Internet Marketing is becoming increasingly important for small business owners all around the world. More than 70% of searches done on Google are done for finding information about local businesses. In this scenario, it is critically important for Small Business Owners to give paramount importance to optimize their website for getting better rankings on Google. Following are the top 5 tips which you, as a business owner can implement on your website without much effort:

Top 5 SEO Tips for Small Business Owners

Use Unique Title Tags for website pages

Make sure that each page on your website has a unique page title and a title tag. If you are using Content Management Systems like WordPress or Joomla, this should be fairly easy to do. These two are not necessarily the same thing. Title Tag is what is shown in the search results when the page appears on search results while the page title is the title of the article of the page. Ideally, both of these should contain main keyword you are trying to rank.

Identify keywords to target

Don’t assume that you already know what keywords your customers are using to find your services on google. You will be surprised by the results. There are multiple steps involved in finding your target keywords. First, brainstorm what you think your site is about, and how you want people to find your site. Write down these words, then think outside the box and find terms related to your original terms. For example, if you use “(term) photography”, try using “(term) pictures.”. Specifically, look at the competition and the monthly searches using Google keyword tool.

Keyword use in page content

Spreading your keyword strategically in the content on the page will help you immensely in ranking on search engines. However, don’t stuff your keywords in the content forcefully making your page unreadable or grammatically incorrect. Remember, you have two customers who you are writing your content for: Humans & Search Engines. Make sure your content caters for both of them without reducing the quality of it. It may be worthwhile hiring an outside copywriter and providing them with keywords to use if you do not think you can handle writing the content in an accessible way yourself.

Site description containing relevant keywords

Site description is something more and more web administrators don’t give enough importance to. By having your main keyword(s) in your site description, it not only helps search engines to give your website better rankings, but it also increases your click through rate from the search results. Again, content management platforms like WordPress makes this very easy to do by using a WordPress SEO plugin. Again, do not try to stuff the keywords into awkward ways and making the sentences unreadable.

Good site architecture

Last but not the least, the website should have easy to navigate website structure. Furthermore, the URL address of the inner page of the website should also be highly optimized with relevant keywords. If you have a page about “ blue widgets”, your URL should be something like “http://www.(site).com/blue-widgets”, which is easy for search engines to read and identify.

Website should not have too many folders and levels on the server. The general rule is: the closer your page is to the root domain (your http://www.(site).com), the easier it will be for search engines to find and index your page. If your URLs start to look like “http://www.(site).com/section/category/discipline/(product).html”, you should request your webmaster to simplify the structure.

To tackle this problem, one way is to add something called an SPF record. Of course there are lots of rules built into spam filters that help it tag a particular email as spam or legit. So using this one method wont ensure that your email will surely get through but rather increases your chances by quite a lot. As with most DNS type records, its really hard to explain the syntax so we wont go into too much details on those.

SPF Records and Google Apps for Domain

We use Gmail to send our emails to our clients and for outgoing emails, we’ve setup our own SMTP server. So we just had to add the SPF Text Record in our hosting control panel. This might not be your case and most businesses tend to use Google Apps for domain to handle their outgoing emails. Google has information on how to add the SPF record but misses an important element that makes the biggest difference.

SPF record that Google gives:
v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all

SPF record that actually makes a difference is:
v=spf1 a include:_spf.google.com ~all

If you’ve spotted the difference (addition of ‘a’ after spf1), you have definitely got a good set of eyes. The ‘a’ simply means that all web servers from which I run my domain and subdomains, are allowed to send emails as well. That inclusion means that Google can setup SPF records for the domain _spf.google.com and thus add or remove mail servers without you having to change anything.

Test to see if you’ve correctly set it up

If you want to make sure everything is working as its supposed to be. Go to this SPF testing tool and use the 3rd form on the page. Just enter the details of your web server’s IP (ask your hosting company for details) and your ‘from’ address which is your email address you use (Eg. ‘myname@mydomain.com’). The test results before you add the SPF will say something like…

Input accepted, querying now…

Mail Sent from this IP address: 202.123.23.244
Mail from (Sender): myname@mydomain.com

Results – none

If you get such result, you haven’t added the SPF records yet. If you have added the SPF record as suggested above, you will get something like this…

Input accepted, querying now…

Mail Sent from this IP address: 202.123.23.244
Mail from (Sender): myname@mydomain.com
Mail checked using this SPF policy: v=spf1 a include:_spf.google.com ~all
Results – PASS sender SPF authorized

That should tell you that your chances of reaching your recipients has definitely increased quite a bit. So whether you are running your own server from home or hosting your website with a hosting provider, it doesn’t hurt to check the above to see whether your emails have been authorized. Let me know what you think of it and if it has worked for you.

1. Maintain your cool and sense of humor, especially during a crisis. When our biggest customer – and I mean big – thought I leaked a front-page story to the press, I offered to resign to save the relationship. My boss, a great CEO, gave me this serious look, like he was thinking about it, and said, “You’re not getting off that easy.” Then he broke out into a big smile.
2. Tell subordinates when they’re shooting themselves in the foot. Sometimes I can be pretty intimidating and I’ve had CEOs who shied away from giving it to me straight when my emotions got the better of me. Not this one guy. We’d be in a heated meeting and he’d quietly take me aside and read me the riot act. He was so genuine about it that it always opened my eyes and helped me to achieve perspective.
3. Be the boss, but behave like a peer. I’ve worked with loads of CEOs who let their egos get the better of them. They act like they’re better than everyone else, are distant and emotionally detached, or flaunt their knowledge and power. That kind of behavior diminishes leaders, makes them seem small, and keeps them from really connecting with people. They’re not always the most successful, but the most admired CEOs I know are genuinely humble.
4. Let your guard down and really be yourself outside of work.You know, teambuilding is so overrated. All you really need to do outside of work to build a cohesive team is break some bread, have some drinks, relax, let your guard down, and be a regular human being. When you get to be really confident, you can be that way all the time. That’s the mark of a great leader.
5. Stand behind and make big bets on people you believe in.One CEO would constantly challenge you and your thinking to the point of being abusive. But once he trusted and believed in you, he put his full weight behind you 100 percent to help you succeed. He’d stand up for you even when he wasn’t sure what the heck you were up to. And he’d give you new functional responsibilities – something up-and-coming execs need to grow. Okay, he wasn’t perfect, but who is?
6. Complement your subordinate’s weaknesses. I often say it’s every employee’s job to complement her boss’s weaknesses. The only reason that’s even doable is because we’ve all only got one boss. But I actually had a CEO who did that with each and every one of his staff. For example, I’m more of a big picture strategy guy and he would really hold my feet to the fire by tracking my commitments. It felt like micromanaging at first, but I eventually realized it helped me to be a more effective and strengthened the entire management team.
7. Compliment your employee’s strengths. It takes a strong, confident leader to go out on a limb and tell an employee what they’re great at. Why? I don’t know, but I suspect it’s hard for alpha males that primarily inhabit executive offices. Anyway, it’s important because we can’t always see ourselves objectively. Twenty years ago a CEO identified how effectively I cut through a boatload of BS to reach unique solutions to tough problems. Today, that’s what I do for a living.
8. Teach the toughest, most painful lessons you’ve ever learned. As a young manager at Texas Instruments, I once asked my boss’s boss for advice about a promotion I didn’t get. He told me a candid story about the hardest lesson he’d ever learned, the reason he was stuck in his job. He made himself indispensible and didn’t groom his replacement. It was painful for him to share, but it opened my eyes and made a huge difference in my career.
9. Do the right thing. Just about everyone says it, but I’ve only known one CEO who both preached and practiced it to the point where it became a big part of the company culture. You’d walk the halls and hear people say it all the time. He meant two things by it. When he said it to you, it meant he trusted you to do just that. He also meant it regardless of status quo or consequences. He had extraordinary faith in that phrase. Now I do too.
10. Do what has to be done, no matter what. It’s a rare executive who jumps on a plane at a moment’s notice to close a deal or gives an impromptu presentation when a potential investor shows up unexpectedly. It’s even more rare when he does it without asking questions or hemming and hawing about it. He just does what has to be done. That kind of drive and focus on the business is relatively common with entrepreneurs in high-tech startups -  but it shouldn’t be. It’s the mark of a great manager who will find success, that’s for sure.

Online retail spending reached $37.5 billion for the quarter, primarily due to an increase in the number of buyers (up 16 percent), with 70 percent of all Internet users making at least one online purchase in the quarter.

We should note that spending was lower than the first quarter of the year, when comScore tracked $38 billion in retail e-commerce sales in the United States. Although, as you can see in the chart below, that is always the case, just like the fourth quarter of a year always has the highest spending because of the end-of-year holiday period.

The 14 percent bump compared to last year represented the seventh consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth and the third consecutive quarter of double-digit growth rates.

According to comScore, the top 25 online retailers accounted for 66.4 percent of dollars spent online, down from 67.7 percent a year ago and down from a peak of 69.9 percent in Q3 2010.

Read the full article @ Tech Crunch

Whether you’re using wireless internet in a coffee shop, stealing it from the guy next door, or competing for bandwidth at a conference, you’ve probably gotten frustrated at the slow speeds you face when more than one device is tapped into the network. As more and more people—and their many devices—access wireless internet, clogged airwaves are going to make it increasingly difficult to latch onto a reliable signal.

But radio waves are just one part of the spectrum that can carry our data. What if we could use other waves to surf the internet?

One German physicist, Harald Haas, has come up with a solution he calls “data through illumination”—taking the fiber out of fiber optics by sending data through an LED lightbulb that varies in intensity faster than the human eye can follow. It’s the same idea behind infrared remote controls, but far more powerful.

Google plus has now become another interesting social tool around the world because of its interesting features and easy usable features. However, it does holds its negative side which hopefully can be fixed. Here are some of the pros and cons about it…

Pros

• It has a sleek and clean layout which makes it easy to use and devoid of advertising or spam
• The user interface has features such as Sparks and Huddle which makes it more interesting to use
• It has ability to classify contacts into various circles enabling you to choose and send updates to selected people
• Hangout Video chat service works very well with large groups
• You can access Google Plus from everywhere (www)

Cons

• Google Plus contains elements from both Facebook and Twitter. It is nearly ubiquitous, hence all the profiles are public. This limits and raises privacy concerns.
• Anyone can follow anyone else in a public stream regardless of an individual being their friend or not.
• One of the major draw backs is that Google plus does not work with Google Apps Account
• Google is known for its search but the Google plus does not have search capabilities making it hard to search for things posted/shared by friends
• Google plus circle is designed to minimize the noise in the stream but the Feed shows recently updated information regardless of the original post time.

After the launch of Google+, Facebook has now launched an exciting feature on the 7th of July 2011. The video chat option is now active on every Facebook account and is also the major feature in Google +. The CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg launched the Facebook video calling option in partnership with Skype. As Facebook uses a default engine with Microsoft’s Bing surf engine and now the recent integration of Skype by MS clearly explains that Skype would be dealing with the Video calling option.

How to use Facebook video chat?

Facebook has unveiled a new Video chat feature by integrating the Facebook and Skype closely. As Skype already had some Facebook features such as mood messages in sync with Facebook status messages, news feed and the ability to call and txt Facebook friend. Now the latest integration allows us to view Facebook friends list, access Facebook chat, and also allows us to “Like” a friend’s status. To get started and use this feature you need microphones and webcam to be able to see and hear each other. If your friend does not have a webcam you will still be able to hear her even thou you she can hear and see you.

Setting up Facebook Video Chat

You can see the video Icon on top of the chat window. Clicking that icon will enable you to complete set up before you try to call a friend or your friend trying to call you for the first time. Once you finish the setup you click on the person you want to chat with and a call icon appears on the top of the chat window.

Using Facebook Video Calling

Clicking the call button will connect you with your friend with whom you can start communicating. Once you finish your conversation you can simply close the window to end the call. In case the person you want to communicate with is Offline you can also leave a video message, the time and date of the missed call will be listed in the ongoing message history with that person. However you can still chat and use other Facebook feature while on video call.

Calling on Facebook

The video chat works similar to the Facebook chat. Only people who you confirmed as friends can video chat with you. You can ignore any call and if you want to make yourself unavailable you need to click on the settings icon which is on the right corner of the chat window and uncheck the “available to chat”.

Blocking Facebook Friends from calling

To block a friend or group of friends from calling or chatting. You will need to create a list of the people with whom you do not want to chat with. Then click on the settings icon of the chat window to select “edit availability” and check the box next to the list you want to appear unavailable to which will enable you not to appear online to the people in that list.

Facebook, video calling works best with the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari browsers. However video calling for Linux is not currently supported hence users will have to use one of the above browsers in a Mac or Windows operating system.

This Feature in Facebook makes life much easier as video chatting compacts the entire hassle of calling and using video chatting by using various other sources. Video chat Feature in Facebook enables us to communicate with our friends in a simple easy and effective way.

In simple words…

Its a service provided by a company that allows you keep your website accessible 24×7 around the world (World Wide Web).

What about Web Hosting plans?

They are like your everyday bank services. You have a range of plans to choose from like a savings account, normal cheque account and so on. Likewise, Web Hosting plans have different limits such as how many website files you can store or how many visitors your account can handle every month (bandwidth). There is no ideal plan for all the websites since each website has different demands.

What about Shared, Dedicated, Virtual Private Server (VPS)?

Shared hosting is one type of service just like your bank accounts. You can have a personal account or business account. Likewise, there is shared hosting account and a dedicated hosting account.

Shared hosting is basically sharing a computer that is switched on 24×7 (see above) with other people who want to host their website files with yours.

Dedicated hosting on the other hand is quite opposite. Its being able to host your websites files on a computer specially kept just for you. In this way, other website’s load will not impact your capacity and all the computer’s resources such as its memory, can be used just for your website.

Virtual private server fall in between these both accounts by allowing you to host your websites on computer shared by other but restricting excess usage from other websites. So the resources given to you will be only yours to use.

WordPress is an open source (FREE) web software that you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. Infact, some now even use it to create web applications. I just wanted to point out some of the reasons on why your should use WordPress as a web development/design tool than other Content Management Systems (CMS).

1) WordPress is Open-Source (FREE)

When you are trying to decide which platform to go with and you are just at start off stages, you want to keep your costs low but get the best package out there in the  market. WordPress helps you do this by charging you nothing ($0 other than the normal hosting costs) and its used by millions around the world from small businesses to large scale enterprises.

2) WordPress is natural, innovative and extraordinary…

You don’t need to be a computer wiz to know how to use this brilliant piece of software. Its so easy that even a 3 year old kid can figure out how to blog post in minutes. It has bundle of innovative features that just cannot be matched by commercial packages, not to mention the regular updates you get. If you dig deep enough, you’ll notice a lot more things you’ll love about WordPress.

3) WordPress is Flexible and Customizable

Because of the way its coded, you can run applications including blogs, forums, websites all under one single platform. WordPress is able to handle all this for you and all you have to worry about is keeping your website up-to-date. Its customizable to client’s needs by enabling them to use FREE third party plugins (1000′s), themes (10,000′s).

4) WordPress is Interactive

Way back in time, we are talking about 60s and 70s, websites were all static, boring and dead. WordPress changes all this by adding interactive features like comments. They allow you to get great feedback and know what your potential customers or existing ones think about the services or goods you provide. WordPress changed the we build websites at Jonah & Associates, since its now next to impossible to find a website without a blog.

5) WordPress is SEO Friendly

SEO is a short-form of Search Engine Optimization. Its the type of optimization performed to enhance your website’s appearance on search engines like Google’s Search. WordPress takes cares of all this because the themes are filled with dynamic PHP tags that change as you move one page to another. In this way, you never have to worry about getting the title and description of the page right as the new pages are generated.

6) WordPress is Spam Free

WordPress ships out with an Ultimate Spam-Assassin – Akismet. Once you activate it by getting an API key, you wont see those spam comments left by working robotic monkeys. Less spam is definitely a great benefit that comes with using WordPress as your website platform.

7) Because we use it…

I dont want to make it a solid reasons on why you should consider using this great package but rather to tell you of our story. Believe it or not, we use WordPress on almost every single site we have ever created including this one. We do have a couple of clients who wanted their preferred platforms like Joomla to be used for their sites but the majority of them agree with us. Infact, I am very confident in saying that millions of WordPress users are behind my statement that WordPress is indeed the best platform out there.

Let us know what you think!

Every device that is capable of connecting to Internet from Apple Ipods to Online Websites are all given a special identifier unique to them. Infact, this website has its own IP address (231.190.203.20) which is covered by the domain name (jonah.org.nz). As Internet seems to grow only bigger each day, we are coming to a stage where there will be no more IP addresses to give out.

So they’ve decided to roll out a ‘new’ generation of Internet protocol with 4 billion times as many addresses. It’s a good thing and It simple means that we’ll all have more of those ‘cool‘ apple gadgets for ourselves in future.

Google, Facebook, and Akamai test Internet’s readiness for future!