Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a technique that is used by all major search engines nowadays. Does your website take this into account? How does it influence the position of your web pages in Google’s search results?

What is latent semantic indexing?

LSI means that a search engine tries to associate certain terms with concepts when indexing web pages. For example, Paris and Hilton are associated with a woman instead of a city and a hotel, Tiger and Woods are associated with golf.

To find out which other keywords Google finds related to a keyword, search for a keyword and add a tilde in front of it. Google will mark the related keywords in bold on the result page. It seems that Google finds the word “Nokia” related to “phone“.

How can Google match keywords with certain concepts?

Google has billions of web pages in its index. If Google finds that many web pages contain both the word Paris and the word Hilton then Google might assume that these keywords are related. The other words on these pages could give Google a hint that this special word combination is about a woman.

Words that frequently appear very close to each other could get a tighter connection. Google has a lot of data that allows them to calculate the relation between different words.

What does this mean for the position of your web pages in Google’s search results?

If you want to be listed for certain keywords, you must show Google that your website is relevant to a certain topic. There are several things that you can do to increase the relevancy of your website for a topic:

1. Optimize different pages of your website for different keywords

If you’re targeting the search term “used cars” you should also create pages that are relevant to the keywords “auto”, “suv”, etc.

The more pages of your website are relevant to a certain topic, the more likely it is that your web pages will be listed for keywords that are related to that topic. Make sure that your keywords appear in the right elements on your web pages.

2. Get links from semantically relevant pages

If you’re selling cars then the “Cars” web page that links to your site should not be about the movie. Links from topically related pages will be semantically beneficial to your site.

A link to your website that comes from a page that contains links to other web pages that deal with the same topic has a greater effect on the rankings of your website then a link from a page that links to totally different pages and your site.

For that reason, it is important that you try to get links from related websites. It is also very important that you submit your website to the right category in Internet directories. If your website is listed in the wrong category, this can have a negative effect on your rankings.

3. Use a meaningful site architecture

Use a logical system to organize your website content. Create content sections that deal with different parts of your main topic and make sure that everything that is related to your topic is mentioned on your web pages.

Make sure that your web pages are put in the right categories on your website and that it’s easy to find the different categories.

4. Find out why other pages rank higher than yours

If you ever asked yourself why another page has been ranked higher than yours although you perfectly optimized your pages for your search terms then you should analyze the inbound links of the top ranked pages.

The number and the authority of inbound links are important. However, it’s also important that the links come from semantically and topically related pages.

Don’t focus on a single keyword when optimizing your pages. If you want to prepare your website for advanced search engine algorithms then you have to create a website that has been optimized for many different but related search terms.

In addition, it’s important that the links to your website come from topically related pages so that search engines put your website in the right context

Copyright Axandra.com – Web site promotion software

Here is what Google’s Matt Cutts has to say about the Semantic matter.  The key point occurs at about 2 minutes 50 seconds.  Enjoy….

Hi Marshall and Gary here

Life is pretty hectic here at Small Business Internet Marketing.  It is amazing the number of small businesses that we come into help who do not have a website, or have a very poorly optimised website, or are having the most cost inefficient Adwords campaign run that you have ever seen.  These are generally a symptom of not having an internet strategy and doing things piecemeal.

Anyway, today it is about affiliate selling online.  As you are probably aware, affiliate selling would be one of the biggest drivers in the growth of the internet.  The fact that so many products today are available digitally mean that the owners of the products are happy to pay away large commissions to sell their product.  This is because once produced, the cost to provide the product is quite often only the bandwidth to download it.  In fact, most internet courses (you know – make $5,000 a week from home for 4 hours work) recommend that you do not deal with products that pay less than 60% commission.   Many internet marketing based offerings pay at 75% – have a look at http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm and search the internet category.

Yes – when someone buys a $67 product online, generally the affiliate will get $45 and the product owner $22.  The product owner is happy because there may be 100 affiliates selling the product, the affiliates are happy because they are making good money.  No problems – the affiliate is normally not disclosed here.  And because the purchaser is not paying any more to buy through the affiliate than if they bought direct, no-one loses (although you could mount an argument that all affiliate products are overpriced to allow for affiliate commission).

When you market as an affiliate to a list, the question of disclosure becomes a bit trickier.  If you have created your own list through your own marketing activities, you have every right to affiliate sell to them and undisclosed.  Provided the product price is not loaded, the people on the list who buy the product are not disadvantaged.

When you are a member of a body (professional, industry, network, etc), the answer, to us at Small Business Internet Marketing at least, becomes much clearer.  To offer affiliate products to this list without disclosing the fact that you may make money from it is pretty unethical.  Just because you have a commonality to other people through a professional or other association does not make them fair game to profit from!

Without exception, the message through the list from the affiliate seller is about how great the product is and how you have to use it.  Whilst the product indeed may be as good as promoted, the question mark is inevitably – “do they really think it is a great product, or do they really like earning the commission?”.  Unfortunately, you never know because you do not even know that they are affiliate selling – unless they disclose it.

So, if they choose not to disclose it, how can you tell if it is an affiliate sale?  It can be tricky, but here are a few hints to look for:

1. Half the time the nature of the communication gives it away.  If it talks about internet opportunities, great value, limited time offer, I have searched and found this great product, etc – it is a fair chance that this is affiliate selling.
2. The affiliate has to put a URL link in the communication. The not so internet savvy affiliate may just use the link that the affiliate program provides.  We saw one of these recently like www.thewelloffhaffiliate.com/?A_BID=Qq8PCpaD.  The code after the forward slash is their affiliate code.  Pretty obvious when you know what to look for.
3. The next level up is where a masking URL is used like TinyURL.  TinyURL and similar products are great, we use it ourselves all the time.  It turns a long and ugly URL into a neat short and unique URL to click on.  However, if you look at www.tinyurl.com you will see a suggested use is that “your affiliate link will be hidden from the visitor..”.  This is harder to spot, but keep a close eye on the bottom left of your internet browser and see if when the destination site is found, does a list of numbers or letters like in “/ADQ1342KZ” flick pass.  If so, you can bet your bottom dollar that it is an affiliate link.
4. When the URL in the communication takes you to an innocuous looking site and there is no forward slash at the end of the URL, chances are it is a sales page.  These are designed to get your name and email address to push market to.  Hover your mouse over the “click here to sign up” banner.  Then look down to the bottom left of your browser – again you may see a URL.  If it has the giveaway “/promo/gj123″ or similar, it is an affiliate sale – again.  Or at worse, just click on the link and watch the bottom left hand corner.
5. While we are looking at the bottom left hand corner – anything that flashes pass like Clickbank, Clixgalore, CommissionJunction or the like – definitely an affiliate sales as these sites are basically a clearing house for affiliate programs and sales
6. Lastly – repetition of similar email messages.  A lot of internet marketing based affiliate programs have a launch date and a close date.  Communication tends to ramp up to the launch date and the message becomes a little more assertive like “don’t miss this one in a lifetime opportunity”, “how amazing the opportunity is”, “no brainer”, etc.

A final point on all this.  Many internet marketing affiliate sales process have the ubiqitious “free offer” up front.  You can accept sign up for this without having to pay anything.  You will undoubtedly then be led to another sales page offering the best deal ever where you only pay $67 but get $4,946 of value.  Buy this, the affiliate gets their 50/60/70% commission.  Alternatively it is a free 30 day subscription and then $27 a month thereafter.  If you don’t buy it, you will be on another mailing list until you unsubscribe.

We have seen a recent offer where although the free offer was significant, if you read the affiliate program blurb, it had 14 ways to earn income (or monetise in internet speak) the free offering.  This again leads to the question – are they helping you via the free offer or are they profiting from you by using the free offer as the hook to get you in to then monetise you 14 different ways?

When should someone disclose that they are an affiliate – Small Business Internet Marketing will leave you to be the judge of this but at least you now have a few tools to spot it.

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary

PS We do have affiliate sales offers, those on the side of this page are exactly this like BlueHost and Aweber.  But they have no loaded cost and we do not sell to any professional network, just those who take our recommendations for what they are – the best value we can find online.

Hi, Marshall and Gary here

One of the reasons we run the Small Business Internet Marketing blog is that there are many people in the internet marketing space that want to make you an offer too good to refuse.  But as the saying goes “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is!”.  One example we look at here is whether a high search engine ranking for an article with the rarely searched keyword combination of Marketing for Online Business A Marketing Business Secret will really assist your business.

We believe that our blog offers unbiased and sensible information and advice that can really benefit small business owners, business consultants and anyone wanting to use the internet for commercial purposes.  Have a read though our older posts – you will hopefully learn a few useful internet concepts.

By far the most common “great” offers we see revolve around 2 themes:

1. Get your website built for free;  and
2. Let me drive huge amounts of traffic to your website by achieving high Google search engine rankings.

We have no problem with these offers – when all is as it seems and clearly laid out – but it rarely is.

Offer # 1:  Get a free website built

Let’s have a look at the first one – one recent offer we have seen offers to build you a free 10 page website.  Built in an SEO friendly CMS we are told.  Who is driving the strategies of keyword research, titles, meta descriptions, URL naming, product segmentation based on keyword strategy, etc which will get good search engines rankings is not mentioned.  But we probably agree for many businesses, a website with poor SEO & strategy is better than none – as long as people understand what they are getting.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.  The sting comes with the hosting of the website.  This particular offer had a range of hosting options, the cheapest being around US$500 a year with 2 email accounts (not sure what business nowadays runs on only 2 email accounts) for a 2 year deal.  That is a commitment of just shy of US$1,000 for a “free” website – interesting economics.  To get the princely number of 5 email accounts, the cost almost doubles.

We like BlueHost in the US for hosting where possible (like .com, .net, etc).  They charge US$6.95 a month or around US$85 a year, give you the first domain registration free, allow 2,500 email accounts, have unlimited transfers and best of all let you have unlimited domain names (and websites) hanging off the one hosting package.  And have a free website building tool if you feel that way inclined.  In short – this is awesome value.  This is why we are affiliate sellers of BlueHost and we use them as well.  We have about 8 websites hanging off our US$85 a year hosting package (you do have to pay to register other domains – which are very cheap).

According to our Small Business Internet Marketing maths, over 2 years this leaves around US$800 to build a website for the same cost as the free website offer.  We have many associates who will knock up a SEO friendly 4 to 6 page site for around US$300 (we are talking about your basic “have an online presence” type site – nothing fancy). Using an outsourced service like Odesk is even cheaper.

We think we know where the better value lies – but value is always in the eye of the beholder.  We just worry that the beholder does not know what to look for when assessing value.

Make sure that you have a look around at what hosting packages really cost for your preferred domain before committing to the “free” website offer.

Offer #2:  We will get you lots of Google #1 (plus #2, #3, etc) rankings for you

At Small Business Internet Marketing we have banged on about this quite a bit.  But it always seems that there is someone else around the corner ready to make outrageous Google ranking claims.

One ridiculous claim we have seen from a supposed expert is “look how I dominate the Google rankings for my name!” – presented as evidence of capacity to get rankings.  Well search Google for “Marshall Vann” and you will see lots of listings for me as well, particularly for Australian based searches.  Have I optimised myself?  No, just had a sufficiently public life to gather lots of references on the web.

The next one is getting a fistful of rankings in Google for really obscure keywords.  Our favourite is the #1 ranking for – wait for it – “Marketing for Online Business A Marketing Business Secret“.  And the ranking is for an article, not a website.  Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, when you do a quick Google Keyword Tool analysis for this long. long tail keyword – the result is “not enough data”.  For those who have used GKT, you will know that this is Google’s polite way of saying “there are no searches being done around the world for this keyword or phrase”.  So great, it ranks #1 for something absolutely no-one is searching for (other than maybe the author) – even better, it also ranks #4 (woo hoo!).

So are we getting our knickers in a knot over this.  Yes.  They want people to pay for this service!  It is rubbish.  A #1 ranking for unsearched keywords does not help your business, does not drive traffic to your site, in fact, does nothing of any note other than make someone else a bit richer and you a bit poorer. 

We have seen these strategies offered as a free service as well.  The trick here is to take some obscure keyword (again) and get it ranking #1 for you (well, normally an article that may have some passing relevance to your business).  Then having proven the supposed knowledge of SEO, proceed to charge for a raft of subsequent (and useless) #1 ranking keyword articles.

However, don’t get us wrong.  Article submission strategies are great for building strong and plentiful backlinks to a website.  If the article ranks highly for well searched keywords, even better.  So when people search for the keyword (and you know they are because you have done the research on GKT or elsewhere), find your article, click through, read it and then click on the hyperlink in the article to your website – great and proven strategy.  Get the link in the article, not just at the end – these are called contextual links and really help with your own web page PageRank.

So what to do?

So what is the lesson here?  Please don’t rely on claims made by others peddling something that may or may not be of value to you but is of value to them.  Do your homework.  Use blogs and sites like Small Business Internet Marketing or the hundreds of other really good and informative ones to make informed decisions.

Once you have the knowledge, make the decision.  The apparently quick and easy way may cost you a lot more than you think.

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary

Hi, Marshall and Gary here

Here at Small Business Internet Marketing, we are members or associates of quite a few different professional and accreditation bodies.  So we get to see a lot of communications and offers that flow around.

One that seems to be getting a lot of airtime in many organisations is the pushing of reciprocal links.  Inevitably, the message starts off with something like “Improve your Google ranking” and then goes onto to offer an exchange of reciprocal links.  Whilst we have nothing against reciprocal links as part of a well thought out internet strategy, we have a sneaking suspicion that most people do not quite understand how they work.

One of our earlier posts had a long and detailed explanation about the Google PageRank formula – see How Googles PageRank fits in. If you follow the maths, it is obvious that links from higher PageRank pages will definitely help with your web pages PageRank. 

But a couple of very important things seem to get overlooked in the rush for reciprocal links:

1. Google gives a PageRank to every web page.  So make sure that you get all your backlinks pointing at the page that you want to increase its ranking.  This may or may not be the Home page.  Often, you may want it to be a product or services or sales page.  You should know this before offering any reciprocal links.
2. Backlinks from web pages with a PageRank of 0 are nigh on useless in helping your PageRank.  Be careful, many times the Home page of the site backlinking to your site may have the good PageRank, but the backlink comes from another “Links” page with a PageRank of 0.
3. If you own a web page that has a decent PageRank, you only have so much “link juice” to use.  Use it wisely and don’t just use backlinks as a simple strategy – you will be giving away far more than you get most likely.  The more links out to other sites, the less worth your PageRank is to those sites.
4. The placement of a backlink is very important as well.  One link in a veritable sea of random links is not of much value – I am certain we have all seen the Links page with an amazingly eclectic range of links.  Google values “contextual” links far more highly, particualrly if the anchor text over the hyperlink is relevant to the page that it is on.

So, to paraphrase a well known saying, please beware of Greeks bearing links.

You need to have a clearly thought out link strategy that incorporates all these matters rather than a random asking of everyone to do reciprocal link with your website.  We use our useful links section sparingly here at Small Business Internet Marketing – and so should you.

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary

Hi, Marshall and Gary here

All sorts of interesting bits and pieces exercise our minds here at Small Business Internet Marketing. It is said that inspiration comes from the strangest places. Well, talking about online marketing and internet marketing strategies is no different.

As I was driving my son to school this morning, I saw a learner driver in front of me. The company name on the car was something like AABEC Driving Company. I jokingly said to my son “I wonder if it is still the first driver teaching company in the phone book?” He, like all 16 year old boys, looked at me as if I was some kind of demented fool.

So I had explain the strategy of choosing a business name that was one of the first in the telephone directory (white pages) or was the first listing for the business type (yellow pages). You get it – the most “A’s” and “B’s” at the front of your business name, and bingo – you are first on the alphabetic list. It is one of the original “get your name to the top of the search pile” marketing strategies in the old world.

Well, after dropping him at school I had to drive down to the coast to see a client. What should I see on the highway but a dump truck emblazoned with Aardvark Earthmoving. Another classic case of “first in the search list”.

This co-incidence got us thinking at Small Business Internet Marketing. Both these companies obviously looked at what was in the phone book before choosing their business name. There was no connection between the business owner and the name (apologies to Mr Aardvark should we be wrong). So anything starting with lots of “a’s” got more traffic and inquiries.

Well, the internet now offers the same opportunity. However, it is no longer driven by such a narrow concept as how many “a’s” but by who is using the right words and phrases, and who has best optimised their website. But the logic is the same. Work out the best business name by working out what is the best name to get to the top of the pile.

So in internet marketing, this means a high ranking in a search engine. The jury is never 100% certain on what the Google algorithm gives a positive tick to and not, but there is enough evidence to suggest when you have the opportunity to align a URL root name with your major keyword, that you should.

So if you want to set up a driving lesson business in Brisbane, the keyword “driving lessons Brisbane” gets 390 exact searches a month in Australia. The domain name www.driving-lesson-brisbane.com.au is available to register. “Driving schools Brisbane” gets 480 exact searches a month and you can register this as a hyphenated domain name. Why would you go with the ego and register www.marshallsdrivingschool.com.au when far better optimised domain names are available?

A couple of other things to note:

• Google views a hyphen as a divider in a URL (so it is “reading” driving lessons Brisbane)

• An optimised domain name is the start, not the finish – all other good off and on page SEO still has to be done

• From a searcher viewpoint, seeing a URL that exactly matches what they entered in as a search query will give your site a psychological advantage over a site which is the same service but the URL is less descriptive (www.marshalldrivingschool.com.au for example – is it local or national, who is Marshall, is he any good, I haven’t heard of him, etc)

• Getting traffic is great, but your website still has to convert surfers to an action

• We are not suggesting that you abandon a good ranking site domain name just to aim for a few places higher

Hope this helps clear your thinking on the choice of a domain name for your internet marketing strategies.

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary

Hi Marshall and Gary here,

We always try and keep you up to date with all that is happening in the world of small business internet marketing, and today we bring you an announcement from Google about it’s Australian Small Business Stimulus offer.

In short:

Google Australia has announced a business stimulus offer, designed to help Australia’s 1.88m small businesses. Google is offering a free $75 search marketing campaign, to help small business reach new customers and drive sales via internet marketing.

More and more Australians are researching products and services online and conducting comparison shopping. the growth in this type of consumer buying and researching behaviour is reflected in recently released online statistics.

Australian search growth by the numbers

* According to Nielsen NetRatings, Australians spend 16.1 hours per week on the internet, more than any other media.
* Over 11.9 million Australians use Google each month. (Roy Morgan, 10 December 2008)

Retail

* Shopping-related queries were 22% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008
* Apparel-related queries were 34% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008
* Queries for Clothing labels and designers were 29% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008

Financial services

* Accounting and tax-related queries were 63% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008
* Credit card-related queries were 34% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008
* Investing-related queries were 26% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008

Travel

* Travel-related queries overall were 28% higher in March 2009, compared to March 2008
* Air travel queries were 38% higher in March 2009, compared to March 2008
* Hotel/accommodation queries were 24% higher in March 2009, compared to March 2008
* Cruise queries were 29% higher in March 2009, compared to March 2008

Real Estate and houses

* Real estate-related queries were 27% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008
* Gardening-related queries were 35% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008
* Home furnishing-related queries were 40% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008

Technology

* Mobile and wireless-related queries were 82% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008, most of this growth coming in the last three months.
* Laptop-related queries were 54% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008,
* Consumer Electronics-related queries were 54% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008,
* Internet Service Provider-related queries were 49% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008,
* Software-related queries were 39% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008,

Others

* Office supplies-related queries were 36% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008
* Pet food and pet supplies-related queries were 30% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008
* Restaurant-related queries were 40% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008

According to Google, small business internet marketing has become increasingly popular in Australia over the past 12 months, with thousands of businesses embracing the benefits of measurable, cost-effective and targeted advertising programs.

Both online and “bricks-and-mortar” businesses will benefit from the stimulus offer. Research shows that many Australians are doing their research online and then heading in-store to buy. Monash’s Australian Centre for Retail Studies has found that 50 per cent of Australian shoppers research their retail purchases online before they get to the store to buy. The same trend is evident for Australians researching holidays, and even businesses buying corporate supplies.

Read the full story here: http://www.google.com.au/press/pressrel/20090422_smallbusinessstimulus.html

Well, there you have it, a $75 gift for small business to encourage them to embrace internet marketing. Click on the link below to take advantage of this offer.  https://services.google.com/fb/forms/stimulusoffer/

If you want to know more about how Google Adwords and how internet marketing can help your small business, feel free to drop us an email or give us a call on (07) 3325 0505

Until next time
Your business buddies
Marshall and Gary

Hi, Marshall and Gary here

At Small Business Internet Marketing, we focus a lot of our posts on how small business can raise their online profile. However, for many small businesses the profile of the owner(s) and/or key staff can be equally, if not more, important.

Personal promotion on the internet has been generally done through business networks like LinkedIn, although blogging and social networking are becoming significant but do require a lot of attention and time. We come across lots of new online products, service  and ideas; most we closely analyze and then discard – but some really grab our attention.

One that we find useful for small business is from Google who have recently released a new product that directly addresses how to raise your personal profile for a Google search. It is called Google Profiles and can be found at http://www.google.com/profiles.

What this lets small business do is tell the world who you are (the owner) and what your business is. You have to have a Google account to access this feature – so sign up if you haven’t already. To be honest, everyone should have a Google account anyway if you plan to use the internet to your marketing advantage.  Once you are a member, click on the Create My Profile button and fill in the boxes.  Note that you can fill in personal information and keep it private, or only available to nominated users.

Having a Google Profile does not guarantee a front page ranking for you. Google still (as always) bases its ranking on perceived relevance to a searcher.  It depends how much other information exists about you on the internet already, and how much of this information is perceived as “more relevant” than your profile by Google. The result will also depend upon how common or unusual your name is – we suspect Bill Smith may become a fairly crowded space.

But the real bonus is Google Profiles lets you load up relevant URL hyperlinks to your profile.

So you can put a link from your profile (that potential customers have found by searching your name) through to your small business website or blog or social networking site. This will then let a potential customer who does not know your business name but knows your name (not an uncommon problem for businesses, particularly those that provide mainly personal services) to find you online and then click through to your business.

To add a link, go to the bottom of the Profile page and enter a URL and then add your business name or other relevant description.

So you have now broadened your small business reach to your own name and added another activity to your internet marketing – for no cost and with a Google listing. How good is that?

Your business buddies

Marshall & Gary

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Hi, Marshall and Gary here

You will have seen a number of our Small Business Internet Marketing posts talk about internet marketing strategies (after all, it is part of our name). But we think it is also worthwhile to consider the wider issue of internet strategies. Internet strategies need to be considered and decided upon before racing into internet marketing strategies.

Let us give you an example. One business we know has had a website site up for the last few years. It was a typical corporate “brochure” style site – looked nice and told you what you needed to know about the business.

However, one day they decided to analyse why they had an internet presence and how this worked with their marketing. They knew all their work was coming from personal contacts and the invaluable word of mouth. So the website did not really help finding sales leads – what it did do was present their credentials and bona fides in such a way to give potential clients the comfort factor that the business was big enough and experienced enough to deliver whatever they were seeking.

So their site did not have a direct internet marketing sales function.

As a small business one of the biggest challenges over the past few years was finding appropriately qualified staff to deliver results to their clients. So the company looked to see how the internet could help to do this. It was not to use the internet to collect potential employee names – it was to use their internet presence to sell their business to potential employees who had heard of the business.

In other words, it was to market the attractiveness of the company to potential staff. This then made them refocus the internet message – quite cleverly. The site now has a large focus on existing staff with everyone getting their picture and worthwhile description of what they do in the business and what they enjoy doing away from the business. Even the person who does the mail run, coffee run and general admin stuff gets in here.

The site focuses on community involvement, the projects they have worked on (combination of testimonial plus tells potential staff about the great jobs the company has done) and a pervading sense of unity of spirit.

So it works by marketing to potential staff on the internet, plus still retaining its credential and bona fides side.

So when you are thinking of small business internet marketing, don’t close your mind to the various types of marketing the internet can do for you.

Your business buddies
Marshall and Gary

Hi, Marshall and Gary here.

You know how kids at school now days learn a lot of computer stuff. Most learn how to use FrontPage and generally knock a basic website at school as part of their education.

At Small Business Internet Marketing, we have run across this again and again. A small business owner tells us “I couldn’t afford to have a website built but luckily my neighbour’s son learnt how to do it at school, so he knocked one out for me”. They register their domain name (which is always the same as, or as close as possible to, their business name) and up goes the website.

When you go their website - guess what? It looks like it was built by the neighbour’s son. But that is not all, there has been no thought out internet marketing strategy of what the website is trying to do. There has been no work done on what keywords are important. No search engine result analysis has been done. The content on each page has been written by the small business owner at night over a glass of wine because the neighbour’s son says he needs some content tomorrow.

A common internet term for this type of website is a business card, or brochure, site. The website merely tells a visitor (should someone be lucky enough to find it), what the small business is and what it sells and who owns it. The only “capture strategy” for potential new customers is the email address on the Contact page.

At Small Business Internet Marketing, we feel like telling these small business owners that the website is actually hurting their business and that they should take it down and start again with an internet marketing strategy rather than a website.

But we don’t want to start fights between neighbours so we usually say “The website could use a bit of tweaking”.

Next post – How to get some visibility on the internet.

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary