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Choosing the right keywords
June 28th, 2010
I was going to call this post ‘don’t start a fight you can’t win’ – but for the minute we’ll stick with choosing keywords, but it’s a tough call as to which is more appropriate!! For those of you who are interested in developing the web side of your business, you might already know a bit about SEO and how important choosing keywords that let your site rank in the search engines is – for those that don’t, read on to find out probably the single most important thing you’ll need to get your site ranking in google.
The basic theory of search.
Right, just to get everyone up to speed, the basics of how search works are this. Your small business website gets launched into the world, the search engines ‘read’ your website and try to work out what your site is about – it does this by looking for words or phrases that repeat throughout the site, your keywords. Now, when people search for the keywords that feature in your site, the search engines know that’s what your site is about and your site appears top in the search engine results, thousands of people click on the link, buy your products and you get rich very quickly. Back in the real world, there are also thousands, or possibly millions of other websites all over the world trying to sell exactly the same thing as you – so the search engines use backlinks from other sites to judge how important your site is in relation to the others in the list
Small business marketing
June 15th, 2010
Small business marketing is a huge topic, people write books about it that still don’t tell you everything, so what we’re hopefully going to do here is let you know the really important bits about small business marketing and how you can use them in your business. What you think marketing is now, might well change as you read on, but hopefully we can show you how you can use it in your particular business.
So what is marketing?
Selling, promotion, research, finance, planning? Well, it’s all of those things and also a few more. Marketing is all about how you run your business – it isn’t just about how you sell your product or service, a very common misconception. To understand small business marketing and how it can affect your business, you really need to understand a couple of the key ‘theories’ of marketing – it’s all textbook stuff, so please bear with me!
‘Produce and sell’
Marketing has changed a lot over the past fifty years or so. The original way of doing business was based around production or ‘what can we make?’ or ‘what service can we offer?’ questions. What a business did was linked to what it could do rather than what their customer actually wanted.
Writing for robots – small business seo
June 11th, 2010
If you have a flick through our blog, you’ll know how much we believe in SEO for small businesses – your website isn’t going to be the asset it should be, if no-one can find it! And this is how we arrive at the difficult part of writing the content for your site – you need to write for two audiences, the search engines that deliver your site to your potential customers and the customers themselves – the problem is they both want different things. In an ideal world, you hand over your basic idea to someone who knows what they’re doing and let them do the hard work, but in the real world, this costs money and it’s not always an option, so we’ll try to shed some light on how it’s done.
So what are the search engines looking for?
Essentially, the search engine spiders ‘read’ the code behind your website and try to pick out words or phrases that appear frequently throughout the text – your keywords. The trick is guiding the search engines through the text and make the occourences of your keywords seem natural – they’ll very quickly pick up on people trying to ‘stuff’ their page with keywords, so if your text looks anything like this, you need to be having a re-think:
“If you need big trousers, come to the Big Trouser Emporium for all your big trouser needs. The Big Trouser Emporium has all the big trousers you could ever need, so if you need big trousers, the Big trouser Emporium is the place to be.”
So that’s the over the top, wrong way to do it. Unfortunately, the right way to do it isn’t so black and white. There are many theories about what the search engines are looking for
Small business insurance
June 8th, 2010
Small business insurance is one of those essential but slightly confusing things that all small business owners need to get on top of. Choosing who to insure your small business with is difficult enough, but there are also a variety of products that you really should understand before you even start shopping around, the main thing that most small business owners don’t realise is that most small business insurance is actually optional. The one insurance product that is a legal requirement for all businesses that employ people is Employers Liability Insurance – it doesn’t matter if the business is a sole trader or limited company or whether the staff are paid or voluntary – you must have insurance to protect the interests of your staff should they be injured whilst at work.
What is employers liability insurance?
Employers liability insurance is there to protect your employees, not really to protect your business (although it does do this as a side effect). It’s unfortunately quite common for people to be injured at work and the reason that employers liability insurance is compulsory is to make sure that the injured employee can have all of the costs associsted with their care and/or compensation covered – for example, if a very small company was found to be responsible for the death of an employee, it’s unlikely that they would have the cash in their business to pay the costs and compensation required, which can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds – their insurance company, however, should always have the finances to cover any costs. One thing to keep in mind, even if you are the only director of a limited company and you have no employees, technically speaking, you are an employee of that company (even though you own it!) – it’s worth checking this with your insurer while you’re getting quotes as some don’t see it as compulsory whilst others do.
The main types of ‘optional’ insurance
We’ve classed employers liability insurance as ‘compulsory’ because, for the large majority of businesses, it is. The optional insurance products are those that change becasue of the type of work you do, rather than how many people you employ – however, for a small number of businesses
