Yakiji (Yah-key-jee)

It’s only hours before the decade is over and 2009 was a great year for me. It was a year of outstanding innovation in the web and with that came great content as social media really took off. Sadly there wasn’t enough time in the day to read all the great content from blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc…and of course I have a life too. I really dove into Twitter this last year and it opened up my eyes to some great resources and articles. While I probably missed many great posts, I decided to list some of my favorite (must-read) blog posts from 2009. Enjoy.
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Congrats on launching into internet with your small business! This can be a little daunting at first, but if this is done right, you can achieve huge success. The important part is to stay persistent in spreading exposure of your small business…and keep your patience.

While most new small businesses levitate to Pay-Per-Click services like Google Adwords, Yahoo! Overture, and Microsoft Adcenter for increasing their web presence, these can be huge money wasters with very little pay-off – obviously this all depends on your goals. To flip it back around (not to confuse), DO try these services out, but do it conservatively – don’t invest a ton of money into them and geo target your ads if possible. Yes, they will generate traffic, but getting users to buy your product (or convert) is far more difficult for a new business. You will have more success with Pay-Per-Click as your brand becomes stronger and more trusted.

Biggest Struggle for Small Business Websites: Brand Awareness and Trust. Your site needs to be visible across the internet – this is also huge for search engines. Consumer’s are more likely to purchase from a recognizable brand. There’s a reason why you see the same old car ads sometimes.

Some basic techniques to generate traffic for your small business website:

1. Before you start anything – you must have a measurement tool to track your visitors. Try Google Analytics (free).

2. Submit your website to the major 3 search engines:
http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx

3. Make your website visible to your target audience. Submit your website URL to complimentary websites, blogs, and directories (focus on specific places where your audience will be). Ex: If you’re selling cakes, request a link (or submit an article linking) to your website on some big name cake websites.

4. Update your website often with fresh content. Give people a reason to comeback and tell others about your website. Start a blog to increase exposure.

5. Optimize your site for SEO (search engine optimization). This is almost a whole different topic, but you can start here:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/

http://searchengineland.com/070628-074149.php

6. Submit your site to geo-targeted services and business directories. Ex: https://www.google.com/local/add/

http://www.yelp.com/

7. Submit your site to business directories and vertical industry directories. Ex: https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/
http://botw.org/
http://www.squidoo.com/
http://www.moli.com/

http://www.dmoz.org

8. Get involved in social networking and spread the word:
http://www.facebook.com
http://www.stumbleupon.com/

http://del.icio.us/

9. Submit Press Releases to get your small business in the news.
http://www.businesswire.com

http://www.prweb.com

10. Research tips on adapting your small business to the web successfully:

http://searchengineland.com/070628-074149.php

11. Keep researching creative and innovative ideas to increase exposure…

Related Links:

• 21 Essential SEO Tips & Techniques (Search Engine Land)

Got a burning question that you need answered? Then consider asking it on Yahoo Answers. With a solid user base, you’re sure to get a response from every point of view. While browsing the questions and answers, finding something of interest shouldn’t be difficult and could provide a great backlink opportunity. With a mass of open questions, people are open to recommended sources and feedback that could potentially provide them a resolution.

If you’re promoting a real estate website, then search for real estate questions. Then get ready to roll-up your sleeves and dig into the questions. If you find something where your website could provide a credible solution, then throw your link up there along with a decent description describing it. You’ll be amazed how quickly the visitors will start rolling in.

If you haven’t heard of or used Wordpress yet, then you are one of few in the web world. After reading a recent posting in the Sitepoint Forums asking web developers to supply their Wordpress SEO checklists, I decided to post my own.

After installing Wordpress, download and install the following plugins:

• Google XML Sitemaps – to auto-generate XML sitemaps when new content is created.
  
• All in One SEO Pack – automatically optimizes your blog for search engines.
  
• Category Base Killer – removes the “category/” base text from the URL string.
• Wordpress.com Stats – quick and simple stats that are important to your blog.
  

Contributing factors:

• .htaccess: force the www rewrite for your website so all the urls.
  #Force www domain
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com [nc]
  RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
  #End force www
• XHTML/CSS: Develop a wordpress theme that has clean XHTML with semantic tags and clean CSS.
• Robots.txt: identify your sitemap and make sure your content is crawled correctly with the robots.txt file. Be sure to disallow the “wp-admin” directory.
• Permalinks: set to custom use %postname%. Ultilize keywords in your URL.
• More Tag: utilize the more tag so your entire post doesn’t show up on your homepage and it’s own page.

Useful Links and Resources:

• Wordpress SEO Checklist (SitePoint Forums)
• Ultimate Wordpress SEO Guide (ToddW Blog)
• Pushing Wordpress SEO Boundaries (Andy Beard)

Google couldn’t be more generous to SEOs and web marketers when it decided to launch Conversion University. Articles have been posted very infrequently, until just recently when Google released the new and improved Conversion University. By the looks of it, it received quite an overhaul. It looks to provide more information than ever with such topics as Acquisition, Onsite Behavior Analysis, Outcomes, Videos and more.

Thanks Google!