Websites For Small Business

When building and launching a website you get to the point near completion and say, "that looks great...cant wait for some traffic!". Most people believe that just having a website is going to bring instant success, well fact is, that doesnt happen, it takes hard work and persistance.

I have spoken about the importance of making sure you site is SEO friendly and about reciprocal links, fact is that building links takes time and there is no quick fix that doesnt come with risk. You need to be careful about who you link to, consider the relavance and context that the link comes from and try not to link to a bad neighbour (somone in google's bad books) like a link farm.

We all know about google and other search engines bid for search engine placement programs to bring in traffic to a website quickly, what about combining incoming links and bidding? It's not new but it is a fast way of securing some one way text links to your website realativly easy and relatativly cheap.

You can purchase one way incoming text links at http://www.justessentialoil.com for $1 for 12 months. Amongst the other sites in the directory, you can bid against others to have top page listing as well as your chosen category. Simple, quick and easy. Websites such as this one also range from PR3 to PR7 and all should do your site a favour in rankings and should be part of any SEO strategy as listing is instant with no "wait 4 weeks to be considered for a listing", pay your entry $1 by paypal and bid higher say $10 if you want the top page, and just renew is it in 12 months time.

If you have gone to the effort to pay for or build your own website you may have overlooked some aspects - interactivity. Making the effort to offer your visitors an incentive to return and interact with your site is fundemental to visitors returning.

1. Offer Subscriptions
By implementing an opt in email subscription is an effective method to deliver your news, upcoming sales, offers or rewards to subscribers. This is a very valuable resource as people who subscribe to your newsletter are qualified leads and potential customers. You need to strike a balance with regular newsletters but not overwhelming your subscribers, you need to focus on offering them something special or rewarding as a subscriber. We can create you a custom subscrption page to your website based on your current design to being building your customer base. Prices start at $150.

2. Discussion Forums
Easily added onto your current website, a discussion forum is a great exchange between you and your visitors. If you offer a specialised product or service you could become a leader in the field where other people come to your forum to find out more information and share ideas. You can toggle most forums to filter posts only approved by your or allow it to be fully open to the public. It usually takes some time to monitor and administer a forum but the rewards are an increase in traffic and more visitors, as well as offering visitors a specific and relevant information source. We can create you a variety of forums for your website from $150.

3. Search Engines
Place a search engine on your site, you can easily place code to include a google search of your domain, if your are using Google Adsense you could also be generating revenue when visitors click on the links generated. Most importantly adding a search engine offers a fast accurate method of finding the information that your visitors are looking for rather than passive text links hidden in pages.

4. Feedback Forms
Very important to receive feedback from your visitors, encourage feedback on every aspect of your site and be responsive! This can either be a customer satisfaction survey, a contact us form, or product rating survey. You can also offer respondants a reward for completing the survey by offering 10% off their next order to reward them for their time. We can develop feedback forms from $50 for your site.

5. Competitions
Everyone wants to win something, offering your visitors or customers to contribute their ideas or work to be judged and a prize rewarded is quite effective and encourages ongoing participation. Make sure you have clear terms and conditions for your give aways and always, always follow through! You could offer competitions through a newsletter or offer an image gallery to ask visitors to submit their artwork. The benefit of this is that you not only encourage participation, but you are also creating new intresting content for your site.

I would like to talk briefly about an Australian developed e-commerce software package for developing and maintaining a complete e-commerce website. The emphasis on the Ezimerchant package is affordability, functionality and taking control of your own website from your desktop without needing to pay a designer or programmer to make changes when you want them made!

Ezimerchant is the product of On Technology, based in New South Wales Australia, it is a rival to the open source packages like Zen Cart and Oscommerce, Ezimerchant is a perfect package for small to large businesses managing their own website.

The package works on similar databases as the web based PHP systems, but is however a desktop software package generating static HTML that is just lapped up by the search engines. It handles the database of products that can be easily imported or exported to other software packages. Once the user has developed their database or catalog of products in a few clicks the catalog becomes a fully functioning website.

You can customize your payment options, calculate postage, apply discounts, make products active or inactive, and add new products and have them online for purchase in minutes. Ezimerchant works seamlessly with PayPal, Paymate, real time and manual Credit card processing, accounts, COD and bank deposit.

The package also has built in SEO capabilities allowing the user to customize propagation of either global meta tags or by category page or product. This is very effective in defining and easily applying SEO to your key pages.

If design is not your forte, the professional edition for $449AUD comes loaded with over 100 templates to choose from so you can easily find a template to match your business image. Changing templates is simple, with a few clicks you can re-generate your website upload it and its done. Customising Ezimerchant websites is also a simple task and we specialize in developing custom Ezimerchant templates for a unique image for $400AUD this includes up to 5 professional stock images and your logo.

Even if you have a web based PHP shopping cart website, your existing database can be imported into Ezimerchant, for many this offers far better control, confidence and SEO than the PHP counterparts. I have many clients who have paid over $6000 for a PHP site and are frustrated that neither the website is performing in search engines or is not entirely customizable. When I offer to transform their website to Ezimerchant for just over the $1000 mark they are astonished in the ease, control and performance of the product. Most notable is the ability to customize the front / home page, add additional content pages and manage the customer database with ease.

Security is also another affordable feature for Ezimerchant. Compare the cost of hosting a PHP website on a dedicated server with SSL security certificate to make it secure and only $29.95 a month for Ezimerchant. I am astounded by how many PHP stores are on shared hosting with no security certificate at all! Ezimerchant can be hosted on a shared server or dedicated IP as it uses the Ezimerchant GTS gateway providing the latest security encryption for a fraction of the price. When an order is made your receive an email to notify you and all customer details and credit cards numbers are encrypted and stored on the Ezimerchant secure server only accessible from the Ezimerchant software. Login, find your order, print a receipt and process the payment. Easy!

Websites for small business can design you a customized Ezimerchant website. Examples of our websites can be found here. http://www.websitesforsmallbusiness.com.au/ecommerce.html

This includes:

· a domain name for two years
· 12 months hosting
· a license of Ezimerchant professional
· a custom design

For $1065.95

Added Extras:

· SEO of the home page for $225

To book an obligation free quote and take the next step towards your affordable online store contact Websites For Small Business, specialists in Ezimerchant website development and management.

It is very simple for small business to purchase their own domain name, all you need is an ABN and a registered business name in your state.

Most businesses have a trading name or business name closely describing their business activity or trade but many do not. When you are about to purchase a domain name it is very important to think outside the box a little. You need to think about a descriptive, easily remembered, easily typed name, avoid symbols to split up words like "-" because people are likely to just miss type them or not type them at all. Narrow down your intended domain name to two or three keywords that best describe your business and research google as to who has similar names, take a note of how competitive these names are and what they do. Then go to a domain name registrar and see what is available. Domain names are very affordable indeed and a .com.au for two years will cost you on average about $50 with some charging over the $150 mark.

The domain name you choose will affect how you rank in search engines and the relationship surfers make with your domain name and what your offer. For a business offering massage therapy services and also selling aromatherapy - a very good domain name would be aromatherapymassage.com.au , not only does this domain describe that it is about massage and aromatherapy oils but also that they provide an aromatherapy massage.

Hints:
1. Keep your domain names short and snappy
2. Find a domain name that described your products / services
3. Find a domain name that will contain an important keyword
4. Make sure you renew your domain before it expires or you will loose it.
5. Buying a domain can be valuable; you can sell the transfer of the domain to someone else and make a tidy profit.
6. Don’t limit yourself to just one domain name. Purchase one that exactly fits your business name, and another that closely matches and describes your products. Set up an URL re-direction to one main site or have two sites going together.

Websites for small business will provide free consultation to small businesses to determine the best domain name to purchase and assist in developing an effective online campaign. .com.au Domain Names are $48.95 for two years. http://www.websitesforsmallbusiness.com.au/packages.html

When you first launch a website you are often thinking OK, what next? When am I going to be getting all of this traffic and start making some real money for my business? It is important to remember that if you sit back and wait and do nothing like most people you will go nowhere fast so what how do you improve yours chances? For a small business, with a very limited budget what are your options? What can you do yourself? And what should you get some advice on and employ the services of a consultant to search engine optimise your site?

I have operated websites several years now and I have learnt many things along the way, I have listened to what other webmasters have done and subscribed to loads of forums and newsletters about improving websites, I recommend that you, as a small business website owner, do that as well, arm yourself with knowledge, learn from others and follow the principals to improve your own website if you can. If you can't and have the budget, employ someone to do it for you. Just don't sit on your hands and expect it to happen by doing nothing. Also don’t get caught out by believing that you will see results in the short term, expect to see things moving in six to eighteen months.

Ok so just having a website does not mean instant traffic and ranking in search engines. Assuming you have a reasonably well thought out site with easy clear navigation, optimised content, fast loading pages you and you want to get some traffic fast , you could leap into Pay Per Click Advertising. This is how search engines generate revenue big time, you are effectively bidding on your site appearing on the search results, usually before or aside naturally appearing relevant content. Each major search engine will have one; the major ones are obviously Google Adwords and Yahoo Overture. I have been there and done all that, but didn’t get a t-shirt. Some words of advice, it is really important as a small business to very carefully choose your keywords you want to bid, the more competitive the keywords are the more you pay to appear. You can dramatically increase your traffic, but you then need to convert these into sales so be prepared.

Summary:
1. Use PPC to rapidly bring targeted customers to your website - it is far quicker than waiting to appear in search engines.
2. Research your competition; see who is bidding on the same keywords. Experiment with less competitive keywords that are cheaper. Use the keyword calculators provided by the PPC websites as a guide.
3. Review your natural search engine rankings regularly, far too many companies are ranked top ten in search results AND are paying for PPC. For a small business this is just plain silliness!
4. Use a traffic analysis program, there are loads available to keep track of your PPC campaigns and ensure you are optimising your conversion.
5. Last but not least; don’t forget to keep your site optimised, either by yourself or by an SEO expert because one day you want to have your traffic streaming in for free.