Just wanted to give a quick update on what is cooking for Optimal Web.  We are on the tail end of complete re-design for our website.  We are shooting to launch the new site by the end of the week.  We are also restructuring our SEO packages and web design packages and will have some great specials for the spring.

Needless to say this has taken up a great deal of time that I normally devote to Optimal Web Blog.  Once the changes go live we will continue with updating the blog on regular schedule once again.

Thanks,

P.S.  Thanks for being patient!

Most of the ways you capture pictures will do so at the highest resolution.  This is great and you don’t want to change a thing here.  You always want to capture it at the best quality because you can always go down but you can’t go up.  You just need to re-size the photo so it does not bog your website down or take forever to send over email.

How do you easly resize photos when everyone has diffrent programs to do the same thing?   Then add in the fact that each program has a totally unique way of doing the re-size.   You make it simple.  The below tutorial will walk you through a great tool that I use to make batch photo resizing.

Note: You can download the program at this address. http://www.rw-designer.com/picture-resize

Best Regards,

Chances are you use Facebook all the time for personal use but how do you make it work for your business?  In the past business owners would simply create a new profile for their business and in this fashion it functions identically to the normal account.  Facebook however has just changed their policy that all self promotional material needs to be on a “fan page”.  If they discover anything else they will be disabling user accounts.

In this article I want to go through how you set up this fan page and a quick and easy way to get an amazing inbound link from Facebook.  In future articles I will go through other ways to use Facebook to get more traffic to your website and business.

To create a fan page I would recommend that you have a normal Facebook profile.  Its beyond the scope of this article to go through how that works but here is a tutorial (with pictures and videos) that should get you up to speed if you need it.

Next were going to want to create the fan page, you can do that by going here.   Once the page is created your job is to make it as appealing and attractive to your customers.  You want to create a reason for people to come back instead of just becoming fans and never returning.  You can do this by adding applications to your fan page.  There is an unlimited amount to choose from and if you want something custom made you can find a developer to do that as well (Optimal Web does does this tooJ).

Selective Twitter Status- Already on Twitter?  Install this application to your fan page and end your tweets with #fb and it will automatically update your fan page status.  This is great as it eliminates the need to log in twice.

Social RSS- This nifty application will pull your websites blog and display it right on the homepage of your fan page.  This again is another automated process so you do your social media work on one site and it carries over to others.

Last, I just wanted to touch on how to get a great inbound link from Facebook.  I talked about inbound links in a previous article but to refresh your memory these are links from another website to your website.  Most social media websites don’t give you any credit for links you have on them (they use a no-follow tag that tells the search engine not to count it).  But for whatever reason this method does work (not sure for how long) and it’s a fantastic way to get a link from Facebook.  Below is a quick little tutorial on how to do this.

Notes:  If your unsure how to make a hyper link use the following as a guide: <a href+”websitename”>Hyper Link Text </a>.  Replace websitename with your websites address and Hyper Link Text with whatever you want the click able text to be.

Best Regards,

P.S. If you have any questions please leave them as comments below!

I have been hearing a lot of buzz about Google Wave but until I watched the below video I could not quite wrap my head around it.  The basic premise is that email is old (40 years old) and Google asks the question, “What if Email was invented today?”.  Google Wave looks amazing and could very well be the future of online communication.

Right now Google Wave is still being tested and currently is on a invite only system right now.  No word on when it will go public but I when it does I will be sure to do a thorough review.

Best Regards,

Today like most days I walked over to grab the mail and saw a familiar site.  Yellow Page books in weather resistant packages parked by the mail boxes.  They have been there already for longer than a week.  I guess I wonder what will happen first, will they simply decompose or will someone simply get annoyed at seeing them and toss them in the garbage (most likely the later).

The Yellow Pages topic comes up almost every time I meet with a potential client.  “I can’t track it”, “They over promised and under delivered”, or the most common “It is too expensive”.   Is there room for the Yellow Pages in the Information age?

So I decided to check out Google Trends and run some numbers to see what type of search traffic the Yellow Pages is getting:

I knew the Yellow Pages market was shrinking but not this fast.   How long do you expect the Yellow Pages to be around (post comments below)?

Best Regards,

P.S.  I estimate that the Yellow Pages will discontinue distribution in 3 years in case you’re wondering

If anyone has watched the original shift video you are familiar with the concept of these fun videos.  After watching there is no doubt that social media is and has already taken over many other traditional marketing streams. But how does a business take advantage of social media?  Social media is still in its infancy, make sure your leading the parade and not trailing behind.  Whenever there is a paradigm shift the people that are at the front of the change benefit the most.

Below are some of my previous posts on social media and I’m currently in the process of creating diffrent marketing kits to help business owners understand and take baby steps to get started.

• Blogging is an investment
• Understanding the benefits of Twitter
• What on earth is Social Media?

Best Regards,

P.S. I know social media can be a bit overwhelming and scary but stick with it, its not so bad.

In 1979 a study was conducted about graduates from Harvard’s MBA program. The graduates were asked, “Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?” Only three percent of the graduates had written goals and plans; 13 percent had goals, but they were not in writing; and a whopping 84 percent had no specific goals at all.

Ten years later, the members of the class were interviewed again, and the findings, while somewhat predictable, were nonetheless astonishing. The 13 percent of the class who had goals were earning, on average, twice as much as the 84 percent who had no goals at all. And what about the three percent who had clear, written goals? They were earning, on average, ten times as much as the other 97 percent put together.

Have you defined your website goals?  Take out a piece of paper (or open notepad) and just jot down some of your primary and secondary goals.  Is it to sell your product online, gather contact information, view corporate information, subscribe to newsletter, stop into your retail store, change their mind about something, comment on your blog, etc.

Now review your website and see if you’re hitting these goals.  Is there a clear path from when a customer “lands” on your website to the ultimate goal?  The web is very non-linear and you must make sure you make a clear path for what you want your visitors to do.  Make sure to always have calls to action for your desired goals on each of your web pages.  Believe it or not, most customers will not “land” on your homepage but one of your many other pages depending on the search phrase they used.  This is why you want to include calls to action on each of your web pages.

Please don’t tell me your goals for having a website are “So we have a website”.  Give this some honest thought and find out if you’re hitting the mark.  If not then make the necessary changes and you will greatly increase conversion of just visiting customers to actual customers.

If you don’t know what Bing is then this is a must read for all local business owners.  Within the last few weeks a major deal has happened in the search marketing arena.  Microsoft and Yahoo have partnered up (though not an official merge) and will combine their search technologies.  As of right now Google owns the lion’s share for amount of searches (72.34%) but after this partnership Bing will have acquired nearly 15%.

Now this may not seem like a large percentage but there are some things to take away from this.  First, Bing’ search traffic is more likely to convert than on any other search platform.  Conversation simply means to sign up for your newsletter, make a purchase online, or to call your business.  Second, and more importantly to your businesses, Bing’s local search will become a major player. Local search, if you’re not familiar with it is separate from the overall search.  When you search Google for “City Name Mechanic”, you will get 10 results at the top of Google from their local search engine.  Now most businesses are already listed in Google’s local search, this may not be true for the younger Bing local search though.

To get listed in Bing’s local search follow this link and go through the simple steps to get your business listed.

Best Regards

P.S. Local Search is where small businesses get the majority of their business; make sure to submit your business!

Yesterday I talked about the importance of inbound links to your website.  How they serve as votes for the search engines on how to rank your site.  Below I go through 10 activities you can do to build more inbound links.

1.       Make friends- This is no different than any other type of networking.  Step out and start a conversation, introduce yourself.  Once you get to know someone simple ask for a link back and forth, think referral marketing.

2.       Article directories- Take some of your blog posts and turn them into full articles.  Then submit these to article directories like ezinearticles.com, ehow.com, ArticlesBase.com .  Then when others take your great content and retweet repeat and provide a nice inbound link coming back to your site.

3.       Press Release directories- This is one step more than the articles and most of them are going to cost you some money. The benefit is that you have the potential to reach an even larger audience.   PR directories are the outlet for most major news and change, bloggers and writers come here for the content.  Make sure your PR is professional written and optimized for the key words you want to use.

4.       Marketing Groups- Find a group of likeminded business owners and work together to build inbound links.  Communicate through tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and RSS.  When someone in the group post an article help spread the word by digging, bookmarking it through social media bookmarker delicious.com, tweeting about it, or simply posting a comment on their website.

5.       Directory Submissions- Submit your site to as many directories as you can (not all are free).  You can do a simple search in Google for “Your Business Industry Directory”  Make sure these directories don’t have Do not Follow Links, if you don’t know what that means click here.

6.       Great content- There is no substitute for this, focus on this and everyone thing else will fall into place.  The better your content the more people are going to want to spread the work (I.E. link to you).

7.       Guest blogging: There is a blog for every little niche and every industry type.  Just do a simple Google search, find a great blog and start following.  Once you become a part of the community ask the blog owner if he minds if you post an article on their site.  Chances are they would be thrilled.

8.       Make Comments: Now first it’s important to not just spam your website on someone else’s blog, that’s just rude.  Make sure the link is relevant, link back to a previous article on a similar topic for example.

9.       Forums- Just like blogs, there are forums on every niche and interest.  Find a great forum and become an active member.  In your signature place a link to your website.

10.   Keep working- Again, this is not a onetime activity but an ongoing process.

This list might seem a bit overwhelming, but challenge yourself to do a little bit every day.  If you tackle all of these at once you’re bound to get burned out.  Print it off and try to use a different method every day or so until it just become habit.

Best Regards,

P.S. I am currently in the works of building a networking group to help promote each other’s business online.  If you are interested contact me and let me know.

How does a website get to the top of the search results?  What can I do to improve my business likelihood of getting to the top?  Why not hear it from search giant Google:

“Google PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important.” – From Google

The web is always changing and adapting, even a year ago you would hear it that it is all about the keywords, not anymore.  Relevant content and as many inbound links (or just call them votes) as you can get are what are going to propel you to that desired top spot.

Not all inbound links are created equal though.  A website that gets no traffic and links to you is not worth as much as a link from say… CNN, you get the picture.  This stops people from going out and creating a thousand blank webpage with a bunch of links.

So let’s take this knowledge and help grow our online businesses.  Go out to your top 10 vendors or other business you work closely with and talk about getting your link on their page.  Offer to put you’re their link on your page; chances are they will follow suit.  It’s nothing huge that suddenly makes a gigantic difference when trying to get to the top, its small incremental changes like these that get you there little by little.

Best Regards

P.S. Anyone interested in trading inbound links with me let me know!  Also, if you scroll half way through this article, you will find a list of some great ways to create inbound links on some great web 2.0 sites.