Tips for Small Business Costs

Many first-time business owners are completely overwhelmed or unprepared by the amount of small business costs associated with operating a business. Small business costs often lead to the failure of many businesses, especially during the first year, or they even prevent them from getting started in the first place. Through a wide array of government and private programs, however, many small business owners have helpful options to help them finance their mounting small business costs.

A business plan is a necessity for obtaining business startup loans and funding for your business. Without one, most banks and investors will not even consider providing you with business startup loans or other funding for your new business. But a business plan provides more than just the opportunity to receive funding. Properly done it is also a blueprint for you to map out your future success in a written plan that you can stick to.

A business plan for the sole purpose of receiving a small business startup loan must contain several components. The first few pages include the Executive Summary and the Table of Contents. After this is the company description. This is one of the most important sections of a business plan. Your company description will give potential investors a short history of your small business along with the future you are planning for it. It describes plans you might have to expand your business. For purposes of getting small business startup loans, this is one of the sections that loan providers and investors are most interested in.

In the company description, you will want to avoid mentioning that your business is a startup business. Startup businesses are considered very risky investments by most investors. As an alternative, outline details of what you have contributed to the industry that you are currently in or plan on entering. Without sounding arrogant, mention some details or things that you have changed or something you have done differently than others in your market that has proved to be successful. Also, discuss how your business has grown in recent months or years and don't be shy about your predicted growth. Your excitement and passion regarding your new business needs to be seen in the writing of your business plan to help increase your chances of getting a business startup loan.

One of the last parts of a well-written business plan, but certainly not the least important, is your marketing plan analysis. This is an explanation of your demographics using facts and figures and a study done about your new, potential customers and clients. This section also explains your advertising plans, especially your target market and how you intend to reach them. This section must show that you have done extensive research, appropriate with your market to ensure that your product or service has a large demand. In order to obtain small business startup loans, you will also need to include a sound financial plan, including pro-forma financial statements for your new business.

Small business costs can be a large concern for entrepreneurs and first-time business owners. Fortunately, small business owners have access to business startup loans as well as other forms of business startup funding to help them overcome their financial stress. A business plan is an ideal way to show investors that you are serious about your new venture and that you know how to make it a success. With a some extra financial help, most small businesses can pull through the tough times and remain a viable business.

Dr. Ande
SEO Tips for Small Business

Directory Submission to Generate Online SEO Promotion

Links to your site from other sites drive additional traffic. But since Google and other major search engines consider the number of incoming links to your website ("link popularity") as an important indicator of relevance, more links will help you rank higher in the search engines. Google has a measure called PageRank that reflects the quantity and quality of incoming links. All links aren't all equal. Links from trusted, popular sites help your site rank higher than links from lower traffic sites.


Submit Your Site to Key Directories, since a link from a directory will help your ranking -- and get you traffic. A directory is not a search engine. Rather, it is a hierarchical listing of sites sorted according to category and subcategory. Be sure to list your site in the free Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.com), overseen by overworked volunteer editors. But if you don't get listed right away, don't be impatient and resubmit, or you'll go to the end of the queue. A link in this directory will help you a lot.

Yahoo! Directory (dir.yahoo.com) is another important directory. Real humans read submission, so be careful to follow the instruction given. Hint: Use somewhat less than the maximum number of characters allowable, so you don't have wordy text that will tempt the Yahoo! editor to begin chopping. Yahoo! Directory Submit (ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/) requires a $299 annual recurring fee to have your site considered for inclusion within seven business days. Other paid business directories that might help are About.com and Business.com.

The Trick to Generating SEO Driven Traffic

The trick to generating SEO driven traffic and going viral is to make sure people can find you. It's easy on one hand but hard in the fact it will take you some time at first to set it up. But the payoff is well worth it.


1. Make Your Navigation System Search Engine Friendly. You want search engine robots to find all the pages in your site. JavaScript and Flash navigation menus that appear when you hover are great for humans, but search engines don't read JavaScript and Flash very well. Therefore, supplement JavaScript and Flash menus with regular HTML links at the bottom of the page, ensuring that a chain of hyperlinks exists that take a search engine spider from your home page to every page in your site. Don't set up your navigation system using HTML frames (an old, out-dated approach); they can cause severe indexing problems.

Some content management systems and e-commerce catalogs produce dynamic, made-on-the-fly webpages, often recognizable by question marks in the URLs followed by long strings of numbers or letters. Overworked search engines sometimes have trouble parsing long URLs and may stop at the question mark, refusing to go farther. If you find the search engines aren't indexing your interior pages, you might consider URL rewriting, a site map, or commercial solutions.


2. Create a Site Map. A site map page with links to all your pages can help search engines (and visitors) find all your pages, particularly if you have a larger site. You can use a free tools, XML-Sitemaps.com (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/xml-sitemaps.htm) to create XML sitemaps that are used by the major search engines to index your webpages accurately. Upload your sitemap to your website. Then submit your XML sitemap to Google, Yahoo!, and Bing (formerly MSN), following instructions on their sites. By the way,  Google Webmaster Central (www.google.com/webmasters/) has lots of tools to help you get ranked higher. Be sure to set up a free account and explore what they have to offer.


3. Develop Webpages Focused on Each Your Target Keywords. SEO specialists no longer recommend using external doorway or gateway pages, since nearly duplicate webpages might get you penalized. Rather, develop several webpages on your site, each of which is focused on a target keyword or keyphrase for which you would like a high ranking. Let's say you sell teddy bears. Use Google Insights for Search (www.google.com/insights/search/) or the free keyword suggestion tool on Wordtracker (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/wordtracker.htm) to find the related keywords people search on. In this case: write a separate webpage featuring the keyword "teddy bear," "teddy bears," "vermont teddy bears," "vermont bears," "the teddy bears," teddy bears picnic," "teddy bears pictures," etc. You'll write a completely different article on each topic. You can't fully optimize all the webpages in your site, but for each of these focused-content webpages, spend lots of time tweaking to improve its ranking.


4. Fine-tune with Careful Search Engine Optimization. Now fine-tune your focused-content pages and perhaps your home page, by making a series of minor adjustments to help them rank higher. Software such as WebPosition (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/webposition.htm) allows you to check your current ranking and compare your webpages against your top keyword competitors. I use it regularly. WebPosition's Page Critic tool provides analysis of a search engine's preferred statistics for each part of your webpage, with specific recommendations of what minor changes to make. The best set of SEO tools is Bruce Clay's SEOToolSet (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/clay_seotoolset.htm). If you want more detailed information, consider purchasing my inexpensive book Dr. Ande's SEO Tips for Improved ROI (www.setipsforsmallbusiness.com/SEO-ROI.html). You can get a free SEO Tutorial on my site and even more in our (http://www.seotipsforsmallbusiness.com/Freebies.html ).


5. Promote Your Local Business on the Internet. These days many people search for local businesses on the Internet. To make sure they find you, include on every page of your website the street address, zip code, phone number, and the five or 10 other local community place names your business serves. If you can, include place names in the title tag, too. When you seek links to your site, you should request links from local businesses with place names in the communities you serve and complementary businesses in your industry nationwide.

Also create a free listing for your local business on Google Maps Local Business Center (www.google.com/local/add) and Yahoo! Local (listings.local.yahoo.com). That way your business can show up on a map when people do a local search.


6. Promote Your Video, Images, and Audio Content. Google's "universal search" displays not only webpage content, but also often displays near the top of the page relevant listings for images, videos, local businesses, and audio clips.  Therefore, consider creating such content appropriate to your business and then optimizing it so it can be ranked high enough to help you. For example, if you were to get a top-ranking, informative video on YouTube (www.youtube.com) that mentions your site, it could drive a lot of traffic to your site. For more information, search on "optimizing images" or "optimizing videos."

6 Simple Search Engine Strategies

Perhaps the most important -- and inexpensive -- strategy is to rank high for your preferred keywords on the main search engines in "organic" or "natural" searches (as opposed to paid ads). Search engines send robot "spiders" to index the content of your webpage, so let's begin with steps to prepare your webpages for optimal indexing. The idea here is not to trick the search engines, but to leave them abundant clues as to what your webpage is about. This approach is called "search engine optimization," abbreviated as SEO.

1. Write a Keyword-Rich Page Title. Write a descriptive title for each page -- rich in keywords you want people to find you with -- using 5 to 8 words. Remove as many "filler" words from the title (such as "the," "and," etc.) as possible, while still making it readable. This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found. Entice searchers to click on the title by making it a bit provocative. Place this at the top of the webpage between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format: <TITLE>Web Marketing Checklist -- 37  Ways to Promote Your Website</TITLE>. (It also shows on the blue bar at the top of your web browser.)

Plan to use some descriptive keywords along with your business name on your home page. If you specialize in silver bullets and that's what people will be searching for, don't just use your company name "Acme Ammunition, Inc.," use "Silver and Platinum Bullets -- Acme Ammunition, Inc." The words people are most likely to search on should appear first in the title (called "keyword prominence"). Remember, this title is your identity on the search engines. The more people see that interests them in the blue hyperlinked words on the search engine, the more likely they are to click on the link.


2. Write a Description META Tag. Some search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title in the search results. The description should be a sentence or two describing the content of the webpage, using the main keywords and keyphrases on this page. Don't include keywords that don't appear on the webpage. Place the Description META Tag at the top of the webpage, between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format:

<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Increase visitor hits, attract traffic through submitting URLs, META tags, news releases, banner ads, and reciprocal links.">
The maximum number of characters should be about 255; just be aware that only the first 60 or so are visible on Google, though more may be indexed.

When I prepare a webpage, I write the article first, then develop a keyword-rich title (#1 above). Then I write a description of the content in that article in a sentence or two, using each of the important keywords and keyphrases included in the article. This goes into the description META tag.

Next, I strip out the common words, leaving just the meaty keywords and phrases and insert those into the keywords META tag. It's no longer used much for ranking, but I'm leaving it in anyway. I think it may have some minor value. So to summarize so far, every webpage in your site should have a distinct title and META description tag. If you implement these two points, you're well on your way to better search engine ranking. But there's more that will help your ranking....


3. Include Your Keywords in Headers (H1, H2, H3). Search engines consider keywords that appear in the page headline and sub heads to be important to the page, so make sure your desired keywords and phrases appear in one or two header tags. Don't expect the search engine to parse your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to figure out which are the headlines -- it won't. Instead, use keywords in the H1, H2, and H3 tags to provide clues to the search engine. (Note: Some designers no longer use the H1, H2 tags. That's a big mistake. Make sure your designer defines these tags in the CSS rather than creating headline tags with other names.)


4. Position Your Keywords in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text. Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document -- where most people write an introduction to the content of the page. You don't want to just artificially stuff keywords here, however. More is not better. Google might expect a keyword density in the entire body text area of maybe 1.5% to 2% for a word that should rank high, so don't overdo it.


5. Include Descriptive Keywords in the ALT Attribute of Image Tags. This helps your site be more accessible to site-impaired visitors (www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/glance/) and gives additional clues to the search engines. The ALT attributes do help get your images ranked higher for image search (see #12 below).


6. Use Keywords in Hyperlinks. Search engines are looking for clues to the focus of your webpage. When they see words hyperlinked in your body text, they consider these potentially important, so hyperlink your important keywords and keyphrases. To emphasize it even more, the webpage you are linking to could have a page name with the keyword or keyphrase, such as blue-widget.htm -- another clue for the search engine.

7. Make Your Navigation System Search Engine Friendly. You want search engine robots to find all the pages in your site. JavaScript and Flash navigation menus that appear when you hover are great for humans, but search engines don't read JavaScript and Flash very well. Therefore, supplement JavaScript and Flash menus with regular HTML links at the bottom of the page, ensuring that a chain of hyperlinks exists that take a search engine spider from your home page to every page in your site. Don't set up your navigation system using HTML frames (an old, out-dated approach); they can cause severe indexing problems.

Some content management systems and eCommerce catalogs produce dynamic, made-on-the-fly webpages, often recognizable by question marks in the URLs followed by long strings of numbers or letters. Overworked search engines sometimes have trouble parsing long URLs and may stop at the question mark, refusing to go any further. If you find the search engines are't indexing your interior pages, you might consider URL rewriting, a site map, or commercial solutions.

3 Tips to Easy Business SEO promotion

Many local businesses struggle to find ways to promote themselves, get links, rank in search engines, and ultimately drive traffic to their websites. Most small businesses also have limited budgets making the task more difficult. For those businesses here are some ways you can promote your business online for free and generate some SEO traffic organically.

1. Email Signatures: Be sure to add your business URL to all of your outgoing email. Want to catch the reader's attention? Try adding your mission statement, or a catchy phrase to help people understand what you do. Change the statement a several times a year so people notice it again.
2. Syndicate Your Content and Ideas: Take advantage of article distribution Services like EZineArticles, ISnare, and IdeaMarketers to spread your message and approach. Use them to bring leads to your site by offering things like free eBooks or PDF’s that they can download after entering their contact information.
   
   These create link backs to you because you will include your business URL in your resource box. When you do this try and be just as creative. Don't just point them to the first page of your website. You can either create specific landing pages to send them too based on the company you post the article with or by topic (keep in mind this can become a lot of landing pages unless you write about one or two categories or topics).
3. Get listed: This is one of the most basic methods of business promotion, both on and offline. List yourself in as many business directories as you can; yellow pages, and local business Websites as you can find. Many of these will list your company for free, though some might require you to pay a small fee.
   
   This type of promotion is well worth the time and investment, as most people consult these publications when looking for a designer, plumber, electrician etc. You see the point.

Getting your business name recognized in appropriate circles is one of the biggest hurdles a fledgling company is going to face, but with a little fore-thought and some shameless self-promotion it's not as hard to get noticed as you may think.

Every Page of a Site Indexed by Search Engines is a Potential Landing Page.

The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to leave few landings to chance. The content of the page and/or links to the page are optimized for very specific, carefully researched keywords and phrases. Those keywords and phrases that are of most value for "organic" or "natural" search engine optimization are those most likely to be used by prospective customers in their search engines. Good choices will cause the site to rank higher in search engine results.

For large websites covering many products or many topics, a single home page cannot be optimized for every topic and still be relevant to all. A different approach is needed, a landing page that will not convert a visitor directly. A "hub" page is optimized for more generic, less targeted keyword phrases that have naturally a lower conversion rate than more-specific search terms. Hub landing pages serve as a "mini portal" within a site – the site establishes a number of virtual home pages, each for a broader topic.

There are two types of landing page, reference and transactional.

A reference landing page presents information that is relevant to the visitor. These can display text, images, dynamic compilations of relevant links, or other elements. Reference landing pages are effective if they meet the objectives of their publishers, which may be associations, organizations or public service entities. For many reference landing pages, effectiveness can be measured by the revenue value of the advertising that is displayed on them.

A special type of 'reference landing page' is the 'webvert', the marketing goal focuses on lead generation and interaction with the visitor. A webvert is not 'transactional' in nature. A webvert is a reference based, ethical landing page. The webverts consists of an advert, deigned on the AIDA principle. The traffic is driven from 

Google Adwords and is designed for two specific marketing tactics;

1) To attain high Google Adwords landing page quality scores, the benefit being any Adwords campaign costs are minimized.

2) The webvert has a clear call to action, usually a reply form.

The visitor traffic is immediate as the webvert relies on Google advertising to drive visitors to the webvert.

A transactional landing page seeks to persuade a visitor to complete a transaction such as filling out a form or interacting with advertisements or other objects on the landing page, with the goal being the immediate or eventual sale of a product or service. If information is to be captured, the page will usually withhold information until some minimal amount of visitor information is provided, typically an email address and perhaps a name and telephone number as well – enough to "capture the lead" and add the prospect to a mailing list.

A visitor taking the desired action on a transactional landing page is referred to as a conversion. The efficiency or quality of the landing page can be measured by its conversion rate, the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action. Since the economics of many online marketing programs are determined by the conversion rate, marketers constantly test alternatives and improvements to their landing pages. Some of the testing methods used are A/B testing and multivariate testing.

In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

In pay per click (PPC) campaigns, the landing page will also be customized to measure the effectiveness of different advertisements. By adding a parameter to the linking URL, marketers can measure advertisement effectiveness based on relative click-through rates.

Search Engine Optimization – Title and Meta Tags

Now that you have a better idea how to pick your keywords for your website/blog pages it’s time to take a look at Meta tags and how you can use them to achieve higher rankings in search engines.

Traditionally, Title and Meta HTML tags – parts of your websites’ underlying source code– have been centerpieces of any successful search engine optimization campaign. In the early days of the search engines, a top ranking often could be secured by simply building the right Title and Meta tags for your website or blog. Today, well-optimized Title tags remain among the most important search engine optimization factors, while the value of Description and, particularly, Keywords Meta tags has declined. Still, because most small and/or niche search engines and Web directories continue to incorporate all three elements into their indexation and ranking procedures, you should add carefully-optimized Title and Meta tags to your website.

Now while keyword meta tags and description are overlooked today, due to the Google SEO rage of the past few years, I’m going to explain why ideally, all of your site’s main pages should be equipped with individual Title and Meta tags that reflect the products and services offered on each of the pages, and why you want to put in the description and still use those keyword meta tags. You see, doing so allows you to aim for a top search engine ranking for each individual page, based on the keywords and phrases specific to each page.

Let me break it down for you.

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