As a business owner, where do you invest the majority of your time? Yes, the first step is often the hardest. What could you do to reinforce your customer relationships? Give out small prizes like gift certificates to lunch or dinner, tickets to ball games, t-shirts, tools, or happy face …

Customer loyalty is the result of the quality of your relationship. You need to choose your visual identity carefully, because it s not something you will change much over time. Facilitation is never a pure, linear process; iterations or fractals of the F-S-N-P cycle are typically found within each phase …

A leading merchant in New York found his calling through having loaned money to a friend. Begin on time. For many, this is a more valuable result than securing funding. Sense-making is an attempt to provide an understanding and it implies a continuous process of interpretation and learning through experimentation …

Generally, poor performing or problem employees are a result of hiring too fast when companies are desperate to fill slots. Say you increase your projected market share by 1 percent here, reduce expected costs by 2 percent there, and lower your estimate of required startup capital by a few percentage …

Most small companies don't have formal training programs. Operational, administration, and production excellence starts with complete systems to ensure on-budget projects, excellent service, quality workmanship, on-time completion, and a safe workplace. If you can't persuade your business customers to pay upfront for your products or services then you at least …

Advertisements are not read unless persons are looking for something in that line. No one is going to want to join a site which only offers the choice of three people to meet. One way to minimize the risk of starting a full-time business is to ease into a part-time …

You can get your business to work by installing people systems and a training program. If the loan for initial capital will be based on security instead of equity within the company, you should also specify the source of collateral. Contrast that with a professional-services firm, such as a management …

Measuring the number of search engines that have indexed your site is an easy way to check the website growth resulting from your SEO efforts. The more pages indexed, the easier it is to get a ranking for more keywords. One of the best ways to start earning links is …

A simple way to create nonsensical names is to combine parts of two or more words into a new word. If the issues in the reviews are real, then deal with them. Common extensions that appear at the end of URLs are .htm, .html, .shtml, .php, .jsp and .asp. When …

There are numerous benefits to dedicated server hosting. Following an internal search, the consumer makes a mental decision regarding an external search. Google started penalizing mobile unfriendly sites in 2015. And they're likely crack down even more in the future. If you want to make your site mobile-friendly, I recommend …

When done well, content marketing can contribute to boosting a site's position in search rankings. One of the very first things that you need to do in order to gain success in online marketing is to establish the main keyword of your site. When you are able to do that …

Learning means excitement for your brain; think of it as a data party. When you build backlinks, you have to be very cautious not to leave footprints, and make the links look natural. Personal digital assistants, such as Applees Siri, have increased the amount of voice-based searching that takes place …

The most effective way to boost your website's indexation is through linking. The paths that the spiders take through the Internet are formed by links. When one page links to another page, the spider follows that path. Within your own website, make sure that you've created links to and from …

Google is also now looking at things like bounce rates - how long someone spends on your website. And it is looking at how your site renders on mobile and how quickly it loads. You can now get penalized for typos and mistakes. Webpages that are light on words but heavy …

However, as generic keywords are generic, you might notice that the conversation rate for the keyword is lower than other keywords due to their lack of specificity. For user experience, performance, and web development trends, I really like Smashing Magazine, DZone, and Stack Overflow. Using third-party applications will save you …

In Google's eyes it is thought to be that 'thin' and 'low quality' are synonymous. It involves activities which make a website friendly to search engines by applying some techniques like website should have all important pages with good density of keywords and Meta keywords, etc. Every page after the …

Search engines have a limited ability to recognize images, animation, video and audio. A very common mistake many SEO’s make is to leave footprints when building backlinks. All your links should look natural, even those that you are building for SEO. You cannot get away with keyword “stuffing” anymore …

SEO closely aligns with so many marketing channels, business decisions and user behaviour that the potential your website will be 100% optimised is slim, to nil. Links are a strong indicator of the value of a website’s content, especially when multiple pages target popular keywords. The truth is that …

Adding the website is quite a useful step in making a website more popular. Search engine and directories accept website submissions for free. Title tags and meta descriptions are important elements of your website’s content. The title tag and the meta description tags should include keywords relevant to the …

. Try putting into Google search terms related to your business, its products and services. There are days when I feel like search engine optimization is moving faster than I can digest and I’ll never be able to stay up with modern SEO techniques and the constant changes brought forth …

Add internal links to the taxonomies the post belongs to Nofollow links do not allow search engine bots to follow the link. That means if the website owner is linking back to you with Nofollow attributes, it does not pass on value from the source site. Only humans will be …

The best keywords are ones that don’t have much competition. Try long-tail keywords — these are three- to six-word keywords that are extremely specific and tend to have less competition for them. You want your company’s name to be one of the first results that they see. When you …

On the web, sole traders can in theory compete with the corporate big boys, so being able to be found – and found easily – among those searches is essential for any firm Link building is definitely one of the most important aspects of SEO strategy. But, finding good sites to comment …

Seriously, what is worse than staring at a blank page waiting for it to load? The page speed is a huge ranking factor when it comes to search engines. Google’s latest update had a heavy focus on the user experience and site speed can undoubtedly affect this. This means …

Despite countless claims over the years that have proclaimed the death of link building it is still very much alive and kicking. Not only is it still alive but it remains one of the most important ranking factors and is in the top two factors in Google’s ranking algorithm …

An effective link building strategy that simply makes a lot of sense is fixing broken links on your site and on sites that you’d like a link from. Your first step is to look for broken links on pages that interest you. After finding the links that go to …

Google’s algorithm takes into account users’ interactions and experience with a website based on how long they stay on a page and what webpage in the search results a user clicks on. Google will be looking to see if you have put any time into the content or just …

Google will show less information in the search results on mobile than on a desktop. Your meta descriptions and your titles will be truncated if you made them too long. Thinks about that when you optimize your posts and pages. Based on some online surveys, SEO is one of the …

In the end, the users, the marketplace, content and links will determine the popularity and ranking numbers. There are literally hundreds of factors that contribute to your final rankings. On top of that, it can be hard to determine what kinds of trends Google may associate with your chosen keywords …

Keyword selection is the starting point of the small business SEO process. You must choose keywords that are directly relevant to your business, which people are actually searching for, and which aren’t too competitive for your budget. Choose the right keywords – limit yourself to around 5 to start with …

Start focusing on your visitors, on the people that want to buy your product or services. “Social search” is an evolving term for the way in which search engines factor a user’s social network -- also referred to as social graph -- into how results are displayed after a search query …

Links still matter. We should just think of them differently. Consider whether the links you attract will actually drive qualified traffic to your site, rather than just adding to antiquated metrics like external link volume. One of the basic tools of the trade for an SEO practitioner is the search …

Google is pretty good at understanding the general context of a site’s content. If you’ve been producing content in a haphazard manner, hoping and praying that some of it eventually ranks, it’s time to buckle down and commit to a more methodical SEO content strategy for the …

When we talk about trust through age, we're talking about the indexed age (i.e. the time since Google originally found you). But, more importantly, what happened over the time since Google discovered your site or page. Without on page optimization of your content which talks about your website, there …

Google will penalize spammy sites, and unfortunately this causes some bad behavior from bad actors. Say, for example, you wanted to take out a competitor. You could send a bunch of obviously spammy links to their site and get them penalized. This is called “negative SEO,” and is something that …

Getting third parties to link their websites to yours is a critical part of SEO. Without inbound links, there is little to no chance of ranking for competitive terms in search engines such as Google, whose algorithm relies heavily on link measuring and weighting criteria. Cross linking is a great …

Today, due to the way backlinks are evaluated based on different industry-related ranking factors, it is less quantity focused and more about the quality of sites from which the links are coming. The bottom line is that if you’re focusing on a small group of generic keywords, you’re …

Historically, traffic from search engines has been about a very singular pursuit -- that of rankings. Another “old school” method of building up your backlinks is to make use of Forum Posting. It is a quick, easy and sometimes even fun way to get your links out and maybe even have …

It helps the search engines quickly determine what the page is about. But the blogging holy grail is just this: A quality blog improves your Google ranking, which will draw leads to your website and encourage them to make purchases. One of the recommendations I frequently give as an SEO …

Keep your descriptions under 150 characters to avoid a trail off (…). This shows visitors that you have intentionally put up an informative and helpful description, opposed to the randomly generated one that Google pulls for non-optimised pages. Currently more than half of searches account for mobile devices. Sometimes you just …