The most important thing to remember when you are building a site for your business is that websites are now critical marketing tools. The days of static sites that simply present products or services are giving way to the Web 2.0 boom, and these types of sites are a critical sales vehicle for any type of business.

Finding a web professional who can build these interactive sites is essential for today’s competitive marketplace and they can help you build, develop and even market your business with ease. When you’re searching for the right web professional to join your team, here are the top ten questions to ask during the interview process:

1. Do they build for the search engines? Making sure your website is compliant with today’s SEO rules and regulations is a critical step for site construction. If a web professional isn’t keeping up to date with SEO guidelines you could be left with a less-than-stellar site that doesn’t get any exposure on the major search engines.
2. Do they check their work for W3C compliance? W3C compliance is another critical area for websites, and building a site with these rules and regulations in mind can also earn you high rankings on the search engines. This will save you coding work in the future, so make sure the candidate is aware of industry rules and can apply them to all of your projects.
3. Do they have Web 2.0 development skills? The days of static websites are long gone, and it’s essential that your web professional has the skills and experience to build a web 2.0-friendly site. Avoid getting left behind as the industry grows with the latest Web 2.0 developments; select someone who knows which direction the industry is growing and can help you build your business accordingly.
4. Do they understand your marketing concept? Building and designing a website in today’s competitive marketplace involves a thorough understanding of the market and sales. Your candidate should be able to understand your marketing goals and build something that attracts your target market appropriately. Remember, you need to build a site that sells to get the traffic and advertisers you need to build your business; can the web professional create a site with this goal in mind?
5. Do they have verifiable references? Checking work history is an important part of your interview process, and can help you learn more about the candidate’s work style, commitment to projects and deadlines, and the types of projects they’ve worked on.
6. Are they committed to ongoing education? Ongoing education is necessary for all professionals in your organization, especially with the rapidly changing world of the internet.
7. Will they provide you with the code of their projects? Even when you’re hiring a web professional permanently, you need to have access to their code and work at all times. If they end up leaving or are dismissed for any reason, you don’t want to have to start from scratch – make sure you back up all copies of their work and have access to their projects.
8. Can they sign a non-compete agreement? Making sure you don’t lose out on business opportunities is an important part of running a successful business; make sure they are willing to make a commitment to your company and sign a nondisclosure and non-compete agreement. It’s a simple step that can protect your business for the long-run.
9. Are they willing to train and lead a team? If you are planning on growing your business or outsource various projects, the web professional may be in charge of developing a system to allocate work. Are they willing to train and build a team, or will they only be working independently? Find out what type of commitment the candidate is willing to offer.
10. What type of programming experience do they have? While some web professionals do not need extensive programming experience, most will have basic programming knowledge that they can use to build and create a quality system, or even work with programmers and other designers. Check their qualifications for any certificates or other credentials to learn more about their educational experience.

Choosing the right web professional for your site can be challenging, but defining your goals and development plans can help you make a better decision. While every business needs a website, few business owners take the time to map out exactly how the site can help them build their business. Take the time to prioritize your goals, then set out to find the right web professional with these top ten questions.

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There are two great ways to use the Google Custom Search Engine to brand your business and help your site visitors find what they want more easily.

The first way involves building a local search engine so that visitors to your site can find what they want in your local area. The second way is to create an industry-specific search engine that helps visitors to your site find what they are looking for in your industry no matter where in the world it may be located. Both types of search engines can be used as a branding tool for your business.

Let’s say you own a dentistry website in Wayzata, Michigan. You can build a local search engine to help people in Wayzata find anything they want in Wayzata and that can be an effective way to brand you to your local customers as well as keep your local visitors on your site longer and when they are in need of veneers, who do you think they’re going to call?

On the other hand, you could skip the local search angle and build a dentistry search engine. Anyone interested in finding something related to dentistry - be it a dentist in their home town, the latest technology used in dental offices, research currently being conducted in the area of teeth maintenance, etc. - and visitors to your website can find anything related to dentistry through your website.

You can brand your custom search engine using Google’s unique branding features and design your search results pages to look just like your website. Since Google Custom Search also powers AdSense for Search, you can turn the search engine into another source of revenue for your business. How cool is that?

So, to recap:

• Branding
• More Traffic
• Visitors Stay Longer
• AdSense for Search
• Customization

Why not start your own search engine?

Is SEO the same for the small guys as it is for the big boys? Do small business owners have the same considerations as large corporations when it comes to search engine optimization? In a word, yes; and no.

Yes, SEO is largely the same when it comes to ensuring that you get high rankings for your key terms. Both small businesses and large corporations must write web content based on keywords and use the latest Web standards to ensure websites are developed with search engine friendliness at the core. But it can’t go unmentioned that there is a difference between how small businesses are capable of going about SEO and how large corporations do it.

Mega-national corporations can afford to hire in-house SEOs and website developers, but small business owners have a more difficult time hiring a full-time SEO to manage their websites. It may seem as if small businesses are economically disadvantaged, but it really isn’t the case. You can do a lot of things yourself, saving you the money that large corporations shell out for website development. Or you can hire someone who specializes in small business SEO.

Small businesses can move a little quicker online than large corporations. That’s an advantage. So while there might be disadvantages, you can move more quickly to adapt to market changes, making SEO for you as a small business owner actually an advantage despite the hurdles otherwise.

The short story, you don’t have to feel out of place online just because you are not an SEO or web development expert. Just jump in and learn at your own pace, and don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Branding your business online is every bit as important as branding it off line. And it’s really a lot simpler. You can do some of the same things, of course. Your company logo can be used online just the same as it can off line, and you should use it wherever and whenever you can. The perfect place for your company logo is in the headers of your website and blog. But why stop there? You have so many other branding options available to you online that to ignore any of them is to effectively shoot yourself in the foot.

One of the best ways to brand yourself online happens before you ever put up your website. Proper keyword research can lead you to the perfect domain name. A good domain name not only tells visitors what kind of business you are, but it also can be used as a branding tool. Small Business Mavericks is more than just a website that caters to small businesses - it is a brand. It was designed that way on purpose.

Other ways to brand yourself online include:

• Using a creative tagline that tells people what you do and why you do it
• Website or blog design can be effective in branding your business
• Ads that run on other websites can be used to brand your business
• Even PPC ads can be used for branding
• Creative use of keywords can be used to convey a particular image about your company that brands you in the minds of your target market
• Your company newsletter or e-zine can and should be used as a branding tool
• Branding can also take place through your social media profiles
• And you can brand yourself in your author resource bios when conducting article marketing

There is no limit to how you can brand your business online. The tools and resources available to you are numerous and all you have to do is ensure that they work together to create an image that people can relate to, respect, and identify with. That’s what online branding is all about.

Greg Sterling of Screenwerk is telling us that local video marketing will be a big thing within two years. I think he’s right.

I think his suggestion to YouTube to open up a local video channel is a good idea. He quotes HitWise as saying that YouTube already has 73% of the market. While Yahoo! and Google Video are both used to some degree, there is a huge margin between the market share enjoyed by these three video marketing channels. Second place running, MySpaceTV, has only a 9.21% market share, down from 17.73% one year ago. It looks like Google acquiring YouTube has paid off.

Making a video is relatively simple. You don’t have to spend a lot of money. You can hire a young college or high school student who knows how to operate a video camera and editing software and pay them to create marketing videos for you and upload them to YouTube and the other video sharing websites. Marketing online through video is a lot less expensive than off line marketing used to be.

No matter what kind of small business website you have, there is one tool that will benefit you anywhere in the world: Google Analytics. An account with Google Analytics is free. But it is one of the most essential tools for your business.

Google Analytics will help you track and analyze your traffic, sales conversions, and other important website statistics. If you care what people are doing on your website then I highly suggest you open up a free Google Analytics account.

Once you sign up for an account, you take the Google code provided and insert it onto each page of your website. Then you’ll be able to log in to your account at any time and see how many visitors you’ve had, where the visitors came from, how long they stayed on your site, your bounce rate, and see other statistics and trends. You can also set goals and track how well you’ve done in meeting them.

This tool is important if you wish for continuous improvement in your website business. And one other aspect of Google Analytics that is helpful is you have the ability to see how well you are doing against your competitors. A truly useful tool indeed.

There’s a new service that promises to deliver RSS feeds for blogs based on blog post popularity. AideRSS is being called an “intelligent assistant”. Well, I think my human assistant is pretty intelligent, but that’s OK.

Among the features of this new service are:

• Filter any blog or RSS feed
• Customize to your interests
• Live, best posts widgets
• Daily digests of top stories
• Intelligent PostRank filtering

PostRank is an AideRSS service that promises to analyze your blog and rank your blog posts according to popularity using, presumably, all new criteria. That is, criteria that you don’t already get analyzed through Google Analytics. So how does the service work?

(Source) in a nutshell you enter the URL of the feed that you would like to have filtered and we do some math and checking around the web to learn about this feed, its statistics, and people’s reaction to it. We then assign PostRank™ scores to all articles in the feed and provide you with a variety of tools to sort and parse these items of interest into manageable lots for you to scan and digest at your leisure.

That does sound a lot like the way Google does it, doesn’t it? Without more information, I believe I’ll withhold judgment. But I do see two useful applications for this service.

The first application is the sorting of your own RSS feeds. According to the company’s sales page, you can sort your own RSS feeds, the ones you like to read, in ways that most feed readers don’t allow. For instance, if you just want to read the “good posts” from your favorite blogs then you input the data that you consider to be the best criteria for judging good and the service will rank the individual blog posts that come in daily according to that criteria. Sounds like a little bit of a time saver there.

The other useful service is the AideRSS widget feature. You can rank blogs posts according to top rank, PageRank, and have those posts appear on your blog in a widget. I don’t think I’ve seen this service before. It looks interesting.

According to Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, the best time to post to your blog is on Thursday between 5-7 p.m.

Luciani’s conclusion: between 1pm and 3pm PST (after lunch) or between 5pm and 7pm PST (after work) are the best times and Thursday is the best day. The worst time to post? Between 3 and 5 PM PST on the weekends - nobody cares.

I’d say this is probably true for the most post. People like to use their weekends to play outside the house, especially in the summer. But I think your weekend statistics in the winter time should be better. I also think peak posting times depend a lot on the type of blog that you are writing and the interests of your blog readers. Right after lunch seems reasonable for most business blogs. But in the evening? Again, it depends on your business, but if you have a local blog on the east coast and you cater mostly to business people who read blogs during the day, I’m thinking 8 p.m. EST isn’t the best time. Some things you just have to take with a grain of salt.

With e-mail marketing, you don’t have to worry about your marketing communications not reaching their destinations on time. You can program your autoresponder to deliver your e-mail right when you want it to. And it doesn’t matter which system you use.

There are three prominent e-mail marketing providers that can help you get your e-mail communications delivered:

• Aweber
• Constant Contact
• Virtual Response

All three of these companies can help you with your e-mail campaigns. Whether you need to create and design an electronic newsletter, send out e-brochures, post cards, or any digital communications, these companies have been doing it long enough to know the pitfalls and assist you in avoiding them. But you can also do it yourself. All you need is Microsoft Word and an e-mail client.

But don’t think it’s as easy as creating an e-mail and sending it out to everyone you know. There are effective and ineffective ways of marketing your business. Before you get too far down that road, meet with a consultant to discuss the best way to go about marketing your business.

A permalink is the URL of a specific blog post once it has moved beyond your home page into the archives. It is the part of the URL that follows the first / in your blog post’s URL.

For instance, the Small Business Mavericks blog URL is http://www.smallbusinessmavericks.com/internetmarketing. Each individual blog post has its own URL that is designated by the website URL followed by the / symbol and usually the title of the post. Yesterday’s blog post permalink is http://www.smallbusinessmavericks.com/internetmarketing/seo-for-small-business/5-seo-tips-to-improve-your-business-website/04/30/2008/.

That’s pretty long, isn’t it?

The part that follows the second / and begins with the word “seo” is the blog post’s specific page URL. In the case of this blog, the permalink consists of the name of the category into which that blog post was set (SEO For Small Business) followed by a / symbol and the name of the blog post (5 SEO Tips To Improve Your Business Website) followed by another / and the date of the post.

You can format your permalinks any way you want. You can format them with or without your category names. You can format them with or without the dates. You can even shorten the post part of the URL with some blogging platforms, such as WordPress, by finding the place in the system that allows you to do that and manually changing the URL “slug.” When you do that, your title will not be changed, but the actual URL, or permalink, will.

The permalink is what tells search engines and human visitors where to find each individual blog post. It is a necessary part of that blog post’s address and if you write about the same topics often then you’ll want to make sure that each blog post has a unique permalink.

SEO is a very important part of having a website and you should definitely do your best to ensure that you are using all areas of your site to boost your rankings. Search engines love optimized websites and though you may be using meta tags and proper keyword density in your content, there is still a lot to learn! Here are 5 tips to keep your SEO going strong.

1. Make your URLs SEO friendly. You can do this by using your keywords in your page URLs, rather than just numbers or a random jumble of letters and numbers.
2. Set up a site map. A site map basically tells the search engine spiders how to get to all the various pages on your website, which, in turn, helps you by boosting rankings.
3. Use original content. Writing your own content is the best way to ensure this. If you have duplicate articles on your website, you´ll be penalized by the search engines and that´s just not good.
4. Consider blogging. While a website is a great way to gain traffic for your business, blogs are just more SEO friendly because of the constantly updated content. It could be a good move to start one up for your business.
5. Update your content. Not only is it a bad SEO technique to let your content stagnate, but your clients won´t come back if there is never anything new!

These are just a few of the more overlooked areas of SEO that you can use on your business website. It´s a great way to increase your SEO and move ahead of the competition in the search engines.

Caroline
Small Business Mavericks
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