Internet Marketing is becoming increasingly important for small business owners all around the world. More than 70% of searches done on Google are done for finding information about local businesses. In this scenario, it is critically important for Small Business Owners to give paramount importance to optimize their website for getting better rankings on Google. Following are the top 5 tips which you, as a business owner can implement on your website without much effort:

Top 5 SEO Tips for Small Business Owners

Use Unique Title Tags for website pages

Make sure that each page on your website has a unique page title and a title tag. If you are using Content Management Systems like WordPress or Joomla, this should be fairly easy to do. These two are not necessarily the same thing. Title Tag is what is shown in the search results when the page appears on search results while the page title is the title of the article of the page. Ideally, both of these should contain main keyword you are trying to rank.

Identify keywords to target

Don’t assume that you already know what keywords your customers are using to find your services on google. You will be surprised by the results. There are multiple steps involved in finding your target keywords. First, brainstorm what you think your site is about, and how you want people to find your site. Write down these words, then think outside the box and find terms related to your original terms. For example, if you use “(term) photography”, try using “(term) pictures.”. Specifically, look at the competition and the monthly searches using Google keyword tool.

Keyword use in page content

Spreading your keyword strategically in the content on the page will help you immensely in ranking on search engines. However, don’t stuff your keywords in the content forcefully making your page unreadable or grammatically incorrect. Remember, you have two customers who you are writing your content for: Humans & Search Engines. Make sure your content caters for both of them without reducing the quality of it. It may be worthwhile hiring an outside copywriter and providing them with keywords to use if you do not think you can handle writing the content in an accessible way yourself.

Site description containing relevant keywords

Site description is something more and more web administrators don’t give enough importance to. By having your main keyword(s) in your site description, it not only helps search engines to give your website better rankings, but it also increases your click through rate from the search results. Again, content management platforms like WordPress makes this very easy to do by using a WordPress SEO plugin. Again, do not try to stuff the keywords into awkward ways and making the sentences unreadable.

Good site architecture

Last but not the least, the website should have easy to navigate website structure. Furthermore, the URL address of the inner page of the website should also be highly optimized with relevant keywords. If you have a page about “ blue widgets”, your URL should be something like “http://www.(site).com/blue-widgets”, which is easy for search engines to read and identify.

Website should not have too many folders and levels on the server. The general rule is: the closer your page is to the root domain (your http://www.(site).com), the easier it will be for search engines to find and index your page. If your URLs start to look like “http://www.(site).com/section/category/discipline/(product).html”, you should request your webmaster to simplify the structure.

Recently after staring off an email service provider, Email It, We had to implement numerous methods for our client’s emails to reach their intended recipients. Making sure your email gets through is becoming more of a challenge as spam bots target even the most genuine emails.

To tackle this problem, one way is to add something called an SPF record. Of course there are lots of rules built into spam filters that help it tag a particular email as spam or legit. So using this one method wont ensure that your email will surely get through but rather increases your chances by quite a lot. As with most DNS type records, its really hard to explain the syntax so we wont go into too much details on those.

SPF Records and Google Apps for Domain

We use Gmail to send our emails to our clients and for outgoing emails, we’ve setup our own SMTP server. So we just had to add the SPF Text Record in our hosting control panel. This might not be your case and most businesses tend to use Google Apps for domain to handle their outgoing emails. Google has information on how to add the SPF record but misses an important element that makes the biggest difference.

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1. Maintain your cool and sense of humor, especially during a crisis. When our biggest customer – and I mean big – thought I leaked a front-page story to the press, I offered to resign to save the relationship. My boss, a great CEO, gave me this serious look, like he was thinking about it, and said, “You’re not getting off that easy.” Then he broke out into a big smile.
2. Tell subordinates when they’re shooting themselves in the foot. Sometimes I can be pretty intimidating and I’ve had CEOs who shied away from giving it to me straight when my emotions got the better of me. Not this one guy. We’d be in a heated meeting and he’d quietly take me aside and read me the riot act. He was so genuine about it that it always opened my eyes and helped me to achieve perspective.
3. Be the boss, but behave like a peer. I’ve worked with loads of CEOs who let their egos get the better of them. They act like they’re better than everyone else, are distant and emotionally detached, or flaunt their knowledge and power. That kind of behavior diminishes leaders, makes them seem small, and keeps them from really connecting with people. They’re not always the most successful, but the most admired CEOs I know are genuinely humble.
4. Let your guard down and really be yourself outside of work.You know, teambuilding is so overrated. All you really need to do outside of work to build a cohesive team is break some bread, have some drinks, relax, let your guard down, and be a regular human being. When you get to be really confident, you can be that way all the time. That’s the mark of a great leader.
5. Stand behind and make big bets on people you believe in.One CEO would constantly challenge you and your thinking to the point of being abusive. But once he trusted and believed in you, he put his full weight behind you 100 percent to help you succeed. He’d stand up for you even when he wasn’t sure what the heck you were up to. And he’d give you new functional responsibilities – something up-and-coming execs need to grow. Okay, he wasn’t perfect, but who is?
6. Complement your subordinate’s weaknesses. I often say it’s every employee’s job to complement her boss’s weaknesses. The only reason that’s even doable is because we’ve all only got one boss. But I actually had a CEO who did that with each and every one of his staff. For example, I’m more of a big picture strategy guy and he would really hold my feet to the fire by tracking my commitments. It felt like micromanaging at first, but I eventually realized it helped me to be a more effective and strengthened the entire management team.
7. Compliment your employee’s strengths. It takes a strong, confident leader to go out on a limb and tell an employee what they’re great at. Why? I don’t know, but I suspect it’s hard for alpha males that primarily inhabit executive offices. Anyway, it’s important because we can’t always see ourselves objectively. Twenty years ago a CEO identified how effectively I cut through a boatload of BS to reach unique solutions to tough problems. Today, that’s what I do for a living.
8. Teach the toughest, most painful lessons you’ve ever learned. As a young manager at Texas Instruments, I once asked my boss’s boss for advice about a promotion I didn’t get. He told me a candid story about the hardest lesson he’d ever learned, the reason he was stuck in his job. He made himself indispensible and didn’t groom his replacement. It was painful for him to share, but it opened my eyes and made a huge difference in my career.
9. Do the right thing. Just about everyone says it, but I’ve only known one CEO who both preached and practiced it to the point where it became a big part of the company culture. You’d walk the halls and hear people say it all the time. He meant two things by it. When he said it to you, it meant he trusted you to do just that. He also meant it regardless of status quo or consequences. He had extraordinary faith in that phrase. Now I do too.
10. Do what has to be done, no matter what. It’s a rare executive who jumps on a plane at a moment’s notice to close a deal or gives an impromptu presentation when a potential investor shows up unexpectedly. It’s even more rare when he does it without asking questions or hemming and hawing about it. He just does what has to be done. That kind of drive and focus on the business is relatively common with entrepreneurs in high-tech startups -  but it shouldn’t be. It’s the mark of a great manager who will find success, that’s for sure.

Online retail spending reached $37.5 billion for the quarter, primarily due to an increase in the number of buyers (up 16 percent), with 70 percent of all Internet users making at least one online purchase in the quarter.

We should note that spending was lower than the first quarter of the year, when comScore tracked $38 billion in retail e-commerce sales in the United States. Although, as you can see in the chart below, that is always the case, just like the fourth quarter of a year always has the highest spending because of the end-of-year holiday period.

The 14 percent bump compared to last year represented the seventh consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth and the third consecutive quarter of double-digit growth rates.

According to comScore, the top 25 online retailers accounted for 66.4 percent of dollars spent online, down from 67.7 percent a year ago and down from a peak of 69.9 percent in Q3 2010.

Read the full article @ Tech Crunch

Whether you’re using wireless internet in a coffee shop, stealing it from the guy next door, or competing for bandwidth at a conference, you’ve probably gotten frustrated at the slow speeds you face when more than one device is tapped into the network. As more and more people—and their many devices—access wireless internet, clogged airwaves are going to make it increasingly difficult to latch onto a reliable signal.

But radio waves are just one part of the spectrum that can carry our data. What if we could use other waves to surf the internet?

One German physicist, Harald Haas, has come up with a solution he calls “data through illumination”—taking the fiber out of fiber optics by sending data through an LED lightbulb that varies in intensity faster than the human eye can follow. It’s the same idea behind infrared remote controls, but far more powerful.