4 Common Misconceptions About SEO for Your Online Business

There are a lot of grey areas about SEO that people don’t understand. In fact, nearly the entire niche is misunderstood and there are few that really “get it”. SEO is simply, Search Engine Optimization. It can make you or, if you’re relying on it – break you.

SEO is an incredibly valuable service you should know as much as you can about. We’ll be offering some online courses here for you to increase your knowledge about the subject. Join our newsletter to be informed of our latest e-learning courses and to receive some free and deeply discounted courses.

Common Misconceptions

1. Web Developers know SEO.

This is very common as a belief. Few programmers of C++, ASP .NET, PHP, or anything else really know what they’re doing in SEO. The reason is – both are highly specialized fields and it takes a full-time effort to master either one. Ask for specific SEO experience and results you can look at before hiring your SEO professional. Don’t entrust your business website to someone that isn’t a complete expert on SEO or you’ll be disappointed. There are programmers that have studied SEO inside and out and know what they’re doing. Find one!

2. SEO is on your site.

Yes and no. There is on-site and off-site SEO techniques that, when combined – can give you what you need – high rank in Google or other search engines. There are many more things that can be done off-site than on-site at this point in time, so it pays to know what those things are. Once your on-site factors are all optimized you can spend the next couple years optimizing your off-site factors! Off-site usually consists of getting inbound links to your business site because Google counts inbound links as a vote of confidence.

3. SEO special, $295!

Unless it’s your good friend, who is an absolute SEO expert and wants to give you a lot of work for nothing – it’s unlikely you’ll ever find something like this that works. SEO is a huge effort if your business is in a competitive niche. For a non-competitive niche you’re still looking at a minimum of 75+ hours of work. Even if you use someone overseas at $20 per hour you’re going to pay $1,500 as a minimum. Probably you’ll need a couple hundred hours of SEO work. SEO is not cheap, but, cheap SEO is…

4. SEO stops when the job is completed.

Nope. One can do SEO from day one – until the end of the business’ lifespan – 10 years later. SEO, when done right consists of an initial thrust of 100+ hours and then continues on a monthly basis for the life of your business. SEO results can drop in just a month if you let them. Find out more about SEO at our online courses to be offered here on this site in the short-term future. Join our newsletter to get alerted to new courses as they come out – and for discounts and even some free ebusiness courses.

Website Hosting Basics – an Overview

Webhosting for your business is one of those things that few people really understand well unless you happen to be a web developer. It’s a mystery sort of like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – but not quite that bad.

A host for your business website is a server. It could look just like your computer at home. In fact, if you wanted, it could even BE your computer at home if you had a fast and very stable connection. You could use a website server program and set up your notebook or desktop computer to be a web host.

In reality – it’s best left to professional companies that specialize in business hosting because to do it right takes some know-how.

Your website is in all likelihood hosted on a server rack in an air conditioned building that has a few million sites hosted on those servers too. A webhosting company has very fast bandwidth and big pipes. Meaning, they can serve your site to as many places as are requesting it all at once – very fast, very efficiently.

You can create web pages any number of ways, but at some point they go from your computer to the webhost. The way they travel across the internet is via FTP – file transfer protocol. This protocol is ideal for transferring files or programs without data loss. It’s fast and can pick up where it was cut off in the case of connection problems. There are many FTP programs available – most of them are $30-40 for a license. Or, you could use the FireFox browser and use the FireFTP plugin for free. Up to you.

Hosting your business site usually starts with these variables that define the cost of your hosting plan:

• Server Space - how much space you have on the server for your files including photos, videos, mp3′s, html, text, etc. Usually you’ll have a 500MB or some Gigabytes available. Not many business websites use all their available space on the server.
  
• Bandwidth Per Month - this is basically how much information the server dishes out to visitors of your site over the month. If your visitors are all looking at gigabytes of data each month you might go over your bandwidth. If you only offer text articles you’re not likely to go beyond what they give you for bandwidth. Bandwidth per month might be 100 GigaBytes or 1 TeraByte is becoming common now. Again, chances are you won’t ever max out your bandwidth. Years ago it was common. Now? Not much chance!
  

That’s it – this is all at the consumer level that you usually ever choose between. There are a host of add-ons that you can pick up for some extra cash per month but if you’re going with simple webhosting like at Godaddy.com you’ll basically choose plans that vary on these two criteria.

Hosting costs for new small businesses should be under $100 per year in most cases. Godaddy offers it for about $80 per year and you’ll likely have more bandwidth and server space than you could ever use.

If you need to know more about business website hosting we’ll be offering ebusiness training here as we release it through our email newsletter. Some courses will be free, some at a deep discount. You can ensure you get notified so you can take advantage of it by joining our email newsletter now.

Do You Need a Webmaster for Your Business?

There’s no doubt – you need someone you can call on for emergencies and to handle certain aspects of technology that are better left to professionals. A virus that destroyed part of your website, a crash you can’t recover from, etc. These are things you need a webmaster or some other technical professional for.

Do you need a webmaster on staff for you or can you or someone in your business learn as much as you need to know and only outsource the tough stuff?

With the advent of blogging technologies many companies are turning to blogs as the solution for their business website. Blogs are quick to get up and running, well put together in the case of WordPress, and quite a bit easier than a traditonal website to handle on your own.

Over the past 3 years we’ve developed a few dozen websites based on the WordPress system (wordpress.org) and have found it an amazing platform to work from. Picture having a website up and running in a day, complete with design, SEO, and multimedia capabilities. WordPress makes it not only possible – but possible for many levels of people. The instructions at the main site are easy enough that most technical professionals or those that like to tinker can probably hash it out and do everything themselves.

Learning the interface (dashboard) is not that difficult either, and like anything requires some trial and error to become expert with all the little tweaks and functionality bits. WordPress is powerful – and, the reason it’s really powerful is because it gives you the tools to modify, create, and delete content you have on your site as a user – not a webmaster or tech professional. You need not know how to code HTML to manage a WP site. There are a few themes now that are coming out with many easily tweakable functions to make WP super easy.

The “THESIS” theme is one such WP theme that gives the user many options to choose from so he/she need not go into the code to change things like font colors & size or other formatting attributes. Thesis is used by professionals and total amateurs alike. Look at Copyblogger.com – he uses it – and he’s at the top of the game. I also just set up a guy teaching English in China on the Thesis theme and he was up and running in two days of playing with it – he had no prior experience with blogging or creating websites at all!

So, with WordPress you no longer need to take a year to develop your site from scratch. Not even a month or a week. If you ever DO want to tweak the design the changes can be made much more quickly to all the pages because they’re all based on templates – one change affects all pages of the same type. Paying someone to fix your site the way you want it is also MUCH cheaper than it used to be. What used to take 100 hours, today might take 2 days of work. Seriously.

What you might have paid for in the past – today you can try yourself.

Times have REALLY CHANGED. You might not even need a webmaster on staff anymore. How’s that for saving $50,000 per year in expenses? Outsource what you need to and save a bundle.If you wanted to learn how to maintain your site built on the WordPress platform it would take about 30 hours of time to really get into it and figure it all out. We offer a WordPress elearning course here on site for those of you that want to learn all  you can about it -and never need a webmaster again.

If you learn the WordPress platform – and then learn a little bit about tweaking CSS and PHP – the code behind the websites you’ll be much farther down the path of self-sufficiency and it will be a huge cost you no longer need to outsource.

We’ll have some easy to use ebusiness training here to help you learn WordPress, FTP, Graphics Editing, and video production for websites. Join our email newsletter to be alerted to training courses as they are released. Subscribers to our emails will receive offers for free training and deeply discounted training too.

Seriously consider using WordPress for your business website. It makes a lot of sense.