business website

Headlines are the key to everything. Try an experiment. The next time you’re in the checkout line at your grocery store, notice if you scan the magazines conveniently placed right there by the checkout line.

You probably scan all of them. In fact, you probably read the headlines and mini-headlines before you bother to look at the name of the magazine.

Some of the headlines make you laugh, some get you curious, and some might even make you pick up the magazine and thumb through it or toss it onto the moving belt along with the veges and ice cream.

The Wall Street Journal article on the front page of the Monday 8-11 Small Business section titled, “How To Create A Small Business Web Site For Nothing (Or Almost Nothing)” has some mistakes and missing information that could cost small business owners dearly in the future.

In other words, if a small business owner follows it verbatim, they are going to need to spend an inordinate amount of money later to fix the problems.

The short answer? No. Google Page Rank gets bandied about quite a bit by people who really don’t know anything about SEO but want to pretend they do.

Google Page Rank is really all about trust. Google looks at a number of factors when anointing web sites with Page Rank but none of them have much to do with Search Engine Optimization.

Mostly, Google looks at how long your web site has been around. Their theory is that the longer your web site has been around, the more likely you are a going concern that isn’t going to shut down next week.

Yesterday, I was a guest on WCCO Radio and I was stressing that almost any business could be adapted to the Internet. The example I gave was a residential window washing business.

You might wonder how a window washing business could be adapted to the web. Here’s how he did it.

The guy had a residential window washing business. He contacted a web designer and had a web site designed where people could sign up for window washing service in his city. Next they designed a calendar with week days between Monday and Friday and times  between 9am and 5pm where people could sign up for window washing service.

Boy, there is just no limit to how important anchor links and anchor tags are. I could write an entire article on the importance of anchor tags but for now, let’s just go over some of the essentials so you begin using them

I’ll bet your first question is, “What the heck is an anchor tag?” And your second question is, “what’s so damned important about anchor tags?” I’ll tell you right now. Anchor tags can be used for several things:

The last place you want to look for help or advice on writing copy, for websites or anywhere else, is in “writing” books. Writing effective copy never looks like the writing you did in school or for papers or for your business. Powerful web copy looks and reads like speech.

You must view your website like it’s a member of your sales team. You aren’t “writing” to the people who visit your website. You’re communicating with them. Picture them sitting across a table from you and think about what you’d say to them if they came to you with a question because they viewed you as an expert on your subject.