small business websites

Ginny Reddish, author of Letting Go Of The Words: Writing Web Content That Works, spoke at the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) event this morning on website content. While I’m a copywriter specializing in writing copy and content for websites, I picked up some great pointers from her. She also reinforced a lot of my “beliefs” about copy and content on websites.

Ginny Redish is definitely a content ”evangelist.” which works for me because so am I. But enough blah, blah. Let’s take a look at her major points:

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.

Getting more content on your web site is a great way to get more traffic to your web site. The search engines love it and it gives people a reason to visit again and again. You can also use the content or articles to steer people to some of your products or services.

The tough question is always, how do you get content if you aren’t a writer?

Well, I just got an interesting “request for quote” from my web site yesterday. an attorney contacted me wanting to know if I would be willing to swap writing articles for his web site in exchange for him creating a will for me.

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.