A Few Ways to Market Your Small Business Online
As a small business owner with mostly local customers there are a lot more things you can do to market your business in addition to your website. Over 70%, I have seen figures over 90%, of customers find a business using the Internet.
In any case if you are ignoring or or not working constantly to build and improve your Internet presence, you are throwing away valuable business. Your business website is only one part of an Internet marketing startegy.
Here are a few ways to market your business on the web in addtion to your web site.
Helpful SEO tools for Chrome
Have you ever wondered how your web site ranks in Google, or even better, how individual pages rank? Or do you have questions like:
- Are my page titles too long?
- Are my page meta descriptions being displayed correctly?
- Have I gone overboard with too many links on a page?
What is a QR code!
You may have noticed on magazine advertisements, or business cards and product labels, in fact in many places, a small square printed object like the one to the right. The object is a Quick Response or QR code. They are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone. They have been in use for years in Japan and Asia and are showing up all over the place in the US.
While they sort of look like a bar code they are much more useful. They can store (and digitally present) much more data, including URL links, Geo coordinates, and text. The other key feature of QR Codes is that instead of requiring a chunky hand-held scanner to scan them, many modern cell phones can scan them.
Passwords and Security
Keep Your Site Administration Passwords Secure and Safe
Recently one of my client's web sites was hacked using a cracked password. We all need to be reminded from time to time how important it is to keep our user credentials secure. Fortunately the hacker did no damage to the site. Visitors to who cruised the official site were unaffected. The hacker parked malware infected pages on the server. The foreign pages attracted visitors interested in free software, cheap goods etc. Once the pages were discovered and removed all was good again. It could have been much worse. The foreign content could have been pornography or the hacker could have been much more malicious by destroying the site.
The Introduction Paragraph, Abstracts, Blog and Article Layout, and the "Read More" Button
Blogs can be powerful mechanisms to keep your web site alive and dynamic as a way of increasing your search engine site ranking and attracting new visitors to your site. A feature in Joomla enhances your blog and article layouts and increases your keyword density for your web site if properly used. I will describe the Joomla usage, although the feature is similar to features in Drupal, WordPress, and other CMS platforms.