Tag Archives: website design

By definition, business owners looking for a new website lack the technical skills to look “under the hood” of what they get. They can grasp the concept of a content management system, they recognise the name WordPress, but for the most part, they look at their website as the public would look at it, move around a bit and give their lowest-bidding web developer the thumbs up to go live.

A couple of months later, a major WordPress update comes along, with a flurry of updates to plugins and themes that must be made compatible. Most, if not all, of these updates contain bug fixes and security patches, so it’s really important to apply them. If left untouched, the website will gradually become more and more exposed and the online business will be in too much danger of being hacked.

“No problem”, thinks the hapless site owner, “All I need to do is click that Update button and my site will do the rest automatically”.

Famous last words…

Let’s face it. Search engines are not interested in making SEO easy. By definition, SEO is a set of ways to manipulate search results, so why should the?

Google has always made it clear that the best way to promote a website is by focusing on human searchers, rather than on robots and crawlers. In several algorithm changes, it specifically targeted links that serve no purpose other than SEO and content that serves purpose other than SEO and advertising revenue.

So basically, traditional link exchange – you link to my site and I’ll link to yours – is dead. Gone. Buried. No more. You get it.

What now? How should an honest small business use the mighty Internet for some promotion, then? Without swapping links, what CAN we do?

The answer is … (drum roll) … fresh content.

The first thing you learn about starting a business on the Internet is that everyone can do it. I remember the first seminar I attended. You may have had the same experience yourself. It is a free event that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales in one day. The food, the venue and the free gifts are nothing compared to how many suckers come to those events for the promise of sitting on the beach in a swimsuit with a laptop, sipping cool drinks and watching the dollars appearing on the screen every day and every hour.

Gal and I went to our first event as life coaches. It was an awesome weekend. It was a great seminar and I learned a lot. For 2 days, they promised the world “Be your own boss! Work 3 hours a day! Money will be coming out of your ears!” and … “Everyone can do it!”

I have to say I almost believed them. I wanted to believe them with all my heart, but because our life coaching course had promised exactly the same thing, I had the suspicion there was a pattern there. Luckily for us, it was not a test of our trust. We just did not have $10,000 to buy the product on offer. We were shocked that our fellow coaches spent so much money just weeks after they had spent thousands of dollars on the life coaching course.

If you have ever heard these slogans about trying to build a business on the Internet, be warned, someone is convinced you are a sucker and might be taking you for a ride.

Will you make a purchase from a stand-alone Landing Page that you’re visiting for the first time?

I think that if you’re going to ask for professional help, it’s better if you stick to what you want to get for yourself and don’t try to use jargon, because that will get you both in trouble. Leads? Great. Sales? Even better. Profits? Awesome. But SEO? Is that a business word?

This is just a quick post to share something too many people don’t know: how to protect your email address so that bots can’t harvest it and you won’t start receiving tons of spam.

You see, when you put your email address on your website, it’s very simple to read it, add it to a list and then bombard it with unsolicited email. It’s annoying, but it’s easy to fix in two steps.

You may have heard this saying from people already “What you don’t know, doesn’t hurt you”. Well, I’m here to tell you this saying is really wrong when it comes to getting business online.

On the Internet, what you don’t know can hurt you. A lot!

If you’re reading this, you are most likely a business owner looking to market your products or services on the Internet. So what should you do first? What should you do next? Where can you find more information?

The answer is: right here, of course. Let’s start at the beginning, then, shall we?