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Update your Small Business’s WordPress Site. Charmingly Surly Carpenters Not Included.

5 Ways to Update your Small Business’s WordPress Site

So you’ve decided that it’s time to update your small business’s WordPress site. Great idea! But you’re afraid it needs to be rebuilt from scratch, which sounds like a lot of work and expense. Well, I’ve got some good news for you: you don’t need to start over. Like an old house with solid bones, your old WordPress site just needs some maintenance and upgrades to look brand-new again and serve your business for years more to come.

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Good design isn't just for Artists and Architects. You can use good design for better SEO.

SEO for Small Business Websites Part 2: Design for Better SEO

When people think of Search Engine Optimization, they tend to think of things like links, keywords, and meta tags. Those things are all very important, as you’ll know if you read part one of this series where we got into content optimization in detail. What some people don’t know, however, is that Google cares about design, too, and high-ranking websites use good design for better SEO. No, Google doesn’t judge you if you have too many pictures of cats on your site, but they do care about things that make your site easy for people to use and sites that make it simple for people to find the information they’re looking for. So right here in part 2 we’ll find out how design affects the SEO of your small business website.

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Search Engine, 19th Century style: Library of Congress Card Catalog Division

SEO for Small Business Websites Part 1: Content

Search Engine Optimization (“SEO” to its friends) has been around almost as long as Search Engines, and Search Engines have been around almost as long as there has been information to search for online. The World Wide Web as we know it is a quarter century old and the Internet itself is almost old enough to join the AARP. So why is SEO still seen as a cross between witchcraft and a pyramid scheme? And where is an entrepreneur to go for good information on implementing SEO for small business websites?

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Getting the website you need for your small business should be much more fun than buying a used car.

How to Get the Website Your Small Business Needs

This isn’t backed by any hard data, but I’ll bet that if you asked artists, makers, and small business owners what the the most dreaded items on their to-do lists are, “find someone to help me get the website my business needs” would be right up there with “ask my accountant about my taxes” (or “find an accountant to ask about my taxes”).

Picking a web designer has a lot in common with buying a car: it can be a big financial commitment, the options are overwhelming, and at the end of the deal you often aren’t sure whether you got what you wanted to buy or what the person on the other side of the deal wanted to sell you. Fortunately in both cases it’s pretty easy to pick out the good guys, because they’re the ones asking you the most questions.

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You won’t need tools like this to build a great small business website.

Building your Small Business Website: DIY or Hire a Pro?

There’s a scene in the movie There’s Something About Mary that has Ben Stiller’s character picking up a hitchhiker. This hitchhiker brings with him a duffle bag that is suspiciously similar in size and shape to a human body, and a scheme to hit it big by shaving a minute off of the popular 8-minute abs workout: Seven. Minute. Abs. He is convinced that people will be falling all over each other at the chance to save a minute. And he was right: according to an unscientific Google search the fastest ab workout out there today is 2 minutes. Now we’re talking.

I promise, this is related to building small business websites.

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Choosing a web hosting provider is slightly less difficult than using this machine.

The 3 Steps to Getting the Right Website Hosting Provider for Your Business

It’s become almost a matter of faith that every business needs a website. It’s so easy, there’s really no excuse not to have one, right? I agree that the vast majority of businesses can benefit from having a presence on the internet that they control, with the tiny little stipulation that a bad website can be worse than none at all.

Your website needs to reflect the strengths, values, and unique selling proposition of your business; it needs to be kept up to date and be filled with content that is valuable to your customers; and its design needs to meet the expectations of your customers. This is beginning to sound less and less easy.

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Remember the phone book? Me Neither. Today what you need to get recognition for your business is your own domain name.

Four Ways a Website isn’t Enough: Why your Business Needs a Domain Name

There are so many ways to get your business online today that it can be easy to overlook one of the most basic, and most important things you can do to make your website work for your business: getting your own domain name.

When you can get facebook.com/yourbusiness, yourbusiness.sqaurespace.com, or yourbusiness.wordpress.com for free or for no extra charge, what makes getting www.yourbusiness.com worth it?  Continue reading “Four Ways a Website isn’t Enough: Why your Business Needs a Domain Name”…

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