Thanks for visiting again, why not get my Blog updates via Twitter?
Thanks! Eoin

As the first step in my Internet Business Builder project, I just published my First eBook, “Google Adwords Demystified – what they are & why you should use them” …. Google Adwords Demystified for short.
It’s an Adwords basics eBook, suitable for anyone that wants to get to grips with what Google Adwords are and why you should use them.
You can get the eBook from this page.

This eBook is also pre-launching a new website, which will be my Internet Business Builder web site. You will see the URL for the site in the footer of the eBook pages.

There is far too much conflicting and downright wrong information about what you need to do, to make the Internet side of your business successful. My Internet Business Builder Project aims to help small business owners learn what they need to know to build the Internet side of their business the right way.

This is all to come in October, so keep a eye on my Blog, or sign-up for updates.

Also, I’d appreciate it if you could use the “Please Share This Blog Post ” icons below to share this blog post of Twitter, Facebook etc., or maybe just e-Mail this pages URL to a friend.

Thanks

Eoin

My two main “Pet Hates” at the moment are Static Websites and phone book type Online Directories.

The whole point of setting up business On-line, is to make sales for your business.

Taking that in to consideration, here I go …

Static Websites

A Static Website also called the Brochure website, consists of a number of web pages, and needs to be developed and designed by a professional.
Unless you understand HTML, it’s very difficult to add pages to this type of web site yourself.

For small business owners, in my opinion, a Static website on it’s own, is a waste of money, because more than likely, only people that know what your website address is, will visit your website.

Why?

Because in the majority of cases, Static Websites do not do well at getting a good ranking in the Search Engines.

Most of your potential customers/clients won’t know your website address, so if they also can’t see you when they search in the Search Engines, your website will just gather virtual dust.

A CMS Based website, (CMS stands for Content Management System) is far better.

It can be used as it is, if your budget is non existent, but it can be developed and designed by a professional to make it look good.

This type of website basically allows you to add more pages to your website later, without understanding HTML and some are very good at getting listed in Google.

In my opinion, by far the best CMS to use for a small business owner is Wordpress, if it is done correctly.

Phone book type Online Directories

Basically, in order to get people that would be interested in what you have to offer, to visit your web site, you need to go where the people are Online.

One of the latest trends is Online “Phone Book” type Business Directories that you need to pay to get a listing in.
There are thousands on the Internet and even in Ireland there are more than you would expect.

I’ve been on the Internet since 1994, so I’ve seen everything and I can tell you for a fact that 90% of these are a waste of money.

Why?

The majority of them will send no visitors to your website.

The main decider as to what you should spend your money on for anything Marketing related is, and always should be …
“Will you get visitors to your web site?” and if it’s a Yes,
“Was it worth the money you spent getting them?”

I use Google Analytics on all my website and my clients websites and in case you don’t know, this allows you to see where visitors to your website came from.

I have seldom seen a Business Directory in the recorded data, with one notable exception and that is ShopIn.ie.

ShopIn.ie has a list of 25 things that you can do with your paid ShopIn.ie listing to get more business, which includes plenty of things ShopIn.ie will do for you.

Yes, ShopIn.ie are going to actively bring people to their website, in fact they have gone as far as to state that your money is used to Promote you.

Interesting concept … you pay for a listing and they pool part of that fee to promote you.

So before you spend your hard earned money on a listing in an Online Business Directory, ask yourself “What am I getting?”

What do YOU think?

Leave me a comment.

I read a Tweet from Murray Newlands today about adding your Blog to Kindle and I took a look.

The process was fairly easy, so I’m going to do a quick video to show you and I’ll post it here.

If you want to try it yourself, go to http://kindlepublishing.amazon.com

Yes, swine flu and natural treatments can teach you SEO Basics …. well, to be precise …  the phrase “swine flu and natural treatments” can.

This post is a continuation of a forum post in the Irish Business Women’s forum, where I saw a  post about a member ranking number 1 for the phrase “swine flu and natural treatments”

In the forum post, I didn’t correctly show the point I was trying to get across, as I was distracted, I was in the middle to finishing up work for the long weekend, so I decided to do it here.

The point I was trying to make is that, being first for any keyword or keyword phrase in Google.ie is not necessarily a sign of good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This is because getting to number 1 in Google is partially based on how many other websites also have pages for that Keyword.

In the case of the keywords, “swine flu natural treatment”, when I wrote that forum post, no other Irish web site was using the words “swine flu natural treatment” … so if your web page was about “swine flu natural treatment” and you have used basic SEO principles …. you have to show up first in Google.ie.
Here is a screen capture from the day of the forum post.

The phrase swine flu and natural treatments on May 1st

If you look at the text in Blue, you can see, the listing for www.naturesnexus.org is the only listing with “swine flu natural treatment” in the Title text.

You can learn a little SEO from this, by understanding that in order to rank high in any search engine, you need to look at how many competitive pages are in that search engine, for the keyword you want to rank for.

If there are 200,000 competing pages, you will have a slow, difficult job … if there are only 100, then your job is easier … so pick your fights carefully, go for low hanging fruit first.

In this case, the Title of the page was targeting “swine flu natural treatment”, so with no other competing pages, if someone typed in “swine flu natural treatment” into Google in Ireland, this web site would show up first.

To prove my point, I posted a message in the the Irish Business Women’s forum, about this topic, using some basic SEO.
This is a fourm that I have no control over, so getting listed in Google was going to be based on the content of my post and the fact that there was only one page competing against me for the phrase “swine flu natural treatment”.

Here is the result today, May 5th.

The phrase swine flu and natural treatments on May 5th

As you can see, my post is number two, so using the same principles that made the first post go to Number 1, got my post to number 2.

Just to be clear, I am in no way saying that the member that wrote the article for www.naturesnexus.org was bad at SEO, in fact I think it was an excellent example of how to write articles, using SEO to get traffic.

The Author saw an opportunity to contribute to a worldwide discussion on Swine Flu, I’m guessing that she did keyword research and also found the phrase “swine flu natural treatment” had very few competing web pages and then she wrote an interesting article about Swine Flu, using SEO, to make sure it got listed.

That’s how to do it, pick the low hanging fruit.

So here is what this can teach you about SEO basics.

If a phrase  has very few competing web pages in Google, your Title is very important.

Of course, it aslo shows that no matter how many competing web pages there are in Google for a keyword you want to get ranked highly ranked for, make sure you get your Title right.

So for every web page, article or blog post you want to write.

• Do keyword research to find out what people are looking for in Google.
• Take a look at the number of competing pages and look for a phrase that has very few competing web pages in Google.
• Write an interesting article or web page.
• Use basic SEO