One of the major factors in how well your website performs in search results is based on something that few people know about and even less understand. This trade secret is called “PageRank”. I don’t profess to being an expert in the area of SEO, but I am in the top percentile when it comes to SEO knowledge and even I don’t truly understand the real details behind how it works. I guess only a few people who work for Google do. Despite this I will try to explain what this mystical website talisman is and how you can harness its power.

Firstly, PageRank (the lack of a space between the words is intentional) does NOT simply mean the position of your website in search results. It does ultimately influence this, but to boil it down to such a simplistic analogy is like trying to describe the size of the universe as “really, really big”. 

Why is it called PageRank? Well the “Page” part comes from its creator’s surname, Larry Page (one of the co-founders of Google), who created the algorithm/formula in 1998. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it is the cornerstone of how the Google search engine ranks websites against each other.

So what is PageRank, or PR for short? It’s a score from 0 to 10, given to a website by Google. Realistically most SME businesses should never expect to achieve higher than 6. Only large multi-national corporate brands are able to achieve higher and only the rare few are given 10 out of 10 (two of those being Facebook and Twitter). So as a small or medium sized business owner you should expect to score anywhere from 0 to 6.

PageRank was created to solve an issue of trust in search results. Prior to Google, search engines used different methods to rank results and some even took payments to prioritise rankings. This made web surfers mistrustful of the results they saw. Larry Page’s approach provided a better way of delivering ranked results by using this element of trust in his formula. 

PageRank uses many factors to build up this 0 to 10 “trust” rating for each website. It uses a number of factors to basically build up a picture, or profile, of the site in question. The more factors that apply to your website the more trust Google has in your site and the higher the score. The factors include the following (this is just a summary, click the link to read the full What Is PageRank SEO Article):

• The number of websites that link to the site (especially other high PageRank sites that link to it)
• The quality and relevance of the content on the site
• The overall age of the domain
• The volume of traffic to your website
• The number of pages
• The quality of the SEO (search engine optimisation)

In summary, PageRank is a reflection of the effort you put into a website and conversely a high PR score delivers better results in searches. After all this you might be wondering how you can check the PR score of your website. It’s quite easy. You can either visit a PR checker site such as this PageRank Checker site and type in your website address. It will then return the PR score. Alternatively you can add a PR tool directly into your browser:

For Google Chrome visit this page

For Internet Explorer & Firefox visit this page

Click the link to read the full What Is PageRank SEO Article

I have just finished writing the fourth website requirements document for as many clients in just a few weeks and am amazed by how important these documents are to the success of the overall web development process for both the client and the developer. While some websites are quite straightforward and require little more than the ability to change the content, other sites can be quite complex. Whether you are a large company or SME, if the website you want falls into the complex category (i.e., e-commerce, customer back end access, multiple levels of content management), then you want to be sure that the web developer you hire creates a requirements document that you can review together before they start to build the site. 

A requirements document is intended to ‘protect’ both you and the developer. The last thing you want is an invoice for work that you didn’t approve or a website that has features you didn’t request. A requirements document will help to avoid these ‘surprises’ by clearly articulating all of the elements you and the developer have agreed to for the website.

From the developer’s perspective, the document is intended to avoid what we call ‘mission creep’. Mission creep refers to additional requests made by clients after they have signed off on a project. The problem with mission creep is that it affects both the timeline to develop the site as well as the total development costs. At the end of the day, we want our clients to be satisfied on multiple levels: timeframe for a site to go live, cost and end result. 

What should you look for in a requirements document? 

Click on the link to read the complete marketing article.  

In the old days you had to spend money on marketing your business in order to have people find you. Therefore, by definition, your success was almost directly tied to brand recognition. Think about the Yellow Pages (Golden Pages in Ireland). In its heyday you open it up to find a specific company and you would be hit by full-page ads. You would flick through page after page of full page ads and then the half-page ads would appear, followed by the quarter-page and then the line listings. The bigger ads would typically get the most calls, but they would also be the most expensive. It wasn’t unheard of for companies to hand over €20,000 or more for one ad!

Then Google came along and something interesting began to happen. Slowly at first and then with increasing frequency Google’s search rank began to replace the need for us to buy from recognised companies. In other words, Google’s search rank became a de facto brand identity for unknown brands.

You might disagree with me and in some instances you’d be right to. However, the fact remains that these days most start-up businesses will spend more on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) than they do on brand marketing. Obviously the ideal is to have a well recognised brand backed by a first place, or at least first page, rank in search results. When you look at the Google search results, the listings are all the same. You might be on the same page as a major brand and visually you are both on a par. The Yellow pages approach of “bigger is better” is meaningless in Google’s listings. So, the question is ‘can having a good search ranking can be more valuable in this “search-engine” age than brand?’

Click on the link to read the complete marketing article.  

I was just listening to the radio and came across a business discussion in which a branding expert was talking about marketing. I know the guy and he is a very knowledgeable and eloquent speaker. He was talking about how important perfection is in marketing. The importance of focusing on fonts and not using lots of them or choosing and sticking to a specific colour or colours for your branding, etc. Everything he said was correct but as he spoke, something struck me like never before.

Marketing is like a million-piece jigsaw and most people think that to be successful in business you need to finish the whole jigsaw.

The fact is that “finishing the jigsaw” is only possible for large corporate companies with hundreds of staff and huge budgets and even then they rarely get beyond the 900 thousandth piece! The reality for the rest of us is that we have to make do with completing a fraction of the jigsaw. So how can SMEs be successful without completing the jigsaw? Quite easily actually - stop worrying about the whole picture!

Just like a jigsaw, marketing is about the pieces. But each form of marketing is not a single piece, but a cluster of pieces that make up a small part of the picture. Therefore, don’t worry about the million pieces and simply focus on the 50 pieces that make up one recognisable part of the whole picture…

This is just a small portion of the Marketing Article on our main website.

If you are thinking of starting a business or a new service within an existing business, it is extremely easy to get carried away in the moment. Everyone knows that you start with a business plan, but that might just be your first and quite fatal mistake. As you write your plan a strange thing happens; you start to believe your own hype! It is easily done, everything sounds so plausible and the numbers you include in your forecasts and projections seem easily achievable.

Of course we also know that research is a big part of writing a business plan, but few people at this stage truly ”listen” to what the research tells them. They want the answers to be what they want to hear and that’s a very dangerous thing. Before they know it they have spent tens of thousands on a business that never had a chance!

The answer to this dilemma is four-fold:

1) You need to gather as much information as possible. Look at every possible angle, from target market to price points, competition and need.

2) Don’t dismiss any data that contradicts your belief in this new venture. 

3) Take all positive data with a pinch of salt. Be your own hardest critic and don’t accept data at face value. 

4) TAKE YOUR TIME! Don’t rush this process, it takes time to cover your bases, but you will literally pay the price if you rush ahead.

In summary, you may find that the data dissuades you from going beyond business plan stage, but don’t see that as a failure - you just saved yourself a ton of money and heartache!

This is just a short summary of the main New Business Research article on our main website.

Innovation is amazing! Just when you thought allowing people to find your business and contact you couldn’t get any easier, along comes a new innovation that makes it easier again.

Take QR Codes for example. They were invented in 1994 by a Japanese company(Denso-Wave) and like so many technologies now used for marketing businesses, QR Codes were originally used for tracking car parts through the manufacturing process. There’s a good reason for their initial use and it’s in the name – “Quick Response Codes”. They were designed to allow equipment to read them faster than traditional bar codes; a very important requirement in a manufacturing environment where time is money.

Fast forward about 15 years and some bright spark realised that these clever little codes could be used for marketing purposes because now literally everyone can have a QR code reader in their hands. No, I don’t mean that we would all walk around with those supermarket checkout readers in our pockets. QR Codes don’t need lasers to read them, just a simple camera – just like the cameras now built into virtually every mobile phone.

So the hardware problem was solved but you still needed QR code reading software and that problem was solved with the introduction of the IPhone and other smart phones. If you have one of these devices you can now download a free QR code reader app and once installed, you are free to scan every QR code you see!

Are you still with me? Because this entire preamble was important in setting the scene…

Read The Full QR Code Article Here

I think every business owner would agree that it is far more pleasurable picking up the phone to someone who wants to do business with you than it is to make a phone call to try and convince someone to do business with you. It sounds like Nirvana to have customers ring you and say the magic words “can you help me with…” or “can you provide me with…”, etc. But actually it’s not impossible, it just takes thought, time, effort and in some cases a little money (but not as much as traditional marketing).

We all know what Pursuit Marketing is even if we’ve never heard of it before. You sell widgets, so you decide to run an ad to promote them. Being a smart business owner, you create a great design and include a compelling message plus an attractive offer. But here’s the problem; The vast majority of people who see the ad are not interested in buying widgets that day and the reader of the ad who is interested doesn’t know you and so doesn’t trust you. So even if he/she calls about the ad, you still have to “sell” to them! In short, pursuit marketing is every form of marketing and selling that pushes your services/products without giving knowledge or trying to build rapport and trust.

So in simple terms, attraction marketing is the exact opposite. Forget about directly promoting your products/services, forget about selling and simply focus on building trust and getting your customers to know and like you. The web is the easiest platform for attraction marketing, with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Blogging and E-Zines, you have plenty of opportunities to “connect” with your customer-base. But attraction marketing can easily apply to our everyday, offline world too.

Read the rest of the article and find out why you should implement Attraction Marketing and how.

If I had a Euro for every time I found spelling mistakes on a website, in a brochure or on a leaflet I wouldn’t be a millionaire, but I would certainly be a lot more comfortable. Unfortunately until the government creates the ‘Department of Literacy & Spelling’ I will have to make do with tutting.

However on a serious note, bad spelling is a real turn-off for many potential clients. Perhaps you don’t think it’s important, but according to research conducted in the UK by The Royal Mail (in 2005) an estimated £41Bn in sales was lost to businesses due to poor spelling, punctuation and grammar. It further showed that nearly three-quarters of all customers (74 per cent) said they wouldn’t trust businesses that used poor spelling or grammar, whilst almost a third (30 per cent) said they wouldn’t buy any product or service from them.

Anecdotally I hear the same message time and again from people I speak to; if they see serious spelling mistakes in company websites they leave. So if you don’t think good spelling and grammar is important, you are most definitely in the minority.

So why do so many mistakes end up in text? Well we all learn to read and write in school, so many people think that qualifies them to write their own content. A typical business owner has never had any graphic design tuition and would therefore not design his/her own brochure and is happy to pay a premium to someone who can deliver a quality design. However, since we all learned to read and write early in life we all somehow feel qualified to deliver content.

By the way, I am not suggesting that you should hire a copywriter for everything, most people can handle simple enough product/service descriptions, but if you know that writing is not your strong point, or you are contemplating a major web or print project, get a professional - or it could cost you more in lost sales.

Read the full article here and see examples of typical spelling and grammatical errors made on websites and in brochures every day!

Presenting at the Chamber of Commerce Event

I’m speaking at the Ratoath Chamber Of Commerce event tomorrow on Social Media - So much to cover, so little time! Find out more at http://alinkto.me/f9y