(ARA) - Despite all the chatter about how the Great Recession is finally over, many small-business owners aren't feeling it yet. In fact, although the National Federation of Independent Business (www.nfib.com) reports that confidence among American business owners reached a three-year high in January, many are still cautious about hiring and spending. And if your business still seems to be on the trailing end of the much-touted recovery, you may be looking for ways to take control of your financial future this year.

As many of you might know, I have recently embarked on a new venture.

It was hard for me to make the decision to partner up again with somebody after the fiasco I have experienced with Mr. Instatech, but I finally did.  For months now, I have had talk after talk with Mai-Liis Renaud about starting a new local classifieds paper to replace the old Penny Grader.  And finally, two weeks ago, we jumped in, even though another guy, "visual ads", had been trying to do just the same.  Visual ads is bi-weekly, so we figured we'd print ours when they don't print theirs.

Times are evolving.  There is no doubt about it.  We see it everywhere.  In a world where it is now nearly impossible to pay without some sort of a plastic device, questions arise at an even faster pace than technology itself.

Web design is changing too.  It's constantly moving, evolving, transforming into something bigger, better, bolder.  As a web designer, it is extremely important to follow the trends, constantly learn and stay up to date.  As a programmer; even more so.

This morning, I went to breakfast connections, hosted monthly by the Cornwall Chamber of Commerce, Cornwall Business Enterprise Center and Community Futures Development.  It's a nice networking event, filled with opportunities to mix and mingle and make new connections.

The Guest Speaker today was Lisa from Practical Fashionista.  She was there not so much to talk about fashion, but rather on how to think outside the box when it comes to your website and social media marketing.

As I was getting my morning dose of Facebook while sipping my coffee, and navigating through the diverse messages my friends posted over the last 12 hours, a light bulb lit up and I got to thinking that perhaps, we share way too much information about ourselves on there.

I mainly use Facebook for business purposes, but like everyone, I do, once in a while, post minute details of my life.  And my husband definitely posts pictures of me where my legs show a little too much.  But what is proper or not?  Are we feeding people information that could possibly harm us?

I know, you'll be saying, "Julia, that's why there are privacy settings!".  But quite honestly, do you know, I mean REALLY KNOW, all the people that are on your friends list?  I certainly don't.  I don't know if there are people who are only there to phish for information about my whereabouts.

According to this article, published in the Global Post, police recently raided the apartment of students who "had been using Facebook to befriend classmates. They then used the information their new “friends” posted on their profiles to find out where they lived, what they owned and when they were not at home".  How about that! According to this other article, 92% of the people sharing personal information on Facebook do not really know who they are sharing it with.

Too much information can also lead to identity theft.  Someone who posts everything about himself, age, married or not, kids and other --and I am guilty of this myself -- is litteraly cracking the door open to the possibility of identity theft.

But it goes even beyond what you could imagine.  How about this one?  People using facebook and other social medias, as well as cell phones, to find pictures of keys and having doubles of the keys made from that picture.  Think that's far fetched?  Think again!  It's happening and this article explains in details how it's done.

The internet is a fun place, but if not cautious, it can become a nightmare.  So next August, when I'm going on vacation, my status update will read "Julia, at home chilling".

The single most important thing you can do to help your search rankings is figure out the right keywords to use.  This is a very difficult task as one would have to put themselves in the shoes of their target customer and narrow down the 5 or 6 most definite terms this user would search for, but keep a perspective of what can be achieved.

Let's take VersaCore Tech Designs as an example.

Thinking that I would use the term "web design" and get listed in the first 10 results would be highly unrealistic.  This term is way too broad and I'd be lost in a sea of 371,000,000 results.  So I have to narrow it down.

I have to ask myself questions such as: who is my customer, where does he or she come from, what is he or she looking for.  I have to figure out where I want to focus.  Am I going global or am I developing my local business?  I am targeting a specific category of people such as doctors or real estate people?  Businesses or Mr. Everybody?

Once we've established our target audience, we can sit down and brainstorm.  What would someone use to find VersaCore Tech Designs?  Sit in front of an open browser and start typing anything and everything you think your client might type in to find you.  In our case, these would be something like "web design Cornwall Ontario" or "hosting companies in eastern Ontario". 

Now it is important to mention that your keywords have to be pertinent to what YOU do and have to be highly relevant to your site content.  For example, if you are a donut shop in Toronto, you do not want to use "CN TOWER" as one of your keywords.  Although this might sounds appealing in theory because one would think they would bank on the amazing number of searches and traffic something like "CN TOWER" would get, the fact is that a search engine might penalize your for it.  Since your business is donuts and has nothing to do with the CN TOWER, you definitely want to stay away.

Search engines look at your site as a whole and to determine if a search term belongs to your site, it runs some tests, sort of like a DNA test, only for websites.  If nothing in the child (the search term) matches from the parent (the site), paternity DNA test fails and access to the child is denied. (In other words, you won't get results from that search term.)

Once you have selected the right terms for you, make sure that they are spread out throughout your site and repeated a few times.  If your keyword is "donut shop in Toronto", make sure your text says something like : "John's donuts is the best donut shop in Toronto.  The attention we give our customers have earned us the title "best donut shop in Toronto" for many many years".  You also want to put the search terms in your description meta tag.  Bold text, page titles and headers are also used by search engines determine the importance of the keyword, so you might want to utilise these options when available.

Have fun playing with keywords and don't forget to contact us if you need help with Search Engine Optimization!

One of the biggest mistake people make when they finally decide to hop on the world wide web is regarding email.  If you are going to invest time and money towards a web presence, you HAVE to keep up with email enquiries generated from your site.

I have seen it time and again.  Clients build the site, get good search engine rankings, but then, do not respond to their email.   Why build a site at all then?  Might as well just take that hard earn money and throw it out the window.

It is amazing the amount of people in this day and age who still only work with the phone and do not take advantage of the online opportunity.  And I'm not only talking about older people here.  I recently had a client who did everything via his cell phone.  He was in his early thirties and couldn't care less about email.  He didnt' write well and was concerned that he would come across as illiterate to potential clients when emailing, so he hid behind the phone.  Meanwhile, all the web traffic he was getting was wasted.

If you are not going to be tedious about this, then do not put an email form or your email address on the site.  Just put your phone number and write "phone enquiries only" somewhere.

You need to answer each and every email you receive.  I know, it can be time consuming, but it needs to be done in a timely manner in order to get all you can get out of your website.  I personally answer all emails within 1 hour when possible and do not  more than 6 hours elapse, unless I'm on vacation or sick.  I know this is not possible for everyone to do, so I would suggest not to let more than 24 hours go by without some sort of an answer.

When a client visits your site, that's when he is ready to buy.  If you can give him the information he's looking for right away, your chances of locking in a contract get much better.  On my site, I even have live help during office hours.  I see a potential client on my site and I want to earn his business.  Does it require a lot of work from me?  Definitely.  Does it pay off?  You bet it does!

So what are you waiting for?  Go on!  Answer those emails!

I am thrilled -- and by thrilled, I mean literally quivering or trembling because of sudden excitement or emotion -- to announce that Bing has picked me up again.

Whatever I did, whatever step, or combination of steps, have led to this, I can't be 100% sure of.  But the end result is what matters.  And the end result is that I am back in the list of millions of possible results displayed when typing "web design Cornwall Ontario" in Bing.  Not only am I back, but I'm at the top, baby!

I have worked hard over the last months and the work has finally paid off.

Being in Bing has also created a chain reaction in other search engines by boosting my ranking in them too.  For example, I was 39th in Google for the same keywords.  As of today, I am now 5th.

So what are my conclusions?

I have never, ever, experienced any problem with search rankings in the past.  I've always been able to rank in the top 5 with all the websites I've designed.  My clients are always happy with what I can deliver, and I deliver high.  Most times, my client's websites get listed by all engines within a month of launching, and rank in the top 5 for any chosen keyword.  Not performing in that area was very new to me.

I can't help it but think that because my husband owns the site versacore.info, and because versacore.info was my site 4 months ago, ranking first for the same keywords that I was targeting, Bing got confused.  It probably spidered my site and thought, "Wait a minute, we already have a versacore listed for keyword web design Cornwall Ontario.  Is this someone trying to steal this ranking?  Is this person legitimate or is this someone trying to capitalize on the real VersaCore's amazing results?"  It's a wild guess, but I think I might be on to something.

So the Bing results are great, but with Google, am I just deluding myself?

With Google's new personalized search results, I might be.  Just because I type "website design Cornwall Ontario" and see myself in the top 5 results, that does not mean that YOU will see the same thing.  I came across a very interesting video that describes how Google's Personalize Search will affect not only your search rankings, as a business, but also your search results as an individual.  It can be viewed here :

Now what does that mean for the small business owner?  Did it just kill all my chances of being found?  Only the future will tell.

Well, it's a new year, so I decided that it was time to tackle a brand new subject.  The social media experiment is still ongoing, but I'm not gonna be talking about that solely in 2010.  I realise that there are plenty of subjects that need to be addressed, and so, I will let you direct me.  Send me an email at jmlucio@versacoretechdesigns.com  and let me know what you would like to hear about.  I will do my best to address these subjects in the next few weeks.

Now on to this week's subject : Getting a website -  where do I begin.

So you've been contemplating getting a website for quite some time.  You've researched it, you've looked around at what's available in your community, but now, you're more confused than ever.  Do you go with a do-it-yourself option or do you hire someone?  Where do you register your domain name, and how?  And what about hosting?  Do I go with the cheapest option or do I need more?

Since you've never had a website, you don't really know what millions of hits a day amounts to, nor do you know what a hit truly is, so the only person you can turn to is a web designer, but be careful : not all web designers are created equal.

Web designers come in all shapes and sizes.  I will describe a few types be on the lookout for, then will give you tips on what you want to look for in a designer.

Type one: Scrooge

You have the designer who is in for the money, and lots of it.  This designer will charge an unreal amount of money to make your site, even more to maintain your site and let's not even talk about hosting.  He will make sure that you have a contract stipulating that you need to use him to do changes, will design to assure that you can't do anything on your own and will even make sure that he has control over your domain name, so if you ever decide to leave, he'll have some sort of leverage to make you stay.  Let there be no doubt about it.  There is NO REASON, in our day and age, that a basic presence on the web should cost you thousands of dollars.  And your domain name should ALWAYS be under your own name.

Type 2 : The Wannabe

This is the brother in-law or the cousin who is just toying with graphics and who doesn't know a thing beyond basic html.  He'll put you on the Internet, but nobody will ever find your site because he doesn't understand SEO and SEF.  And your site will look like it was put together by a family member.  It will be plain, boring, won't have much functionality and will be nothing more than a static ad, which is the complete opposite to what you want to achieve with a website.  Newspapers are where static ads should be.  You won't pay him much, but you'll have a hard time pulling away once you realise that this is all not working, because you won't want to hurt his feelings and create a cold front in the family.  As they always say, don't mix family and business.

Type 3 : The one-pattern guy

This guy has no variety.  He's learned to do one thing and one thing only and all the sites he's ever developed look similar.  He is a master in his programming of choice, but if you have any special request that is not boxed into the platform he uses, he won't be able to accommodate you.  You are unique and your website should be unique.  To get the attention of your visitors, especially if you reside in a small community, you want a site that won't look like all the others.  If you go with this guy, everyone will know with one glance, beyond the measure of a doubt, that he has done your site.  This guy also charges a lot of money for a simple template that he fills out for you.

Type 4 : The good designer

This is the designer that will go above and beyond to make you happy.  He will give you several options to chose from before starting on your project.  He will make sure that he explains everything to you so that you understand fully what you are getting for your money.  He will hold your hand through your decision making for platform, look, color-scheme, hosting and domain name choosing.  He won't try to hold you hostage and will design your site so if you ever leave, you won't have to start from scratch.  Another designer will be able to take over the site from where he left off.  He know programing and can get your great results in search engines.  Whatever you want, he can make happen.  I like to think of myself as being part of this last category.

Now, what should you look for or what should you ask when hiring a web designer?

1- Experience.
Don't take someone straight out of school.  Theory is good, but there is nothing like practice.  Ask for a minimum of 2 years experience.

2- Ask to see their portfolio.
You can then assess for yourself if you like what they have done in the past, if every site is too similar, if they have limited functionality.

3- Find out what you are paying for.
Are you getting a website created from scratch according to your specifications or are you getting a simple modified template?  Are they using a content management system (cms) or are they custom building your applications?  Are they employing simple html or are they also making sure that css, xml and seo are coded correctly?  These are all important questions.  A content management system is not something that should cost you thousands of dollars and basic HTML should cost somewhere around 25$ a page, so make sure you are not overpaying.

4- Don't be shy.  Ask questions.
Web designers know that this is all very technical for the average person and won't ever have a problem with you wanting clarifications.  If they do get annoyed with you asking questions, it's a sure hint that something is not kosher with their ways.

5- Get referrals
if you can, call some of the companies the designer has worked for and ask for a recommendation.

Conclusion

If you're up to it, ask for a site that you can update. This will save you money in the long run.  It will also insure that you can modify what you want when you want, regardless of if your designer is available or not.  You won't have to rely on a third party to change the text of your pages.

It is simpler to get a designer that can provide all the Internet services under one roof.  Like that, you don't have to go anywhere else for basic services that should, in my opinion, be provided when you pay for web design.  It also helps to limit confusion.  Since a website comprises of the domain name registration, the web hosting, the design and maintenance of the site itself, and the search engine optimization and submission, it will greatly help you to get only one bill.  Scam companies sometimes get information from a domain name registrant (YOU) and try to fool them into paying false invoices.  If you receive something you're unsure of and are dealing with one person only, you can always call your designer and enquire about it.  They will tell you if it's legitimate or not.

Most of all shop around.  There are many good people out there.  You want to find someone that you know you will trust with your new baby.  We all have different personalities and it's important to find someone who can connect with you and will listen to your needs.

Don't forget to email me at jmlucio@versacoretechdesigns.com if you have any questions.

See you next week!

Seriously!

What is wrong with this Bing Thing?

I've spent countless hours recently reading anything and everything I could get my hands on in order to optimize my site for Bing.  I have joined the Bing Webmaster Center, have changed the way my meta tags work, have run my site through the w3 validator and tried to fix all the mistakes therein, but still, my site does not appear anywhere in the first tens of thousands of pages for my selected keywords.  With all the other search engines, no problemo!  But with Bing, no decent results.  I am indexed, but nowhere to be found.

Now, I have spent most of the day today checking and rechecking my settings and found, through trial and error, a few things that may, or may not, have gotten me off the chart, and I don't mean that in a positive manner.

1 - I had some invalid html markup in the main page due to a component that I was using, and which caused the page to load improperly.

2 - Since this site is fairly new, I don't have a lot of high ranking backlinks pointing to it yet, and most of the ones I do have, have not been picked up yet.

3-  My server had a problem this week and my sitemap had disappeared.

4 - Only my main page is indexed.

As for the social media thing, I've restarted advertising with Facebook.  I'll let you know next week how that is doing.

With print media, the Penny Trader has brought me nothing, nada, zip.  Not one phone call.

I have spend a lot of time networking in person this past week.  On Wednesday morning, I attended Breakfast Connections, On Wednesday night, I attended a dinner and my child's school.  Now that might sound irrelevant to you, but any social event is an opportunity to network.  You never know who you are going to meet and as a matter of fact, I ended up giving my card to someone at that dinner. 

On Thursday night was the Women Entrepreneurs Christmas dinner and then finally, Friday morning, I showed up at 6:45 at the Team Cornwall year in review where I had the joy to see my work presented center stage during a slide show.  Some of the new businesses that opened during 2009 in Cornwall were featured and Steward Bags was one of them.  Josée Lemieux-Bailey and her hubby were posing standing in front of the banners that I had designed for them back in September.  Nevermind the fact that not one soul in the room knew it was my work.  I knew it was my work!  And it felt good.  These banners can be viewed in my portfolio.

Traffic wise, my site received 56 Unique Visitors this week, mostly coming from google.  Second in line was direct access and third, Facebook. I haven't worked with twitter or linkedin much last week, so nothing from there.

This week's conclusion?  Well, I'm not too sure.  I think as small business owners, word of mouth is still our best ally. 

If I don't get to write again before Christmas, I  wish you all a wonderful holiday and a happy, prosperous new year.

Since I've started this experiment, my search ranking have slightly improved, but not nearly as much as I anticipated.  By now, I thought that I would be way up there for my chosen keywords.  I am doing fine with most of them, but the keyword "web design Cornwall Ontario" is giving me a hard time, ranking only at position 39 in Google as of today.   To be honest though, I haven't spent all the time I should have spent on it.

I have learned some interesting things though, about what to do and not to do for good rankings.

After the launch of this new version of the site, along with the new domain, which basically means I am starting from scratch for the rankings, I was picked up by all the engines, including bing.  Bing, however, dropped me withing a week.  I was nowhere to be found.  My mistake?  Bing didn't like the live help script I was using as a module on my site.

It is very important to run your site into a html / xhtml validator, such as the one found at http://validator.w3.org/, in order to see if there is anything major preventing your site from showing high in the rankings, or worse, not showing at all.

After fixing all the problems that were on here, I am finally back in Bing, but rankings are very low at the moment.  In a few weeks though, I'll be back at the top.

Now, some of you might have heard that Google will release their new and improved version of Google (codename: caffeine), shortly after the holidays.  That means a lot of work for professionals out there who specialize in SEO.  That also mean that the old rules of positioning no longer apply. According to Ben Parr, from mashable.com, the new Google will rely more on Keywords, which is a good thing for relevancy, but not so good for rankings.  For the WebMaster, it simply means reinvention of the wheel.  What is good though, is that the new google will be much faster to index sites as it will greatly aim at bringing you temporal relevancy.  But that also means that sites will have to work harder to stay on top as temporal relevant articles will appear first.  Therefore, your Social Media sites will be taking a whole new importance in obtaining good rankings.  How so?  Because they are constantly updated.  I guess we'll know for sure sometime in January.

Now, here are the stats for this week.

Since December first, I've had 271 visits with 159 Unique Visitors.  45% of traffic came from search engines and various keywords.  10% came from Facebook.  30% was people coming to my site either directly or from and email. 15% came from a search to my blog.

I think that 159 unique visitors in a week is a huge improvement considering that I received 121 unique visitors for the whole month of November.

Can't wait to see the next update!

A quick look at my website statistics this morning revealed that the Social Media craze is starting to be effective.

So far, for the month of November, 70 unique visitors have browsed through my site.  As opposed to last week, this week, 7 visitors came from Facebook. None came from the other Social Networking sites.  The rest of the traffic came either from direct searches or from clients I have sent to the site.

Now, this is not to say that people are not "SEEING" what I post on the sites.  They are just not necessarily CLICKING on the links.  But it's fine.  They are seeing me nonetheless.  Business is booming.

This week alone, I've signed up 3 more web design customers, one banner order and received several inquiries for print.  This beats sitting in front of a phone who is just not ringing.  And that means that something is working.

The fact that people are contacting me is proof that visibility is key to building a good trustworthy brand name.  Of course, word of mouth is a powerful tool as well. (Thank you Theresa!)

It will be interesting to see how this upcoming week turns out as I am investing in more direct marketing.  I am starting a four week trial run with the new pennytrader.ca local classified paper and I have hired The Sign Factory to make my car truly recognizable.  I will include a poll on my website to try and find out where people saw my name and benchmark the results.

As far as expanding my friends list on Facebook, I have been just too busy this week to even start looking around.  If you want to share your friends, be my guest!  Let them know about "VersaCore Tech Designs" group page, and tell them to join!

Make sure to read the following article titled "How You Use Social Media Can Kill Your Business".  It is an excellent read and exempliflies very accurately how Social Networking has changed the face of online (and offline) interactions.

IF you have any comments of my posts, please send me an email at jmlucio@versacoretechdesigns.com.  I would love to hear from you.

See you next week!

A week has elapsed already.  And a busy one, It has been.

I've been very actively posting to my Facebook, Linkedin, twitter, blogs and message boards, even Kijiji and Craig list.  What are my results so far?

Well, as far as ranking in search engines is concerned, if you type "versacore tech designs" in Google or Yahoo, you will see that a wide variety or social networking sites do show up within the first 20 results.  Does that mean I got more traffic to my website?  So far, I'm afraid not.

Out of 52 unique visitors, 13 came from a google search (such as web design Cornwall, for example), 6 came from websites of associations I belong to (such as Women Entrepreneurs)  and the rest, all 33 of them, resulted from direct marketing (such as business cards).

So far, nobody clicked on a link to my site from within Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter.  So far, no one clicked on an ad from Kijiji or Craiglist.  So far, no living soul came from an external forum or blog.

What does that mean exactly?  The results are there!  I am at the top of the lists!  If Google is finding me, people should theoretically find me on Facebook and others, right?  Wrong!

It is one thing to type your business name in the search engines and find yourself, but it's a different thing to use social medias and expect someone on Facebook to find you.  I need to work on getting more friends, more fans, more followers.  I need to actively make my business visible to other Cornwallites on Facebook, twitter, linkedin.  I need to post in Facebook groups, I need to tweet and retweet, I need to hook up with important business people.  And THAT, will be my homework for the week.

I would like to mention one interesting fact before I go.  Although traffic to my site has not increased, other sites are now picking up on me.  For example, http://www.zoominfo.com, has me listed and I didn't fill in a form or registered.   I think this whole thing will be sort of like a snowball effect.  At some point, the ball will be unstoppable.

On that note, I bid you a good week.  See you next week, same place, same time.

Social Networking.  That's all we hear about lately.

It's the buzz word and it's on everybody's lips.  Everyone is talking about it and about how it can do wonders for your businesses.  But nobody is telling us how to go about it.

I personally have been using Social Networking for a while now.  But I was a recreational user, utilizing it solely to keep in touch with family and friends rather than for business.  I did have a Facebook group for my business, but never really maintained it and / or saw the benefits of it.  Only recently have I seriously made the switch over.

This happened after I googled my company and noticed that one of the first results appearing was my Facebook group!  That got me thinking.  Sure, I already had great results as my business showed up first in Google when typing the words "web design cornwall ontario", but what would the effect be if, say, the first 10 results would mention VersaCore Tech Designs rather then my competition... What boost it would give my business!  That would definitely take it to the next level!  So I fully embarked on the venture.

First, I setup my Facebook account to be used more for business and revamped my fan page.  Then, I setup my twitter, linkedin, even youtube accounts and decided to keep track of my results in a blog, which you are presently reading.  I was selective on which Social Networking sites I was going to use as I do not want my business to end up being the laughing stock of the town.  MySpace and friendster, for example, were big no-nos.

I also thought about using kijiji or craiglist to help my case, so I started posting ads, free ads, on those two sites.  And I promised myself that I would spend at least 30 minutes a day keeping everything up to date (I'll share a wonderful tip to do so with you in the upcoming blogs).

So far, the results are good.  I know that it will take a bit of time to truly start showing results, real results, but I'm confident.  The point, after all, is to get a greater visibility, right?  And right now, I'm everywhere!

See you next time!

Hello there.

Welcome to your new blog

Every week, this is where we will give you valuable information on how to improve the overall performance of your website.  Stay tuned...