Why did I write this?

I’m guessing you probably don’t want to spend hours researching, tweaking and testing the hundreds of different SEO techniques that are talked about these days. The truth is that most of them only have a tiny impact (if any) on your search position. If you’re a smart small business website owner, then you’ll probably just want to target the most important factors, and then move on to creating some more content.

After reading the guide, you might feel that some factors have been left out. Feel free to contact me to chat about these, why they aren’t included and what you should do about them.

Or, put another way, how much would you pay?

This isn’t a test, just something to think about. If your answer is ‘nothing’ and you use Twitter to market your small business website, then read on…

Hopefully you already have lots of followers and they read and retweet your tweets (if you’re not sure about this then it’s time to start measuring these). A percentage of these people should turn into leads by direct messaging you or by visiting your website and triggering your conversion goals (again, if this concept is confusing, by all means ask for help)

How valuable are those Twitter leads? If you lost those leads what would that cost your business?

So now how much would you pay for Twitter? The sensible answer here would have to be ‘less than the value of the leads it brings you’ – but definitely more than nothing.

Again, this isn’t a test, but it is intended to help you think about whether you’re getting real value from Twitter as a marketing channel for your website. If after all these questions you still think it’s worthless then it might be worth re-thinking your tweeting (or your tracking, or your website and products).

PS. I wonder how many people out of the 0% used Twitter actively for business promotion?

More interesting articles:

Squeeze Your Twitter Lists

Are Your Tweets Search-Engine Friendly?

Link shorteners like bit.ly are great because (a) they let you fit long links into the tiny space allowed for Twitter updates and (b) most services allow you to track clicks on the links, giving you valuable insight into who’s interested in your updates. I wrote about shorteners in a recent infinite42 newsletter.

Until now, you had to go to an external service to do this if you were using Twitter direct – not a huge problem, but every step counts in the social marketing game, so I like this update.  Many Twitter client tools have their own shorteners already, so Twitter is really just filling an obvious gap in their product.

In this new guide, Squeeze Your Twitter Lists, I’ll show you how to create lists on Twitter, promote them and then squeeze the most out of them in terms of followers and value.

This is a free download and I hope you’ll read the guide and share it with a fellow owner of a small business website.

Twitter lists are a powerful new way to focus your life on Twitter, which has to be a good thing.

To download, just click on the image. To download and save, just right-click and select ‘Save As’.

What this means for your small business website is that your customers are probably (*) spending a decent slice of their time searching for stuff (hopefully your stuff) on Twitter, rather than the traditional search engines.

So -  it’s important to keep your tweets as search-friendly as possible. This comes down to using keywords in your tweets and tweeting often about useful stuff.

Drilling down into the numbers a bit, it seems that a lot of the searches are not done at Twitter at all but by Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic. There’s also a decent number of searches from widgets on web pages that do continuous search of keywords, users, and so on. This doesn’t change things though and it’s definitely time to start thinking about how search-friendly your tweets are.

(*) Of course your customers may not be on Twitter at all!

So it’s probably a good time to start checking your site speed now and plan any improvements that you’ll need to make.

To get you going, here are a few links to try out:

The Site Performance Tab on  Google Webmaster Tools

Try out the Page Speed extension for Firefox

Definitely look at Web Performance Best Practices at Google!

How fast is your site?

Should you integrate a blog into your small business website or use a standalone blog site? Does it matter? Which one is best for visitors, or branding, or SEO?

It’s a good question, but probably misses the most important issue, which is whether to blog (or not). In my opinion, it’s one of the most useful things you can do for your small business, since it’s great for connecting with customers, sharing info, getting feedback, getting ideas straight in your head, and so on. So whether you choose to integrate your blog or not, your priority should really be to just get started.

So what’s an integrated blog anyway? It just a section of your website where your blog appears. It’s probably under the same URL as your main site, and possibly under a separate directory such as www.yoursite.com/blog (I’d recommend that – see later). You can integrate your own blog pretty easily using open source platforms like wordpress or moveable type.

The alternative to this is to run a separate blog site, possibly using a hosted blogging solution such as wordpress.com or blogger. The great thing about these are that they are really easy to set up and get going. You can customize them too using standard templates.

So how do you decide whether to integrate? Instead of making up your mind for you, here are some things to consider:

1. Either way, the main thing to focus on is whether visitors see a common theme/brand/message between the blog and your main website. If that means the blog is part of the main site, then good!

2. Can a hosted blog be customized to look the same as your main site (or at least very close?)

3. If you use an integrated blog, such as wordpress.org, it’s good to keep this in a separate section or directory, so it’s 100% clear to readers that they are reading a blog

4. Which is best for SEO? I don’t think it makes much difference (see the PS. at the bottom)

5. With a separately-hosted blog you’ve got two sites to promote, instead of one. That’s twice the amount of link-building and socializing to do. This isn’t completely black and white though, since you can (and should)  interlink the two sites.

6. Do you think your readers would benefit from finding all your content in one place (blog, main home page, product pages, about me and personal info, info pages, etc)?

So having read through these points, which would you choose for your website and blog?

PS. I’d be careful about getting too hung up on blogs for SEO. The value of a blog post for Page Rank (etc) is very low on it’s own, so it won’t contribute much to your overall site ranking unless it has a lot of inbound links. Unless you’re a high profile blogger, you’re probably not going to attract too many links to each post. Of course if you get your niche & keywords right then you certainly can attract plenty of keyword traffic through your blog. I’ve seen many sites that are only blogs and they catch a lot of Google traffic.

Image credit: dorineruter

I wrote the Squeeze Guide as a high level introduction of the things that you need to do to make your website successful. You can download it here for free just by clicking on the picture.

I hope you’ll find it useful. If you do, please share it with a friend who owns a website. Don’t forget to save your copy when you’ve downloaded it (just use File -> Save As in your PDF reader).

I hate spam as much as everyone else and will not share your contact info with anyone else.

To get you hungry for news, here are some examples of recent topics I’ve covered:

Really Easy Content Creation

All about posterous.com

Keep Hackers Out of Your Blog

Protect your wordpress installation

Be the First Fan on My Facebook Page…

I’m afraid you missed the chance!!