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Lessons from Silicon Valley

If you look at the Inc 500 Fastest Growing Companies, a large proportion of them are Internet- or Information Technology-based  companies.  Never in history have so many people become so extraordinarily wealthy from a single industry. 

The IT industry, and in particular, the Internet has created such an incredible vehicle for reaching such a massive and growing audience that those few who can and have figured out how to unleash the secret formula have made themselves, and their partners (and investors) unfathomably wealthy.

Internet billionaires (and celebrities)

Certainly, there are the obvious success stories like:

• Bill Gates (Microsoft)
• Steve Jobs (Apple)
• Steve Case (AOL)
• Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google)
• Jerry Yang (Yahoo!)
• Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
• Jeff Bezoz (Amazon.com). 

In addition, there are hundreds of equally wealthy but less famous (less celebrity-like) founders and co-founders such as:

• Peter Thiel (PayPal)
• Elon Musk (PayPal)
• Max Levchin (PayPal)
• Chris Hughes (Facebook)
• David Filo (Yahoo!)
• Pierre Omidyar (eBay)
• Craig Newmark (Craig’s List)
• Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook)
• Divya Narendra (classmate of Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook)
• Tyler and Cameron Winklevos (classmates of Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook)
• Andy Bechtolsheim (Sun Microsystems, early Google investor)
• Jawed Karim (YouTube)
• Steve Chen (YouTube)
• Chad Hurley (YouTube)
• Marc Andreessen (Netscape, Ning, Opsware)
• Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail)
• Jack Smith (Hotmail)
• Biz Stone (Twitter)
• Jack Dorsey (Twitter)
• Evan Williams (Twitter)
• Richard Rosenblatt (Demand Media, iMALL, Intermix, MySpace)
• Joshua Schachter (Delicous)
• Tom Anderson (MySpace)
• Chris DeWolfe (MySpace)
• Caterina Fake (Flickr)

This list goes on … and on.

What do these people and their creations have in common?  What lessons can be learned from their success … and their mistakes?  Is it possible to reverse engineer these case studies and create a formula or common set of elements that can be a predictor of success?  How do you create a winning website that will take off like a rocket?

The secret formula of success

Sorry to disappoint, but there is no secret formula.  Or, if there is … it’s still a secret.  But, thanks to the help of a few observations and some great authors (and their books), the list that follows may be a guide to building successful web applications.

The following tips, concepts and lessons come from:

1. Guy Kawasaki, The Art of the Start
2. Adam Penenberg, Viral Loop
3. Malcom Gladwell, The Tipping Point

    

Common elements of highly successful companies

Driven by personal need.  Great companies are often started because of a personal need of a founder or co-founder because he or she has not been able to find a satisfactory solution elsewhere.  In other words, an unmet need exists and this is substantiated by the founder’s personal experience.  

• Hotmail founders, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, created a web-based e-mail application so they could conspire, while at work, a new web application.  They did not want their employer to be able to trace their e-mails, so they created the foundation for hotmail in order to send e-mails privately and securely.
• Hot or Not founders, James Hong and Jim Young, conceived Hot or Not during a drunken debate over Young’s argument that a women he met at a party was a perfect 10.  Hot or Not became a social media site where people could submit and vote on women.
• eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar, created an online auction site after placing an order through Charles Schwab to purchase stock in a company.  By the time the order was placed, the stock had already jumped 50%.  Frustrated with financing the profits of inside traders, Omidyar created online auction site eBay.

Started by rapid prototypes.  Highly successful startups did not start out as mature, sophisticated, monstrosities.  Some of the most successful launches were self-funded, bootstrapped prototypes initially built in 2-3 weeks using basic code and/or freeware stitched together.

• Twitter was prototyped in about 2 weeks using Ruby on Rails, a rapid application development platform.
• eBay was cobbled together using open source software.
• Facebook was thrown together in about 3 weeks.

Focused and simple.  The more precisely you can describe your customer, the better.  As Guy Kawasaki states in his book, The Art of the Start, most successful companies started off targeting specific markets and grew to great size by addressing other segments.

• Google established a beachhead by spearheading the market with only one function: search.  Moreover, they kept it simple.  You can’t get much simpler than Google’s original interface.
• Twitter started out serving only one function and asking one simple question: What are you doing?  Like Google, Twitter’s primary interface was pretty stark, clean and simple.
• YouTube had one and only purpose: sharing videos.  It too, shared an extraordinarily simple user interface.  No instructions or user’s manual is needed to navigate YouTube.

Sticky, memorable name.  Guy Kawasaki states that a remarkable name for your organization is like pornography: it’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it.  He goes on to suggest that we spend the time and effort to come up with a good name because it makes positioning easier.  I will go on to say that a good name helps with the stickyness factor – the name sticks in your memory longer.

1. Google
2. YouTube
3. Yahoo!
4. Hotmail
5. Twitter
6. Amazon.com
7. eBay
8. PayPal
9. Facebook
10. Napster

Certainly, Hotmail and PayPal give you a clue as to what the product is about, but the 8 don’t really describe the product, mission, company or user experience.  However, they are sticky and memorable.  In addition, you can use their company name in the following statement, “Are you on …?”  Are you on Facebook?  Are you on PayPal?  Are you on Napster?  Are you on YouTube?  If you can finish this sentence with the company name and it still sounds good, then you are on the right track.

Sticky websites.  Most successful websites give you a reason to come back and/or linger longer.  Great websites create an addiction that compels you to return again and again.  If your company or website is a “fire and forget” type of thing that only compels people to visit once or twice a year, then it’s not going to do very well.

• Linkedin gives you a progress bar to let you know how complete is your profile and what you can do to make it more complete, like asking for a reference or recommendation.
• Hotmail makes you come back again and again to check your e-mail and to send e-mails.
• Facebook compels you to log in on a regular basis to update your status, connect with friends, respond to requests, upload photos and maintain your account.
• eBay drives people back to its site again and again to check on their bid or the product they are auctioning.

The more, the merrier.  Most successful website are more valuable as the number of subscribers or members grows.  Think about it…

• PayPal becomes more valuable as the number of subscribers grows.  The more people who use and accept PayPal, the more it becomes a de facto standard in making and receiving payments online.
• Facebook becomes more fun and meaningful when more of your friends, relatives, associates and those you want to be your friends continue to grow and become Facebook members.
• Napster becomes more valuable as more people and use it and as more music becomes available on it.
• YouTube, like Napster, becomes more valuable as more people load more videos onto it.

Create a unique experience.  In general, most investors, angels and venture capitalists are going to want to invest in first movers – those who are like the Starship Enterprise – venturing where no man (or woman) has gone before.  VCs want to invest in companies with the ability to provide a unique product or service.

But, history will tell you that there is another element to this.  After all, Yahoo was on the scene before Google but Google dominates search.  MySpace was on the scene before Facebook but Facebook clearly dominates social media.  Photobucket existed before Flickr. 

Guy Kawasaki suggests that being a “fast second” (rather than a first-mover) might be better – let someone else pioneer the concept, learn from their mistakes and leapfrog them.

What is more important, I believe, is a unique experience.  Even though potential competitors may exist, if you can do 100 things better than your competitor (or 1,000 things better) or integrate functionality in a unique way, then you stand a chance of winning.  In the end, you need some kind of special sauce that makes you truly special.  For me, that would be a unique experience.

Unleash a virus.  In Malcom Gladwell’s book, “The Tipping Point,” he writes about how contagious epidemics start.  He refers not only to disease but also ideas, fashion, concepts and businesses. 

Gladwell suggests that if you want to spread the word about your company, product or service then you need to leverage The Law of the Few.  That is, the 20% of the people who seem to know 80% of the people.  You need to reach out and find Connectors, Mavens and natural Salesmen or Cheerleaders.  Once they grasp and appreciate your offering, they will do the selling for you.

He also suggests that the message, concept or idea needs to have a Stickiness Factor.  The idea needs to have legs.  As Guy Kawasaki puts it, your company, product or services needs to be cool, effective and/or distinctive.  I have read Pennenberg (Viral Loop), Kawasaki and Gladwell all talk about making your site, product or service sticky.   Make the message stick, make it memorable, make it easy to share and make people want to come back again and again.

If you can develop a contagious idea and then present it to a few people who are extraordinarily connected and well respected within their sphere of influence then you can take a giant leap forward in propelling your concept.  Then, if your website has some type of multiplier effect where people have valuable incentives and motivation to share your site with their sphere of influence, then your viral coefficient will be great enough to unleash your viral concept and allow it to grow exponentially.

Find out how you can make people want to share your site with their circle of friends, family, colleagues and associates.

The other day, when my iPhone locked up and started misbehaving, I pushed all kinds of buttons sequentially and simultaneously trying to get it to reboot.  Somehow, I stumbled upon the iPhone print screen function but didn’t know how I actually did it.  Thanks to my friend Marc Duverneuil – an iPhone applications developer – who reminded me how to take screen shots from my iPhone:

Simultaneously press the button on the top and the button on the bottom (front) for half a second

You will see a white flash and hear the sound of a camera.  You will find the screen shot in the Photos section (the icon with the yellow Sunflower) and from there, you can e-mail the photo of the screenshot by pressing and holding the lower left corner of the image for half a second.

As the number of iPhones sold around the world continues to explode despite “the worst economic recession since World War II,” it’s probably about time that companies, webmasters and web designers take that extra step to design websites specifically for the iPhone and other mobile devices such as the Blackberry and Google’s T-Mobile G1.

Mobile devices outsell PCs

Indeed, in the next few months (if it hasn’t happened already), the number of people accessing the web via mobile devices will outnumber the number of people accessing the web via their laptop or desktop computer. So, if you want your website to look great on a mobile device, the first thing you need to do is look at your website from a mobile device.

Testing your page on an iPhone is easy if you have one. But if you don’t have one, the next best thing is to use Apple’s iPhone simulator. The Mobile Safari browser in the iPhone simulator comes very close to matching the feature set of a real iPhone.

Websites for iPhones

So, does this mean that you have to redesign your entire website for mobile devices?

No.

And, does this mean that I have to design my website either for the iPhone or for the deskop or laptop market?

No.

Your iPhone website and your regular website can coexist. In fact, if you do it right, your website will be able to detect how your web visitors are viewing your web pages and your website should be smart enough to deliver the right user interface for that client.

How to build iPhone friendly design

Building a user interface for the iPhone (or other mobile apps) means that you need to:

• Build a new CSS (cascading style sheet) for mobile devices
• Detect when a user visits your site using a mobile device
• Deliver a streamlined, scaled down version of your web site

Flash chokes iPhones

Certain things need to be adjusted for mobile visitors. For one, as of this writing, the iPhone stumbles on Flash. So, if your website relies on Flash to deliver important visuals or information, you should note that the 100 million iPhone visitors will be blind to this content – as will Google, most search engines and many people with visual or hearing disabilities.

Reduce your content and increase your font size

In addition, since the mobile device is so small, you may want to consider increasing the size of your font. Obviously, you will need to reduce the amount of textual content on the iPhone interface and probably reduce the number of links and options. Since iPhones and Blackberry mobile devices have slower Internet connections than normal desktop or laptop computers, you should also lighten your mobile interface and do everything you can to speed up your load time and make it a thinner web application.

Think about why people visit you via mobile devices

You should also think about why somebody is visiting your site with a mobile device. If you operate a retail business then, most likely, your mobile website visitors will want to get directions to your store – because they are probably on their way to find you right now.

If your company is a bank, for example, your mobile visitors are probably trying to transfer money or check the balance on an account.  Or, in the case of retail, your mobile web visitors are probably on the road trying to find your nearest location.  I

f you are smart, you will build an iPhone application that pinpoints where the web visitor is based on the GPS feature of the iPhone and calculates the route, time and directions to the nearest bank branch location.

So, it is very important that you put yourself into the shoes of your web visitor and deliver to them the most important functionality that they would most likely want to access when they come into your site via a mobile device.

Website designed for a desktop web browser

Website designed for an iPhone (seen from a desktop)

This was designed by my friend Marc Duverneuil who is an iPhone applications developer.  You can see this iPhone interface at his website: www.got-apps.com and you can find Marc on Linkedin at  and on Twitter.  He charges about $500 to create an iPhone interface for your website.

User interface designed for an iPhone as seen on an iPhone

Did you Know 4.0

Learning from Failure

Let’s get this out of the way – nobody likes to fail. And outside the realm of the plot conceit of The Producers, it’s highly unlikely that under normal circumstances, unless it is part of some greater stratagem, anyone deliberately sets out to do so. Yet every single day, all around us, people fail. And if we’re brutally honest with ourselves, we can likely count ourselves in that number on one level or another.

Entrepreneurs Learn the Most from Our Mistakes

Now before you discard this as some pessimistic drivel, understand that failure is an incredible teaching opportunity, for more often than not, we learn more when we come up short and fail to achieve a goal than when we successfully realize it. The truth of the matter is, humans, as well as most animals, learn by making mistakes, and then correcting the behavior until they get it right.

Of course, we have to acknowledge that in the vast spectrum of mistakes to be made, some have more serious repercussions than others, and indeed, some are so unforgiving as to provide no opportunity to rectify or resolve. But these “world-enders” are by no means as prevalent as far less ominous errors in judgment, analysis or action which do not yield a desired outcome, but may teach us important lessons so that the outcome we are striving to achieve is ultimately affected.

Smart Small Businesses Take Responsibility for Their Mistakes

However, in order to learn from failure, we must be willing to set aside, at least temporarily, the ego which seeks to attach a judgment to the failure, and which is often extremely counter-productive to extracting the necessary lesson. For example, failing to achieve a goal may lead to a natural let-down or disappointment, but dwelling on this or mentally flogging yourself for this failure will ultimately continue to undermine your confidence and ability to bounce back from the setback. It is far more productive to acknowledge the negative emotions, allow the grief process to chart its course proportionate to the magnitude of the failure, and then resolve to make the necessary adjustments to avoid a repeat of the failure.

This last point cannot be overstated. We may do everything in our power to try to bring about a desired outcome and still fail in achieving this, and yet this is ultimately forgivable if we’ve truly given our all and applied ourselves with all diligence and effort. Repeatedly failing at a task or goal, because of a shortcoming in effort or because we are making the same mistakes due to indifference or ineptitude, is far less so. We owe it to ourselves, as well as those around us, to do our best and rise to the occasion, especially when the talent or ability to achieve the goal is in abundance and only our own inaction or lack of focus and clarity is preventing us from the result that we claim to desire.

Successful Businesses Choose to be Victors, not Victims

Those who are honest will admit to failure, and successful entrepreneurs and business people often have a long list of failed initiatives and endeavors; however, what separates them from those who are judged to have failed completely is that they learned from previous mistakes and avoided repeating the same mistakes twice. Part and parcel to this process is avoiding the negative status of relishing our victimhood or wallowing in self-pity and self-recrimination; while it is true that some things are outside of our control and sometimes we must play the hand that we are dealt, we can control our attitude and resolve to find a way to overcome the obstacle(s) that stand in our way.

And for those who insist that they’ve never failed, I would counter that you have in all likelihood never taken a risk or stepped outside of your comfort zone, for if you had, you certainly wouldn’t be batting 1000. Anything worth doing entails risk, and if we are not pushing boundaries we are not growing, which is a surefire recipe for failure of a more obstinate sort – the failure to achieve our potential.

Fundamentally, that is the failure that we should be most cognizant of avoiding at all costs.

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Jonathan S. Ross is the founder of Los Angeles based Black Rock Consulting, a boutique management and communications consultancy offering strategic planning and development, project management, marketing strategy and copywriting, and creative writing and content development services to start-up, early stage and more mature ventures. He is also the originator of Tao of the Zentropist, a business and personal development blog fusing universal truths found within Eastern and Western wisdom traditions.

The Power of Imagination: There is Magic in Believing

As a business owner, entrepreneur, or someone aspiring to these labels, it is important not to lose sight of the power and potential impact of imagination. While imagination in an individual or enterprise is not an asset that literally shows up as a line item on a balance sheet, make no mistake about its influence and importance.

Focused Entrepreneurs Keep the Dream Alive

Businesses fundamentally can follow only a handful of pathways once undertaken; they can evolve over time, building upon a reputation and growing more powerful within their niche; they can drift or operate more or less on auto-pilot, dependent upon the whims of fate and chance to either realize profits or loss in a given reporting period; or they can stagnate, failing to innovate and adapt to changing circumstances or market opportunities, invariably losing market share and in worst case scenarios, ceasing to be altogether. Even businesses that start out of the gate with a strong plan and able management can fall victim to complacency or even fear, losing touch with their customers or the very reason why they were founded in the first place.

Imagination, Faith and Courage Drives Entrepreneurs

At the end of the day, businesses are birthed at the intersection of imagination and faith; the courage of a lone entrepreneur or group of entrepreneurs that believe they have found a market opportunity worth addressing, and through an infusion of capital and effort, pursue this vision to make it a reality. Sometimes, truth be told, imagination is not grounded in reality, or faith is stronger than actual business acumen, but the very act of putting oneself out there to offer some form of tangible good or service requires fortitude and successful or not, impacts the economy on multiple levels.

For those that struggle with the creative process or otherwise seek to jump-start their imaginations when envisioning a potential new business, I suggest invoking the phrase, “What if…” By this I mean, once you as an entrepreneur, alone or with any partners, have performed at least a rudimentary SWOT (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats) analysis with regard to the business you are contemplating starting, which includes an understanding of the market you propose to address, it may be very instructive to look for innovative ways of doing things by asking, “what if…” For example, one can imagine that the initial premise behind Amazon.com might have been along the lines of, “What if we used the Internet as a distribution channel to sell books and other goods at a discount that competitors can’t match?”

Successful Startups Fulfill Unmet Needs

Bear in mind, some of the ideas, perhaps the majority, generated by this exercise may be unworkable, impractical or simply untenable, but this approach does have a tendency to spur more creative thinking, especially when seeking solutions to perceived problems or needs – after all, arguably the best kind of business to have is one that can fulfill a need that has been underserved or can be addressed more efficiently (and perhaps cost effectively) than what the competition currently offers.

What Makes a Company Great

And while stressing the liberating power of imagination to fundamentally redefine “business as usual” or create innovative, highly adaptable organizations which can compete in a globally interdependent world, it is important not to lose sight of the admonition offered by Jim Collins in his bestselling book Good to Great which notes that, “All great companies are brutally honest with themselves.” While imagination is a fine thing, as an entrepreneur your ability to execute on the fundamental premise of your business is paramount, and it you cannot honestly evaluate your own strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of the competition (and remember, there is always competition, even if it is indirect), you are doomed from the start.

Analysis Paralysis is Overcome by What If?

We often hear that “failures of imagination” lead to disaster, when the inability to analyze a situation from a fresh perspective leads to paralyzing group-think, misreading of intentions, over-confidence, or another one of the myriad things which can temporarily or permanently disrupt the health of a business. Never underestimate the power of imagination in fueling business success; after all, every venture can likely be traced back to the founder or founders asking the question, “what if…”

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Jonathan S. Ross is the founder of Los Angeles based Black Rock Consulting, a boutique management and communications consultancy offering strategic planning and development, project management, marketing strategy and copywriting, and creative writing and content development services to start-up, early stage and more mature ventures. He is also the originator of Tao of the Zentropist, a business and personal development blog fusing universal truths found within Eastern and Western wisdom traditions.

Consultants…it seems that in the modern business world, it’s hard to avoid this term, and the reactions to those faced with hiring those billing themselves as “consultants” range the gamut from irrational exuberance and enthusiasm to cynicism, skepticism, and distrust. When evaluating the potential hire of a consultant, a business owner or executive should bear a few things in mind before making a decision.

What is a Consultant?

First and foremost, it is my belief that the term “consultant” has been abused and co-opted for years by a wide variety of people, some well-intentioned and even quite capable, others little more than hustlers, charlatans and the unemployed (it has been standard practice, sadly enough, for many resume experts to tell people to label themselves as “consultants” when in between full-time work, even if they have never successfully sold their services to a paying client). At the end of the day, virtually anyone can hang a shingle and brand themselves as a “consultant,” tossing out amorphous industry jargon and buzzwords and charging clients for billable time or ill-defined deliverables.

Black Rock Consulting

In the interest of full disclosure, I currently earn my living rendering a variety of professional services to entrepreneurs and businesses of various sizes, and only reluctantly use the shorthand of “consultant” when convenient or as polite cocktail conversation. In my own case, my offerings are based on my abilities as a writer, project manager and strategist, which are all certainly open to evaluation by a prospective client. Unlike many consultants, I advocate a “full life cycle” approach and rather than simply dispense generic advice or recommendations that I ultimately cannot be held accountable for, whenever possible I seek to implement the solutions that I propose. As with most things in life, having a good idea or solution to a problem is only part of the battle – execution is where the rubber meets the road.  Fundamentally, a good consultant or consultancy of any stripe will help your business identify and solve a defined problem or problems, and will do so with your best interests in mind. This requires ethics and honesty, as well as the ability to recognize when additional expertise may be required, which is something that not all consultants or consultancies seem to grasp.

When to Hire a Consultant

So at what point in a venture’s life cycle is a consultant actually useful? That can depend on a number of factors. There is certainly a case to be made that the right consultant with the right skills brought in at the conceptual stage of a venture can deliver very tangible value, and potentially prevent costly expenditures in the future. For example, many people are intimidated by the process of developing and writing a business plan and seek to outsource this process. Consequently, there is a teeming multitude of individuals and firms with varying degrees of competence and price points all over the map offering to develop plans. Now some successful business people believe it’s a mistake to outsource such a fundamental task, because if a venture’s management team or the entrepreneur launching the business doesn’t understand what goes into the business plan, they have virtually no chance of actually executing against it. My own perhaps biased observation is that while there is certainly value in having the business founder or senior management team perform research and take a stab at drafting a plan (after all, there is software to guide you through the process and any Web search will reveal plenty of free resources and sample table of contents), ultimately having an outsider with the experience and writing skills to help polish the plan is invaluable. This is especially true if the business plan will be utilized to raise capital from outside sources. Not only can this bring a fresh perspective and “reality check” to the process, but it can help vet ideas and assumptions that otherwise might go unchallenged.

Short-Term Projects Requiring Highly Specialized Expertise

More mature businesses can find value in consultants when they find themselves facing unforeseen or challenging market conditions, or are considering the introduction of a new product or service and need to validate a market need for such an offering. A consultant can also deliver tangible value if a business is in need of particular subject matter expertise that is simply unavailable internally. Other consultants with financial industry backgrounds can help business owners to acquire competitors or to sell their own business for the best possible return.

In any case, a qualified and honest consultant will always be willing to put in writing the service or services which are being offered, and will take the time to explain and clearly define the nature of any physical deliverables associated with this work.

Consultants can be Effective Change Agents

In closing, note well that hiring a consultant is not a panacea.  You should never hire a consultant to simply validate your own suppositions or biases or to “rubber stamp” decisions as a fait accompli. If you do not empower the consultant or those within the company to effect change once solutions are identified, it’s a waste of time and resources.

While “consulting” may get a bad rap in some quarters, and sometimes deservedly so based on sketchy providers with no track records to speak of, there are valid reasons to recognize when you may be out of your depth and require the services of a trusted adviser that will help you realize your goals, both in the short and long term.

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Jonathan S. Ross is the founder of Los Angeles based Black Rock Consulting, a boutique management and communications consultancy offering strategic planning and development, project management, marketing strategy and copywriting, and creative writing and content development services to start-up, early stage and more mature ventures. He is also the originator of Tao of the Zentropist, a business and personal development blog fusing universal truths found within Eastern and Western wisdom traditions.

Running even the smallest enterprise that thrives on local customer loyalty needs to have the exposure and promotional power that only the internet can give. From the tiny deli to the local greenhouse; local businesses need to venture out of the neighborhood an onto the web if they wish to remain competitive and profitable.

Provide the Answers to Your Local Customers

You may think your foot traffic each day is sufficient to keep business alive but the reality is that a good majority of your neighbors will still turn to the internet for answers to most important questions they want to ask you, like ‘What are your business hours?’. Web users of all demographics rely on the web to find what they need and if your company isn’t providing answers 24/7, your competitor probably is.

Prove You Are Running With the Big Dogs

Mom and pop stores are folding all the time, unable to keep up with the faster pace of newer, younger stores. Your competitors, both local and international, are surely online and able to promote faster, sell more, and essentially drive you right out of business. You may be a comfortable mom and pop operation to your loyalists but you’ve got to establish credibility and reliability. Let people know you have staying power and can adapt to the changing business environment.

Increase Profits By Widening Your Audience

While you may cater to the locals, you can still use your brain power to come up with innovative ways to expand your product or service to a worldwide audience and therefore increase your own bottom line. Consider the possibilities of taking your company to an international audience without ever leaving the block. A strong web presence can bring much need attention to your little operation.

Get Your Brick and Mortar Biz Socially Accepted

Promoting your company is still a crucial part of a business plan. You can use your website as a reference in local print advertising plus develop resources for advertising online to increase your exposure. Increasing company awareness online through social networking sites and well-developed advertising campaigns can literally change your business presence overnight.

Open Lines of Customer Service Communication On Your Website

Establishing a website allows for you to hear from and speak to your customers more frequently and efficiently. You can use forums to gain valuable feedback from your customers and utilize email to provide more information to seekers.

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Tisha Tolar is the co-owner of Trifecta Strategies, LLC and one of the lead content writers for Reliable Writers. She has authored thousands of articles on small business and personal finance topics. Tisha has also self-published a fiction novel, ‘Gen X’.

It is much more efficient and less costly to build a new website on a foundation of search engine optimization (SEO) than to try to retrofit existing websites after they have been launched. 

This guide will help programmers and web developers identify opportunities to incorporate SEO into the process and framework of building a new website.  By starting at the earliest stages of the web development process and following these recommended best practices; new websites will get crawled and indexed faster, deeper and will appear higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).

The top 5 most important technical SEO elements on a website are:

• URLs (pretty permalinks)
• Page titles and paragraph headings
• Link anchor text
• Image attributes
• Crawl factors

SEO Best Practices

URLs (pretty permalinks)

The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or page address is extraordinarily important for several reasons:

• Search engines include URLs in their index
• Webmasters often link to other websites by using their URL
• Pretty permalinks are easier to share and understand
• A well designed URL reveals the content behind the URL

As you develop or program a new website, particularly if it is a dynamic database driven website, try to engineer it in a way that the URLs are shorter, do not include parameters, avoid https if unnecessary and help web visitors (and search engines) understand the content behind the URL.  Look at the difference between these two URLs, for example:

• www.blakenewman.com/ExploreEconomies/?economyid=2&year=2008
• www.blakenewman.com/country-profile/afghanistan

Other things to consider:

• Create a 301 redirect from inqbation.com to www.inqbation.com
• Name folders and directors using simple plain language
• Use a dash (-) rather than underscore (_) to separate words
• Separate words with a dash (-) rather than running them together
• Prefer long-tail keyword phrases instead of single, short words
  • /crime-security-theft/
  •  /crime/

Back to the top of this SEO guide for programmers

Page titles and paragraph headings

Page titles are probably the single most important piece of real estate on a web page vis-à-vis getting indexed and found by search engines. 

Unfortunately, most websites misuse or underuse the page title.  Commonly, organizations will use the page title for branding purposes, i.e., SEO Quotient or inQbation.  However, since your domain name already includes these words in the URL, you would be wasting valuable resources by duplicating the brand in the page title.

Organization will often use Page Titles as sort of a breadcrumb trail to indicate where a web visitor is within the site.  While bread-crumb trails are a great idea, they should be within the body of the website, not in the page title.

The best page titles will consider these factors:

• Every <title>Page title</title> will be unique.  No two pages will have the same title
• <title>Page titles</title> will be less than 70 characters (including spaces)
• Page titles will include long tail keyword phrases instead of single short words
  • International financial economic business data
  • Data
• <title>Page titles</title> will reflect a web visitor’s Google search query, e.g.,
  • Countries with lowest tax rate
  • Countries with highest unemployment rate
  • How to start a business in Afghanistan

Likewise, Paragraph Headings (H1, H2, H3) will reflect the web visitor language that they would use in a Google search query if they were looking for the type of information provided on that particular page.

Important: every page of a website should be optimized exclusively for the content on that page.  Page titles and headings should be relevant to that particular page.

Also, it is important to adhere to an information taxonomy.  There should be only one H1 heading on a page.  Each subsection within that page should be headed by an <h2> bracketed tag </h2>.  Sub-paragraphs within a subsection should be headed by <h3>bracketed tags</h3>.  Headings, in other words, should be hierarchical and follow an organizational path.

Finally, it is important to not stuff keywords.  Keyword stuffing will earn you negative demerits and possible get you deflated or de-indexed within search rankings.  It is better to say the same thing different ways than to say the same thing over and over again.  One heading, for example, may refer to “gender”.  The next heading may refer to “women in the workforce”.  The next heading may refer to “female participation in the labor market”.  So, mix it up and diversify your language.

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Link anchor text

Hyper links are what make the World Wide Web so valuable.  They enable people to “surf the web”.  Links also add credibility.  It is not surprising that search engines place a lot of value on links and link names (the anchor text between an <a ref=”…> and the closing bracket</a>).

Careful thought should be exercised when creating link names and anchor text.  In general, links should reveal the content behind the link.  Somebody should not have to click on a link to see what is on the next page. 

Typically, there are two types of links:

• Navigational links (main navigation menu)
• Referential links (one time links that cite or reference another page)

Main navigation menu

It is important to comply with convention.  Just like with cars intended for right-hand drive, the accelerator pedal is on the right and the brake pedal is on the left.  It is good to follow convention, unless you have a clear and compelling reason to defy conventional expectations.

Most people, for example, expect that if you click on the logo in the top left corner of the page, you will be taken back to the site index page.  Likewise, people expect to see an About link on the left and a Contact link on the right.  The rest of the links in the middle should be consistent. 

Referential links

These are the links that you make during the conversational text within the body of a web page.  It is here that it is very important to remember the long-tail and be as descriptive as possible.  Also, by convention, you probably want to target the same window for internal pages and blank windows for external pages. 

Remember the long-tail

Most importantly, links should be descriptive – remember the long tail.  For example, which link name do you think would be more descriptive of the content on the other end of the link?

• Read more…
• Full economic survey data comparing various countries tax reform efforts

Certainly, it is easier, faster and in some cases prettier to simply write “read more…” but you will get a lot more web traffic is you express precisely what the page topic is about that you are referencing.

It is probably better to name a navigational link “Business Data” rather than “data”.  “Survey methodology” is probably better than “Methodology”.  “Research papers” is probably better than “Research”.  Top

Image attributes

Images are probably the most underutilized and least exploited SEO opportunity at our disposal.  Because we have development platforms and click-and-drag content management systems (CMS), it is easy to simply Insert > Brown > Image and be done with it.  Often, our software will grab the file name by default and throw it into the alt tag or simply leave an empty alt tag alt=“ ” in it’s place.

Slowing down a few moments to take the extra step in optimizing images goes a long way towards both SEO and Section 508 Compliance (accessibility).  In general, the more accessible (Section 508 compliant) a website, the better search engine optimized it is.  Think about it for a moment…

While a picture can be worth 1,000 words, that can only be true if you have eyes to see the photo.  Otherwise, you must rely on the image metadata.  People with visual disabilities will often use text screen readers to translate into audible signals what is written on a web page.  People with hearing disabilities will use closed caption to know what was said on videos and in audio clips.  Since search engines do not have eyes or ears, they rely on the same methods and technology to understand images, audio and movies.

What is important to know about optimizing images is that if you do it right from the beginning, all of the metadata stays with the image.  So, if you use an image within a document and convert that document into a PDF, for example, all of the metadata gets included within the .pdf.  The same thing applies to Word documents (.doc) and in Rich Text Format (.rtf).

Best practices for optimizing images

• Rename the image file name after the meaning of the picture or graphic, e.g.,
  • IMG-0394.jpg
  • Afghan-women-working- in-professional-offices.jpg
• Go into the meta data (Open > Properties > Details) and fill in the details
  • Title
  • Subject
  • Tags
  • Comments
  • Copyright
• Include meaningful, keyword-rich ALT (alternate text) tags
• When there is a call to action, include an compelling title tag
• Place them in a meaningful directory, i.e., /business-tax-reforms versus /images
• Copy the image and translate all information for use on different language translations

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Crawl factors

Certain methods and techniques can make a page more or less crawlable.  Search engines need a daisy chain of links to enable it to crawl from page to page in order to index content.  If your site does not have an organized information architecture or site map then it is more difficult for search engines to index all of the pages on your site.

In addition, search engines need static links and navigation in order to crawl.  If your site is engineered in a way that forces people to enter a search parameter or select radio buttons or check boxes or pull down a menu, then you may be creating difficult obstacles for search engines to overcome.  A search engine, for example, is not going to select 2 or more parameters and then click a [submit] button.

Ultimately, every page on the website must have a permanent or static link pointing to that page if you want it to be found, crawled and indexed by a search engine.  If your site has 4,000 potential pages of information or data then there must be 4,000 static links that are all findable, site-mapped or otherwise listed somewhere on that website in order to be found and indexed.

Search engine friendly (not)

In general, search engines are not able to effectively crawl websites that rely on these methods and techniques:

• Flash intros
• Flash navigation
• Framesets
• Robots nofollow
• Framesets
• Images
• Image headings
• Javascript menu navigation
• AJAX
• Multi-parameter driven navigation
• Powerpoint Presentations
• Older version PDF documents

Obviously, there are exceptions to the rule and there are methods and techniques in which you can make Flash more search engine friendly, like using XML files to feed content to a Flash file.  In general, if something is important or crucial then you should not rely on these potentially un-crawlable methods, techniques and file formats.

One final thought is to always keep the user in mind.  Any time you have an opportunity to name something, put yourself in the shoes of the person on the other end of Google trying to find the information we have on our sites.  Even better, if you imagine that user as being blind or deaf (like Google), you will both serve a wider audience and accelerate your SEO efforts. 

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An online business presence is certainly not a set-it-and-forget-it type of situation. Developing a website and/or blog for your business requires forethought and dedication to planning and posting. Providing readers (aka your target audience) with valuable information is a priority for all business owners looking to drive the right traffic to a site in an effort to increase sales. The more valuable the information, the more reliable a business appears to potential customers. Visitors want to believe in the expertise and knowledge of a business before they buy in good faith.

Research and thought makes a better blog

Providing valuable content is not the only requirement of a site either. The content you provide needs to also be updated constantly. No one will keep coming back to a stale site where nothing changes. Readers yearning for information often turn to the internet for answers and if your site is providing up-to-date posts, they will come to you time and again to find what they need. You are essentially providing a solution for a problem on a preferably daily basis. Additionally, if comments are allowed on your site, the feedback provided by readers an be invaluable to a business owner.

Consistent blogging helps drive traffic to your website

One of the ultimate goals of your website is to get recognized above your competitors on the internet. Information being picked up by the search engines each day needs to be fresh in order to improve the ranking of your site pages. New content triggers better ratings so posts need to be well-thought out and consistent with what is in the news and the web’s trending topics. It can be a help to outline a list of topics you want to write about to keep the site streamlined and focused. New posts can also be used as a marketing tool through social media outlets. You can promote the link to your daily posts on your Twitter or Facebook accounts to help people easily locate your site while giving yourself some additional ‘face time’ in front of your target audience on the social networking sites.

How to get started with blogging

Starting with an outline of ideas, continue jotting down current events and other relevant topic ideas as they come to you. Depending on your writing skills, you may choose to write a batch of articles at a time. Most site platforms allow you to pre-schedule posts for the future. Make time each week to craft a number of articles and post them all at once. If your writing skills are not up to par, consider employing a freelance writer who specializes in online writing. Quality writing is definitely a plus as the content you produce can be the first impression you make for many new potential customers.

Great blogs start with dedication and commitment

While many business owners begin with the best of intentions when it comes to websites and blogs, a good majority fail to keep up the trend. What is left is an expired waste of space that will more likely turn people off than clue them in to what your business has to offer. Consider your daily postings as part of your required routine much like checking your email or fulfilling sales orders.

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Tisha Tolar is the co-owner of Trifecta Strategies, LLC and one of the lead content writers for Reliable Writers. She has authored thousands of articles on small business and personal finance topics. Tisha has also self-published a fiction novel, ‘Gen X’.

Choosing the right key words to optimize within your website is one of the most important decisions you can make when it comes to getting found on Google.  The problem is, we get so wrapped up in our own language that we use to describe ourselves and what we offer that we may lost touch with the words, dialect and semantics that our targeted website visitors use to describe us.

It’s one thing to use a thesaurus, but it’s quite another to conduct usability testing – where you actually watch people use search engines to find particular things – or tools designed specifically to help deliver evidence-based related keyword suggestions.

KeywordSpy is one particular tool that you may want to play with as you develop your list of keywords.  When I entered “seo analysis tools”  into KeywordSpy it delivered this information:

Keywords related to seo analysis tools

• site optimization
• website optimizer
• search engine tool
• keyword analysis
• ranking tool
• optimization tools
• search engine optimizer
• website keywords
• improve search ranking
• optimize website
• search engine optimize

The tool goes on to provide the estimated search volume for each keyword phrase and the average cost per click (CPC) for that phrase if you were to pay for sponsored advertising on the search engines.  The search volume is very important.  Indeed, it’s better to be optimized for keywords that people actually seek.  After all, what’s the point in ranking first place on Google for some keyword that nobody Googles?

Choosing your keywords are crucial and it’s better to do it early in the web design process because a search engine savy web designer will bake these keywords into the URL, file names, file paths and image names throughout the website.  They will also be sure to use these keywords in the title tags, alt text and header tags.

If you have any questions, give us a call at 310.880.1162 or e-mail me at blake @ inqbation dot com.