Better to be late than never?

Depends on what you're talking about. If, like one of my clients, you're into CPR, then the answer is definitely not! However, if it's doing last Saturday's blog (yes, I misssed writing it over the weekend), then it is better to get it done than just leave it out. You'd be surprised just who may be following your little missives!

Today - Monday 06/18 - I'm off to New Zealand for my youngest daughter's wedding. Yet here I sit, all dressed up and nowhere to go, in Sacramento airport waiting for the plane which should have left 10 minutes ago to arrive from Las Vegas. Still they say 7.00pm we'll be airborne to LAX which will still get me there on time for the connection to NZ.

Better late than never can apply to your website too. Whether it's getting one, redesigning an existing one, or coming to realise that just HAVING a website isn't the end of it. It's never too late to start or revisit. So stop putting off doing it - let us do the heavy work for you for a fraction of what most charge, and get you a good

Those who fail to plan...

...plan to fail. I've heard that ever since I started school...errr... a number of years ago! And, I suspect, it's even older than that. I couldn't find out the bibliography for it, but it's actually irrelevant. The fact is if you don't have a destination (a plan) any road will get you there. Men have a justifiably bad reputation of refusing to ask for directions when driving (I have been there so many times!), but so many business owners approach growing their businesses in the same haphazard way (ummm, you DO want your business to grow, right?)

That's your first goal - decide the ultimate end for your business. The Ray Kroc's, Bill Gates's and Steve Jobs's of the business world didn't wake up one morning and decide to build a one shop, small business. The visionaries were just that - visionaries where the end result went far beyond the orginal objectives. We failed to really plan out our first 2 years and it showed. Pretty ho-hum growth, and while it was a good learning and consolidating time, we really wasted much of that time that we could have been aggressively growing the business.

So

To begin with, as we have had in our contracts since we began, SEO is not a science, but an art (or words to that effect). There are definitely known factors which influence ranking - the <Title> tag, <H1> tag (and through H6), bolding text, keywords in the first sentence and a bunch of others.  That's on-page SEO and it's somewhat quantifiable.  I say somewhat, because, with Google, the goal posts are continually moving.  Content "above the fold" is a hot change this year. Many sites have rightly recognised this as prime advertising real estate and jammed it full of ads.  Google says, "No, our surfer came to learn about <search phrase>, why should they be assaulted with ads?"  So these sites have received a penalty.

Off-page SEO is as fluid as on-page. Link farms and link sites were hit hard this year. The traditional reign of back links has been diminished somewhat (though are still important) with more weight going onto social bookmarking.

Magician or artiste?

What is your expectation of your SEO person? Have they set your expectations properly? Do you see them as Merlin, ready to wave a magic wand (knowing all the "inside" secrets), and, "poof",

Or, how to be safe on the Internet

Doing what I do, I come across all manner of passwords from clients.  Some are good passwords, and some are bad passwords - some are SERIOUSLY bad passwords.  There are lots of articles around the 'net telling you what you should and shouldn't use.  For me, what you shouldn't use is a complete no-brainer and takes one sentence, not a whole article.  If you can type it into Google and find it on the 'net DON'T use it!  It's that simple.  So, that includes the really dumb ones like your name, your spouse's name or your kid's or pet's name.  1-2-3-4-5, password, admin or any other password shipped with your equipment.  For bad passwords, that's it.

What is a much better question is, what is a good password?  Another simple answer, one YOU didn't come up with!  It's hard for a human to come up with truly random ones.  When I'm securing websites, I use an online password generator.  There are many of them, and a Google search will get you to one you like.  Include lowercase, uppercase, numbers AND special characters, and, in my opinion, it should be at least 8