When it comes to web hosting, many SMEs simply leave the choice of hosting company and package to their design company, if they think about it at all. It ends up being one of those aspects of having a web site that easily gets ignored or forgotten about.

This approach works adequately for brochure sites but tends to cause problems if you want your web site to work hard for your business.

Make your site work hard

I bang on about this quite a bit but here are some of the elements that are essential to make your site a vital part of your business:

• You need to know who visits the site
• You need to know where they’re coming from
• You need to know what they do when they visit
• You need to convert visits to leads
• You need to keep the site up to date
• You need to add content regularly
• You need to know your site is secure against malicious attack
• You need to know what changes to the site will reap business benefits
• You need to know who to turn to if your site encounters technical problems

As your site becomes an increasingly important part of your business strategy – and it undoubtedly will in the next year or so, if it has not already become so – you will find yourself frustrated by the lack of information and control at your fingertips.

If you want to add new email addresses, the chances are that you’ll be charged for it.

If you want to load some new content, you’ll probably be charged for it.

Ask for traffic stats and you may recieve a simple total number that gives you no useful data about visitor types and actions.

So, what’s the answer?

If you make the decision that your new web site is to form a core part of your business strategy, the site needs to be treated in the same way any other core part of your business is treated.

You wouldn’t let a vital piece of equipment lie around with little maintenance or care.

You wouldn’t move into a plush new office and leave the windows dirty and use packing crates for desks.

Finding a cheap hosting company is easy: finding a company that will give your site the care and attention it needs to succeed takes a little more effort. But it’s worth it. You suddenly have an outsourced web department for much less than the cost of hiring a dedicated IT person.

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Search engines think page titles are important. You should, too.

Page titles are the text that appears in the very top bar of your browser when you visit a web page. It is not the same as the header you use at the top of the page’s contents.

On many poorly built sites, the page title will end up being a mirror of the name of the page in the navigation bar. So you see a lot of “ACME WIDGETS – About”, “TOP SERVICES – Home” and “BUYONLINE – Contact Us”.

Smart titles = quick SEO

Not only is this lazy but it’s also a missed opportunity from the point of view of optimisation.

For a start, if search engines are looking at your page titles so closely, you need to make sure each title describes the content of the page clearly. And what better way to do that than to use some of the keywords relevant to your product or service and used in the body of the page.

Remember, too, that the title often displays at the top of the browser long before the page loads. You should be reassuring visitors that they’ve come to the right site and convincing them to wait long enough to see what the page reveals when it’s loaded. Telling visitors they’ve reached the ‘home’ page is hardly going to set pulses racing.

Don’t be mean with the description

You may also feel you need to make your title short and punchy. Wrong. Make it as long as makes sense, while keeping it readable and meaningful. Not an essay, of course. Ten words is fine.

Want to see how it should be done? Unsurprisingly, 37Signals is a company that gets this right. Take a look at the home page title – “Simple small business software, collaboration, CRM: 37signals”. The company name is at the end because it’s a given that people searching for 37signals on the web are probably going to find it near the top without much trouble. It’s the first words that the search engines find most important. Here we have three keywords or keyword phrases: ’small business software’; ‘collaboration’; and ‘CRM’.

Click through from the 37Signals home page to one of the products and take a look at the page title now. Highrise, for instance, displays this:
“Highrise: Small Business CRM, Web-Based Contact Manager”.

Every one a winner

Which brings me to my final point in this brief look at page titles. Make sure every page has a different title. Different and descriptive. Each page on your site serves a distinct purpose (it does, doesn’t it?) so it will wear its own set of keywords. This is what you need to base your title on.

Simply being creative (but honest!) with your titles could start to work wonders for your search engine rankings.

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If you’re thinking of putting your business in the running for public sector contracts, the “Winning The Contract” course from Learning Direct is now free and on-line. The aim of the course appears to be to make the procurement process less intimidating and mysterious. This can only be a good thing.

Response to the course being made available at no cost has been predictably favourable, although the FSB’s John Wright puzzled me by suggesting that having the course on-line might penalise businesses with no access to broadband.

You know my opinion on this: a business trying to operate today with no access to broadband and no web presence is unlikely to be in the running for a public sector contract, if only because the business is not going to be around for very long. Tell me I’m wrong.

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Google Increases Profits

When Google announced recently that its last financial quarter profits had surged upwards by 18%, many commentators – and even Google CEO Eric Schmidt – used this as an indication that the end of the recession was in sight. And so it now appears to be.

However, equating Google’s profits – and an increase in its revenue – with a fresh willingness to spend seems to be to regard Google and its customer base in the light of traditional companies and industries. Google is neither a manufacturer nor a service provider in the normal sense. It is really a facilitator. Its increased revenue stems from its core business, which is to bring prospects and sales functions together. As more people use search engines – and Google in particular – as their first step to research on the road to purchase, it is only to be expected that savvy companies and business owners make sure their products and services are easily discovered. That means more businesses invest in AdWords campaigns and SEO. That, in turn, means more revenue for Google.

Whether in recession or not, this is increasingly the pattern of behaviour that drives business. Off-line or on-line. Using the web is cost-effective compared to more traditional forms of marketing, so it is inevitable that a recession drives smart businesses to look at their marketing budgets and ensure they’re getting bang for their buck. Once companies see the success of on-line marketing affecting their bottom line, they’ll continue to spend with Google.

How are you planning to use the web for marketing?

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In the early part of the last decade I was involved on a part-time basis for almost two years with a small start-up that was building software to help manage a sales pipeline. A vital part of that involvement had me spending a lot of time with successful sales people from a number of leading technology companies. In that time, I went from having what may be considered a traditional, rather sniffy attitude to sales in general to a feeling of healthy respect for the men and women who were so good at a task that most of us find either daunting or downright impossible.

For many, knowing where their meat comes from and how it gets to their plate is information they’re happy to live without. Sales occupies much the same position: we know it has to happen but we often don’t want to know the details.

Running a small business on a tight budget often means that selling is something that the business owner has to do, regardless of previous sales experience or how they feel about the function. There is another option, of course: Go bust.

I’ve read Mike Southon’s Sales on a Beermat (and his previous best seller, The Beermat Entrepreneur: Turn Your Good Idea into a Great Business) and I’m a keen reader of his weekly column in the FT. So, I grabbed the chance last week to attend his “Sales on a Beermat Workshop” in London as they don’t come around too often.

If you’ve read the books (co-authored with Chris West), you’ll know that the tone is fun, informative, and inspiring. In person, he’s much the same. Not only is he an engaging speaker but he is able quickly to convince an audience that it’s possible to sell successfully in an extremely ethical way – and still have fun doing it.

I firmly believe that everyone who attended the workshop left desperate to return to their work and begin the task of selling.

Yes, but…

…what has this to do with the web?

Think of the web – starting with your web site but also including your ‘presence’ across social networks and in every on-line client conversation – as a vital part of your sales process. Mike Southon, for instance, makes full use of email newsletters, Twitter, and his site to reinforce his credibility, sell more books, and sell speaking engagements and training. His column in the Entrepreneur section of the Weekend FT is also available on the FT web site and forms part of his weekly newsletter to subscribers. He knows the value of giving stuff away, too. There is a wealth of great information available on his site that you can download. This is all part of establishing thought leadership in your market niche, of course.

Mike knows how essential it is to stay in the minds of prospects and customers, so that when it comes to close a deal, the prospects and customers already have your name at the top of their list of likely suppliers.

How are you making sure your customers think of you first when it comes time to buy?

UPDATE: Just received the latest edition of Mike’s newsletter. He’s doing an extra sales workshop on Tuesday, March 11th 2010. Get the full details here.

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A very interesting piece in this week’s Saturday FT ‘Entrepreneur’ section. Catch it on-line here. The headline and first few paragraphs in what is, if truth be told, a fairly short article for a huge subject, concentrate on the idea of small businesses using the web to ‘reduce costs’. By the end of the article, however, the focus changes to how vital being on-line is for simply growing or maintaining your business.

The two stand-out statistics quoted in the piece are these:

• 76% of small business owners plan to increase on-line marketing in 2010
• 42% say they will use LinkedIn and Twitter to grow their business in 2010

This is a healthy enough number but the real challenge is taking the large step from intention to action. It’s easy to throw money at completely the wrong areas when you’re bombarded by new terms and buzz words and everyone tells you social media is the big thing you need to harness.

In the end, whatever tools and technologies you choose must fit both your company’s business objectives and its ethos. Otherwise, you’re left with what Seth Godin calls a ‘Meatball Sundae’ – a book well worth reading, by the way.

Please go and read the article on the FT site. The final quotation from Julie Hall of Women Unlimited is particularly pertinent if you’re undecided just how important the internet should be in your company’s strategy for 2010 and beyond.

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