4 Ways To Better Business Credibility

Here are a few steps we can all keep in mind to help remain focused on building the credibility of our business:

In my overall efforts, I work at developing a target market, a point of differentiation and marketing materials to support my business. Everything I do is targeted at building the know, like, and trust factor with prospective clients. In order to develop trust, one has to demonstrate credibility. What can we do demonstrate and improve credibility?

Partnering with another provider. While you might aspire to work with a certain target market, in some cases, you just don’t have the level of experience to go after some of those opportunities. Sometimes it might make sense to partner with another provider (yes, even a competitor). If you can’t get the job yourself and it’s a large enough project for two of you to work together—why not? There’s little chance that you’d get the job on your own so there’s little risk for you.

Marketing materials. It’s surprising how many business don’t actually have anything written down. Admittedly, this is one of the weaker points in my marketing efforts with SafeHouse Web, but it’s these kinds of simple reminders that can help us all. For those businesses just getting started, prepare yourself a marketing kit. This can be a simple folder with several one page documents including your marketing story (discussing your company and why you do what you do), your difference, a list of products or services, a page of testimonials, and any case studies you can provide. These kinds of materials can go a long way in building trust and confidence with a potential client. Giving a consistent look and feel to all of your on-line accounts helps to demonstrate that you’ve taken the details into account. Think about both the online and offline presence including your social media accounts.

Professional Email Address. Think twice about using a gmail or yahoo or hotmail email address for your business email. I agree that the ability to access these kinds of email accounts is easy, however, it detracts from creating a credible business. You can still use these types of accounts but use with them an alias that incorporates your business name. Or, in the case of a referral and following a recommendation from me, you would register, host and email-manage your domain name through Dreamhost; Google’s Gmail is the client that manages the email accounts, so all the ease of enterprise-class “webmail” can be had right alongside the professionalism of having your own domain name as your email address. Spectacular!

Create and use an audit process in your business. In almost any business, you can create a list of activities to review to ensure thoroughness. Whether you’re an IT company who’s just performed a software upgrade, a senior’s life assistance service taking on a new client, a photographer preparing for an event, or a marketing coach doing a marketing material audit, prepare and use a checklist to demonstrate a level of experience that shows that you’ve done this before and that your process is comprehensive.

These are just four simple ways to help improve the credibility of your business. What else have you done to give your credibility a boost?

Audience and WordPress

Here are a few thoughts about proven benefits to the success of most any business website; they are thoughts with audience in mind (i.e. what’s your target market?).

Given: Content is king.
Given: SEO is vital.
Given: Your audience has expectations.

When we talk about the best, and easiest, ways to wrap these 3 “givens” together in a productive approach to building or modifying a website, there are some must-have functionalities that include calendars, downloads, images and surveys. We find that WordPress is the best, and easiest, way to take action!

EVENT CALENDAR
Keep your audience in the know regarding important dates that may include special releases of content, speaking engagements, conferences or significant live events. A quick & easy, popular & readily available solution is to include your Google Calendar on your website; there are many good plugin solutions available with WordPress. Calendars inherently denote fresh content – good for SEO.

UPLOAD/DOWNLOAD AREA
If you offer your audience podcasts, video content or PDF files, it is necessary for there to be a location where the content can be downloaded. Some businesses find advantage in having a designated download area, while others use the immediate interactivity of having downloads available as part of a specific post or page.

IMAGE GALLERY
Image galleries can enhance any website, even if the images aren’t products you sell. For artists, image galleries make even more sense, especially when the galleries display the artist’s talent. Your audience enjoys visual stimulation. The SEO consideration here is: do you have a Flickr channel, a YouTube channel or even a shareable photo album on Facebook? Having a presence in these areas, and linking that to you website, is good for SEO.

SURVEY TOOL
Do you care about how your audience perceives your website and brand? Are you interested in what you can do to make their experience even better? A survey on your website will give your audience the opportunity to tell you what they think. And when you publish the results of that survey, you get to do a Press Release and spread the word through all of your other channels (facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc.) – good for SEO.

These are just four examples of additional features you can add and easily manage with a WordPress-based website. Their functionality speaks directly to your audience and their benefits shout loudly at the “givens” of content and SEO. As a premier content management system (CMS), WordPress continues to add to its boastroll.

And we enjoy the boast! Let’s build your new website – your new tool to talk to your audience – with success at hand.

It Comes Up Repeatedly: Easy Blogging Steps

Repetition, when you want to do something well, is a good idea. Learn the right way to do it and then repeat, repeat, repeat, until you continually improve. Blogging is no different, nor is the need to repeatedly go back to a list or an outline of what your blogging about, why you’re blogging about it, and the basics of what any blog should include. While there are many, many lists out there and , even here you will see different variations on blogging tips, it is always good to keep the same basic principals drilled into your head.

So here you go! These 5 can help you make sure you get the most out of your blog activity; a short list of some blog framework that you can hang your quality content on:

• Be informative – you’re trying to create an impression that you are knowledgeable about your business. Your reputation matters so be sure to stay current and check your facts. Initial blog posts can include items like a history of your business and how you got started. Future blog posts can highlight new products and services, special events, employees, or tips for customers.

• Use keywords wisely – one of your goals is to increase your visibility, so it is wise to use words that people will use when searching for your types of business on the web. Each blog post should have a title as a headline that will attract attention and be relevant to the post.

• Quantity matters – in order to attract the attention of search engines, you will need to develop content with substance. A simple headline or single sentence is not going to grab someone’s attention or help get your post found on Google or Yahoo!

• Frequency matters too – if your blog content is updated and you add new information frequently, you can keep customers interested and search engines will index your pages at regular intervals.

• Grammar and spelling count – It only takes a few extra moments to check your posts before putting them on the web. Keep your posts looking professional and make sure there are no spelling errors or grammatical mistakes. You can create your content in Microsoft Word, check for spelling and grammar errors and then paste it into your blog.

Need help setting up the tech side of your blog? Just want to have some help putting it together? We’re just a call or click away…. and it won’t cost an arm & a leg.

WordPress 3.0 Released

After a half year’s work, the developers are going to get some rest and their byproduct is running happily into the jungle.

WordPress 3.0 has been released. The folks over at WP have dubbed their latest and greatest as “Thelonius.” At the time of this post being published, I am still doing research as to the origin of the dub – my guess, it’s going to be a humor-added discovery.

You can now take WP 3.0 for a test drive and check out the many new features that are available. Head over to www.wordpress.org for the free download, the Famous 5 Minute Install Guide, or the full-blown documentation and support resources. Many people already use WordPress for many things other than just blogging but this release will certainly create opportunities for managing content even more effortlessly than before.

WordPress was first released in 2003 as a content management system intended for bloggers, and today is regarded as the most popular blogging software available and a CMS-favorite of professionals and do-it-yourselfers, alike. WordPress is constantly being upgraded with great new features that make it possible to use it as a full website CMS instead of just a blogging platform. Many blogs and even large business sites are using WordPress as their CMS: CNN, Wall Street Journal, Nikon, Pepsi, etc. No question about it, WordPress 3.0 has extended the possibilities for creating a full website with a user-friendly CMS for clients.

New Menu Management Feature

In my opinion, this is one of the most noteworthy new features with WordPress 3.0, and it’s included in the default installation. Before this, it was possible to create a dynamic menu with some plugins and/or WordPress ninja skills. But it was never very easy to accomplish and now they’ve made it super simple.

You can add pages, categories, and even custom website links. With the custom website links option, you could link straight to a post, another website, whatever you want. It’s very user-friendly and setup similar to the current sidebar widget area where you can easily drag and drop to customize it just the way you like.

Custom Post Types

Currently, you can only create pages and posts with WordPress. In 3.0, you can create your own custom post types, and set up the appropriate fields to go along with each. When a user chooses a new post type, something like a Podcast, they will just add a podcast, simple as that. You don’t need to walk your clients through a complicated process and explain why they need to add a new post for a podcast and then click on a certain category and fill in a certain custom field. It’s one step now, and clients will love the simplicity. It does require the use of a plugin, but before it required much more work to setup.

Multi-User

WordPress MUhas been around as a separate entity for a while but will now be integrated in WordPress 3.0. MU allows you to maintain multiple sites from a single admin panel. It’s great for anyone that runs more than one site or blog and would like the simplicity of logging in once and maintaining them all from one place. This is especially helpful if these sites share content, templates, or plugins. One installation means less work and less time to create the same thing.

This isn’t completely setup in the default installation, but it’s fairly easy to get it up and going. First add this line to wp-config.php.

define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

Now “Network” will appear under Tools in the main menu. Once there, fill in the Network Title, Admin Email Address and press Install. WordPress gives you the option to set these sites up under sub domains or sub directories. If you’ve installed this version of WordPress in a sub directory or you’re using localhost, WordPress requires that you use sub directories.

Other Noteworthy Features

You can now choose your own username and password in the installation process, no more auto generated passwords using the admin username. Not only is this cool, but also a significant security improvement.

The new default theme, Twenty Ten, is nicer. It’s clean and lightweight with minimal style attributes.

I’m looking forward to a couple of things with WP 3.0: Getting our existing clients upgraded, and then proactively using 3.0 for as many new website installations as possible. At SafeHouse Web, I think it’s important to stay as close to the leading edge in a new Release Version – while many people will remain complacent with their WP 2.9 (or earlier) installations (which are very strong platforms, don’t get me wrong), I have experienced the benefits of being able to confidently tell my clients that they are getting the best, newest WP version to run their business website.

How Do I Optimize My Site

Optimize it for humans, and it will be optimal for engines, too:

1. Publish good material.
2. Publish good material well! Standards for online content authors
3. Link to good material.

OK, maybe that’s not the complete story but it’s the best you can get in a short answer. To quote Michael Torbert, maintainer of “All in One SEO Pack”, the most popular WordPress plugin currently:

The biggest thing, of course, for SEO [...] is content. That will never change and it’s become increasingly, more and more important [...] as the search engines get better and better determining what is on your page and parsing through all that data. So, having good content is the key.

Michael Torbert, AKA hallsofmontezuma, in: “All In One SEO To Go”

With that said, search engines can always use a little help to index a website better. There are two very popular WordPress plugins suited for this.

“Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress” is a must-have. It automates the generation of an XML sitemap, a document recommended by the search companies themselves.

An XML sitemap tells web crawlers (also known as “spiders”, “robots” or just “bots”) where to find the content to be indexed. So, everything is indexed, even pages with no links, internal or external, pointing to them. An XML sitemap helps crawlers in other ways too. For instance, when a crawler sees the same content repeated in the home page and in the permalink of an individual post, it does not have to work too hard to decide which to give more weight to: it just looks at the XML sitemap, and learns that the main and permanent location is the permalink.

XML sitemaps and sitemap pages in websites are DIFFERENT things. The former are unstyled XML documents meant for web crawlers. The latter provide an index, an overview of the site’s content, for human visitors.

“All in One SEO Pack”, the other very popular SEO plugin, does various kinds of optimization. One is similar in purpose to XML sitemaps: It adds noindex tags (“do not index this”) to pages that duplicate content (category pages, tag pages, etc.), so that crawlers can work better.

It can also rewrite page titles, add meta descriptions, and more — see its page for details.

• Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress
• All in One SEO Pack

Both plugins work fine in their default settings. Just install and activate.