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How To Climb Up The Online Business Mountain

28th February 2012 13 Replies Nick

If you have ever participate in an outdoor activity, especially mountain hiking, you will agree with me that it has a lot in common with the strategic steps we ought to go through before expecting rewarding online business success.

Just like outdoor activities start from recording a list of the necessary gear to use, succeeding in online business also involves a strategic approach of proper self organization, from getting the required working materials to effective time management.

Even while there is already a lot of fun in working from home, it also comes with some time and self management challenges which often keep most of us from climbing up the online business mountain and achieving total control and freedom.

Climb the mountain to online business success

For an effective approach towards achieving online business success, we have to pay attention to the following:

Effective Time Management

This is the most important factor that determines the level we can reach as online business owners. Ineffective time management can ruin our progress and deter us from achieving the great heights. For effective time management, we need to:

Schedule our time: Doing the dishes, laundry, coking and some other household activities are going to steal your business time, if you don’t schedule them wisely.

It is true that these activities are necessary and have to be done, but you will be more productive both at your family duties and at your online business, if you schedule special periods in the day for everything you need to do in the house and for your online business as well.

Once it is the time for each of them, leave every other thing you are doing and focus on them. This will improve your concentration and ensure you accomplish more.

While these activities are inevitable, there are others, like online chats with friends, online videos and their likes are total time-suckers and should be avoided.

Stop procrastination: Once you have fixed activities for the day, don’t shift one to the next minute. If it is time to get something done, get it done. I learn this the hard way, but it is good you know that every minute of the day comes with some needs. Shifting any activity to the future will pile up with loads of other activities and eventually will overwhelm you.

Working place and passion for your job

It is critical to love your work and be able to do it in a nice and cozy place. For effectiveness in online business we need to:

Create a space and keep it organized: Even though you work from home, getting a separate office for your business will make you take it more seriously and ensure that you accomplish something on daily basis. Also, properly organizing your working space will ensure that it doesn’t repel your interest but instead, lure you to work.

Love what you do and let the others be aware too: Tell your family and friends that even though you stay at home, certain periods of the day are dedicated to your online business. They will respect this fact only when they see how bold and serious you are, and how important this is for you; hence you need to show them that commitment.

Measure your success and reward yourself: Most times, many online business owners lose hope and give up when they feel that nothing is working. Even that period is important, because you have found methods that don’t really work and you just need to concentrate to do things differently. However, find a way to measure your success, even if it is the little things you accomplish in your day, and reward yourself for that by taking yourself out, watching your favorite TV series, etc.

With all these been cleared up, you have built a strategic plan and you’re ready to go. Pack your backpack with all these necessary gear and with determination hit the trail to online business success. The path won’t be easy, but you will be prepared.

Tips to improve your mobile SEO

14th February 2012 8 Replies William Taylor

Mobile search engines contain different algorithms and bots than used for traditional web searches. They evaluate websites as it is being rendered on a mobile phone. The ranks are computed based on how well the page is rendered for the phone that submits the queries. One thing you can do to improve your mobile SEO is to make verify the user agents, and the mobile crawlers can pick up your content.

Mobile phone search engines are not as finely tuned as traditional search engines. They are still placing tons of weight on bounce rates and using mobile visitors as barometers for how websites renders on phones.

One neat suggestion in improving your mobile search results is to follow traditional SEO strategies. Mobile indexes and bots determine different from web search. The differences entail things such as alt tags; heading tags and title tags are still dominant with mobile SEO.

After performing traditional SEO strategies, it proves necessary to create a secondary mobile sheet from your website. This will allow for formatting of existing pages to be viewed on mobile phones without having to create separate content. It gives you strength with the SEO value that you have already performed on your website minus creating new pages. You can use the mobile style sheet to assist in blocking things from being rendered with using a “display: none” on the style sheet. All mobile phones with the exception of iPhones can automatically pull the “handheld” style sheet.

iPhones determine different with not searching for mobile “handheld” style sheets. In addressing this critical problem, ensure that you copy your handheld sheet, and create on that is geared for the iPhone. The iPhone is meant to render entire website pages, and people statistically still prefer mobile-formatted content on their iPhones.

Sometimes, mobile search engines will rank traditional pages but consider them ill-suited for rending on mobile phones even with mobile-specific style sheets. When this happens, the mobile search engine will rank the traditional content but “transcode” it for viewing on mobile phones.

Transcoded versions of websites are hosted on temporary subdomains on search engine’s domains. Typically, this provides a user experience that proves under-optimized. This is because navigation sometimes is broken or misplaced and the individual pages are separated into different pages for faster downloading. This can prove problematic when it comes to tracking activity on your mobile website, and if someone links to your content, the website might not receive credit for the links. Address this problem with a “no-transform”header of your content. The no-transform in the cache-control should stop transcoding.

Next, you should include a mobile-site map. Google provides tools that can help you in building one of these. For website owners using multiple-markup languages such as WML (Wireless Markup Language) or XHTML, you should submit separate mobile sitemaps per languages being used on the website. Ensure that you link to mobile site maps in your robots.txt file, the same as you would for traditional site maps.

When you are submitting a mobile site map, add the mobile style sheet and the no-transform tag for this should confirm fitting in getting the mobile search engines to rank your content. Another excellent tip is to make sure your traditional content will work on mobile phones. This will provide the best chance of faring well with higher numbers of browsers and phones.

If your content on your website does not include external style sheets, or contains sloppy code or too many media files, the content will have problems rending on mobile phones. You might want to make mobile-specific content on a mobile sub-directory or sub-domain. This can generate tons of problems for SEO strategists because it can end-up splitting traffic and links between two sets of similar pages.

You should use a “handheld” style sheet with the no-transform designation. You can also re-arrange code so that it proves more suited for crawling and rendering. Redirection and browser-detection and self-selection are how websites and mobile phones interact with one another. Browser detection and re-direction is the process that appears to see what browser the website visitor is using to access your website. If the mobile browser is requesting the traditional website, a single PHP script can redirect the user to the mobile phone website. If a browser is requesting the mobile website, it can redirect them to the traditional website. This proves helpful if your website out-ranks your mobile website in mobile searches.

When you think of mobile SEO, the act alone proves dangerous to create a duplicate copy of your website and placing it in a sub-domain. Most website owners think that mobile phones are capable of interpreting the duplication, but unbelievably, they can become confused. When confusion occurs, your new mobile content has a very-little chance of outranking your traditional website in the mobile searches. Redirection and browser-detection should take care of these issues, but there is always a chance of duplicate content taking away value from the content located on the main website.

If this happens, you can try using a canonical tag that will promote the value from your mobile website back to your main website. You can then rely on your browser-detection and re-direction to take care of it. What proves dangerous in this scenario is that you might hurt your rankings for searches on the primitive mobile phones. The reason is that you are pushing the total SEO value into non-mobile content.

Pinterest Shares Photos and Attracts Blog Visitors

8th February 2012 7 Replies Tammi Kibler

I have not had a lot of experience with Pinterest yet, but one night last week, I put up a bulletin board with photos from recipes on my quinoa blog, and I was impressed with the initial response. I received about a dozen email notifications within minutes. New people were following me or my quinoa recipe board; pinners were repinning my photos.
The next day, my analytics showed nineteen new visitors to my blog from Pinterest. Mind you, all I did was “pin” the photos, I didn’t go out looking for followers or asking for people to like me.

I haven’t figured out how to fully exploit this yet. Pinterest is a very photo-oriented social media sharing site, where each photo is also a link back to an original blog post or web page.

Recipe Blogs on Pinterest

For a cooking blog, it is a no brainer. Pin a photo of each recipe and your board looks like this. (You can click on the photo to see how this looks on the site.)

Notice that each photo bears the domain name, great for branding.

I imagine any blog could benefit from setting up a board for its blog posts. You could even create category boards if you wanted to.

Pinning is very easy. You can click and drag a Pin It icon to put in your bookmarks toolbar.

When you see a post you want to pin:

Highlight and copy the text you will associate with the photo.
Then click Pin It icon in your bookmark toolbar.

In the window that pops up:

Choose the exact image you want;
Choose the correct board;
Verify text is already auto-filled with the text you copied. If not you will have to fill it in.

I set up my board in about fifteen minutes. Now that it is in place, I can add pinning to the list of promotional tasks I will do for each new blog post.

Pinterest is still in beta and requires an invitation to join. If you would like to test it for organizing your favorite visuals on the web or promoting your blog, please feel to ask in the comments. I will send a Pinterest invite to the email you use to comment.

If you have experience using Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog, please comment below and let us know whether you feel it adds value.

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