The government will be starting back the ARC loans (more info) which will given struggling businesses up to $35,000 to borrow interest free.

ARC loans are supposed to help the small businesses which are stuggling due to the economy and thus the fact that there are fewer customers, and the customers are buying less.  ARC loans are to help bridge that gap in income, and help you remain solvent while looking for new opportunities.

Many businesses are turning to the Internet to find new customers, but they are sure how.  Evidence of that is the fact that 90% of small and medium businesses quit using pay-per-click and related on-line ads after only 6 months. If you want to use your ARC funds to help you expand your business, you need to work with someone who specializes in small businesses.

This is because many business owners, while excellent at what they do, do not know how to properly set up and run their website, and many web designers, don’t know how to help clients once the website is launched.  I work exclusively with small businesses to help them be successful, often staying with them months after the launch to make sure the website is doing what it needs to do to help them be successful in getting new customers.

Likewise, some companies try to work with anyone, small, medium, and large, and they treat them all the same.  I only work with small businesses and I am a small business, so I understand the need to be quick to change, cost effective, and how to create that personal experience on-line.

If you need, I can help your business make more money on-line through my experince in Search Engine Optimization, website optimization (both speed and customer experience), pay-per-click campaigns, and more.  Contact me if you need help.

There are lots of interesting theories out there about how one can get there site to rank better in search engines. Unfortunately much of this advice, while it would make since, is wrong.

One example is that correct, valid HTML code is important for search engines to read your website, and thus for you rank highly.

This makes sense for several reasons:

• bad code may not be read by a search engine as it doesn’t know what it sees,
• search engines want to promote good code, to clean the web of garbage, or even
• bad coding appears unprofessional, and therefore is likely to be web spam/fraudulent/etc.

Unfortunately, there is little evidence that any of these statements are true.

First, lets consider that it is estimated that over 99% of the web is made up on invalid HTML code [source]. If this is the case, could you imagine being the search engine which cannot read those pages, or which pages you would be able to read. A search engine which only searched valid HTML pages would find so little, that no one would really use it.

Search engines, while many do claim they want to promote good clean HTML pages, also realize search engines need to promote finding appropriate information on the web. While a web designed might find valid HTML important, the common user is more interested in finding out about the new digital camera, how to download a ring tone to his phone, or other related information.

Of course the proof is in the pudding, as they say. So I took several random search queries.  If the given hypothesis is true, then the top search engine rankings will have clean, or nearly clean code.

The first item I searched for was “shoes”. The top three results, in order was:

• Shoes.Com - has 253 errors and 124 warnings on there homepage [source]
• Zappos.com - has 144 errors and 101 warnings [source]
• payless.com/store/ - has 81 errors and 22 warnings [source]

I also checked two other popular search terms “travel”, (expedia.com with 154 Errors and 194 warnings [source]) and doctor (webmd.com/physician_finder/ with 101 Errors and 32 warnings [source]).

Given that these are popular search terms, one would think that search engines code find plenty of valid HTML webpages. However, it decides to rank these.  And as you can see with the shoes examples, the further down in the search results you went, the “better” the web page.  So, based upon this basic information, I would have to say that any boost a search engine gives you based upon valid HTML code is limited or more likely imaginary.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Does this mean we shouldn’t develop valid HTML websites? NO!

Instead, look at developing content which a search engine wants to see. I assume that if my browsers can read it, the major search engines can read it. We should develop new code to be valid, but not worry about fixing old code if it is working. There are clearly other things that we can do to make our sites more search engine friendly.

Previously, I’ve talked about optimizing your website to improve how fast it loads.  This not only improves the perception of your site, but also how likely it is for people to stay and make a purchase, or request more information.

Optimizing your site for sales isn’t as easy as optimizing your site for speed. When we want to increase speed we know many ways to improve the performance.  We can modify files to be smaller, have files load in a different order, move the server to a faster computer, etc.

However, modifying your site to increase it’s sales requires knowing your users and testing assumptions.

Recently I was helping a client test her website to get more conversions. While using the same traffic gathering methods previously used, she noticed  a whopping 500% improvement in lead generation during the first month alone. Another client saw improvements of over 40%.

So what do you change?

There are several things which you can easily change to find improvements.

• Improve your site speed - whie not directly related, Google  notices a 20% drop in usage for every half a second slower their web page is.  If your users leave early, they cannot buy from you, or contact you for more information.
• Change headers - the client who noticed a 500% improvement, tried three different headers. Her original, and 2 new headers on the conversion page. One header did worse, and was pulled half way through the test, the other blew the first out of the water.
• Change images - pictures can tell a thousand words -  so picking the right one is important. The client with a 40% improvement got it from picking the right images to let his customers know about additional items for sale.

There are of course others, such as the call to action, guarantees, opening paragraphs, etc. When you test these, you can see improvements in how much and how often you sell.

If you need help with optimizing your site, contact me and we can start working on your site.

Yahoo recently updated one of their tools for grading and optimizing websites.  It’s called YSlow, and it checks your site for several different decisions and tools which you (or your web designer) may have implemented.

YSlow is an add on to the Firebug tool which is a Firefox extension - so at this point, you can’t run it in any other browser, however both Firefox and Firebug are free tools so there is no cost to you other than time.

YSlow is nice because it rates things on a scale of A to F, for each of numerous categories.  It also gives a numeric score for the overall grade. By having it calculate where the biggest improvements could come from - it lets you quickly find areas to optimize. With the previous version, I took one website which had a horrible score of 18 (out of 100), and in an afternoon with some minor changes, brought it up to a 32.

Other websites I’ve taken from a 55-60 range and gotten them into the 80s - usually within just a few days, depending upon the complexity of the site.

Users perceive your site partially in how fast it responds - so the faster your site, the more likely they are to make purchases or other related decisions, so optimizing your site’s speed can be very important to the health of your site.