While your services and products are often enough to get people to visit your website, that doesn`t mean they`ll buy. Often, people are looking for more information before they invest in a product or service, so your small business content can do just that.

You will find that if you educate your clients, they will be more interested in buying your products. Just think about it for a minute. If you are going to buy some vitamins, you want to know which type is best first. Do you buy a multi-vitamin? Individual bottles of vitamins? If a website has articles that tell you just what each vitamin does and gives you the lowdown on which to choose, chances are you`ll buy from them, as opposed to a site that gives you no information.

Having some decent content on your business website isn`t enough. It needs to actually inform and be of higher quality. For this reason, many businesses are now turning to blogs to provide frequent updates for potential clients.

Small businesses grow best if they include content. By educating your customer, you`re creating a loyal client.

Having a business website isn`t enough to gain popularity with the search engines. SEO will definitely help, but if you only have a sales page and an order form, there isn`t really much to draw people. That`s why so many small business websites contain much more than just this.

You`ll find that having content on your small business website is a great way to not only boost your search engine ranking, but also to keep people coming back for more information. Even if you decide against going with a blog, you can add informative articles to your business site.

Educated readers often become clients. Once they`ve learned what they need to know about the industry and how products or services like yours can help them, they are far more likely to buy than someone who has simply landed on your sales page.

Content will give your visitors a reason to come back or bookmark your website and that`s always a good thing. Encouraging people to learn more about what you offer can only be good for you.

You’ve heard all the advice and you’re still stuck with the question, “What does it mean to produce quality content?” It’s a good question.

You might think, by listening to all the SEOs out there, that quality content is content that gets you good rankings. Well, not necessarily. Sure, if you don’t rank well for your key terms then having the best content in the world won’t matter as you likely won’t be getting much traffic. But there is always PPC.

But what about that content? I’m going to try to define what good content is and let’s see if we can nail it down.

Good content is content that appeals to your target customer. In other words, it’s just what they were looking for. For instance, if you are a local shoe store then you’ll want to write content that will invite people into your store to buy shoes. Not fluff. Real, valuable content. That requires understanding the needs of your customers.

You’ll have to ask yourself all the same questions you would ask for any other marketing campaign: What demographic do we serve? How far will people drive? etc. But you’ll also need to ask whether or not you want to sell through your website. If so, then your content needs to sell. If the goal is to motivate your customer to drive to your brick and mortar store then your content needs to be geared that way. But always, always it needs to be about shoes. That’s what you customer is there for, right?

Blame it on Google. They went Chrome.

Yes, Google is introducing its own browser, but that’s not the subject of this blog post. Instead, I’d like to discuss how they are marketing it - through an online comic book. How innovative!

Yes, this is a great concept and it’s the kind of online marketing that companies need to be thinking about doing these days. It’s creative, it’s informative, it creates a buzz. My guess is that Google’s online comic book marketing their new browser, aptly titled “Chrome”, will get a lot of inbound links. Not just because it’s Google, but because it’s good marketing. The comic book is well laid out, well thought out, provides lots of useful information, and breaks down technical jargon into everyday language. If your company isn’t doing this kind of marketing online then you need to study Google’s playbook.

Templates are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you can build a website fast using a template and make it look the way you want it to look with no problems. But not all templates are created equal.

The one thing to look out for when you use a template is the source code. You want to make sure the template is easily crawled by the search engines. Otherwise, it won’t matter at all how attractive your website is.

A good template should be written with html, not Flash, and not primarily in Javascript. CSS and php are OK, but in my experience they work better as support rather than primary code. I’ve seen good templates based on tables, though you get a lot more code with tables than you do with CSS and that will increase your code-to-text ratio. Still, if you are building a local website where the competition is slim then that won’t matter much. In a more competitive field you might opt for the CSS over the tables.

The best way to use a template, however, is to modify it for your own purposes. You might take a template and use it exactly as it is, but I’d recommend altering it whenever possible for several reasons:

1. You don’t want your website looking like everyone else’s. While it is highly unlikely that two people in the same industry will pick the exact same template and make their sites look just alike, it is possible. Take the extra step to prevent that by altering your template somewhat.
2. A modified template is more unique. You will undoubtedly have special needs that will have to be considered. Altering a template to meet those needs will make your life on the Web much easier.
3. You learn more. When building your website, you don’t learn anything by taking a template and using it as it is. You’ll learn a lot more about coding if you practice and the best practice is on a template where the code is already laid out for you, but you have the option to modify it. That way, if you screw something up you can alway go back to the original version and start over.
4. SEO. This is the most important thing. Not all templates are SEO-friendly. You want yours to be. By modifying the code, if your template doesn’t start out search engine friendly then you can make it search engine friendly with the right modifications.

That’s it. Have fun with your new web template.

If you are worried about duplicate content on your website or blog, good! You should be. But you can worry yourself to death, too, and it’s not really necessary.

You’ll hear people talk about the “duplicate content penalty.” It’s not really a penalty, though. If you have duplicate content on your website you won’t be penalized, per se. But the duplicate content won’t benefit you either. That is, it won’t be listed in the search engines. How does this truth apply?

First, if you have content that appears more than once on your own website then you have virtually little to worry about. Google will index one of the pages and not the other. If you want Google to index a particular page, but not the other one then you can “noindex” the page that you don’t want Google to index. Pretty simple, right?

But if you are borrowing content from elsewhere on the web that belongs to someone else (make sure you aren’t violating anyone’s copyright - that’s a more serious offense!) then your biggest concern should be legal, not search. More than likely, if you don’t have permission to publish that content then you’ll get a cease and desist letter before having your ISP pull the plug on your site, but that’s a danger. If you do have permission to publish the content then the only issue you’ll face is the search engines not listing that content in their indexes. Again, it’s not really a penalty. You’re not going to lose anything; you just won’t gain anything.

So what can you do to avoid the duplicate content issue? Here are some ideas:

• Use articles from article directories
• Write all original content
• Borrow snippets, not whole pages, and add at least as much original content as you borrow
• Add a “noindex” tag on the page with the duplicate content
• Ask Google not to crawl pages you don’t want indexed
• Stick to print collateral

Yes, if you stick to print collateral then you don’t have to worry about the duplicate content issue, but you will have to worry about the rising cost of printing - paper, ink, equipment, maintenance, etc. At least online you don’t have to worry about paying someone else’s fuel bills.

There are many places online where you can get photos for your blog or website. But do you know where the stock photos to fill those sites come from?

Generally, stock photos are provided by freelance photographers and average people just like you. If you have a digital camera then you can be a contributor. But many of the photos are hard to come by on your own and that’s why it’s important to use stock photo sites. Many of them allow you to use your photos online or in print.

If you have a need, for instance, of a photo of Mount Rushmore and you live in Alaska you’ll have to travel a long way to get your photo. But you can download that photo online from a stock photo website. Usually, a person who lives in the area of Mount Rushmore, or who may have visited the site, uploaded the photo and is paid a commission based on the number of downloads for that photo.

Stock photo websites I recommend include:

• iStock
• Fotosearch
• Getty Images
• Shutter Stock
• Stock Vault

Should you worry about duplicate content? Generally, I’d say no. The search engines do a really good job at filtering out duplicate content and they don’t penalize webmasters for having duplicate content. They simply filter out the duplicate and credit the original. That said, there are two types of duplicate content to concern ourselves with:

• Internal website duplicate content issues
• Duplicate content on another website

Sometimes you might inadvertently create duplicate content on two separate pages of your website. If you want one of those sites to rank higher than the other (in other words, one of them is more important than the other) then you can give instructions to the search engines to crawl one and not crawl the other within your robots.txt file. That should fix the duplicate content issue for you.

With duplicate content that appears on other sites, this usually happens because someone has scraped your content and are trying to profit from it in some way. If you notice that one of these sites is ranking higher for your content than you are then you might want to check your own sitemap to see if you updated the page and also check your robots.txt file to see if you blocked the search engines from crawling the page. Be sure that you are operating within webmaster guidelines. If you are out of compliance with search engine guidelines then getting yourself in line with those guidelines should fix any issues.

Ways that you can prevent other websites from ranking higher for you content include:

• Keeping your RSS feeds active
• Social bookmarking your web pages
• Doing some link building to your original content pages

Stick to traditional SEO techniques and you should be fine. For more information on duplicate content issues, check out the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

The first step toward getting people to buy from you online is to get them to your website. That can be done in a myriad of ways, but perhaps the best method is via website content. When someone is ready to buy, they may be willing to jump onto a sales page and make a purchase immediately, but most of the time, you´ll need to warm them up first and content does a great job of that.

Your content doesn´t have to be written by you, necessarily, but it does need to be true and offer information that your readers can actually use. This will keep them coming back for more and they may even mention your website to friends. It´s said that it takes an average of 7.2 times seeing the same ad before a person is ready to buy. You can give them repeated views of your ads by simply mentioning your services at the end of the articles or linking to your sales page within the article.

Website content is a valuable method of keeping visitors on your site, but it is also good at getting them to click on your link when it comes up in the search engines. If you have keyword optimized web content, your articles will tend to appear in the search results for those keywords, depending on how well the page is optimized. The blurb below the title is what decides if people will click through to your site or not. The more interesting the content, the more likely they are going to want to read the rest of it.

Once someone reaches your website, they will be drawn in by the other website content that you have to offer and hopefully will find enough useful information that they´ll decide you know what you´re talking about and buy or take any other action that you want them to, like signing up for your email newsletter. Content is king, as they say and it really does work to keep people interested in your business website.

Aaron Wall is predicting a decline in content quality. If he’s correct in his predictions then 2008 will be a bad year for content developers. But what does that mean for the small business owner?

One thing it means is that small business owners going online for the first time to build their presence in the great unwashed WWW will have to work harder to produce original content of high quality. It will likely also increase the value of real quality content. If you rely on ghostwriters to produce your content then the price you pay may rise. It could also mean that many sources of information online that have traditionally relied on outside linking may all start pointing inward. Will outbound linking die? According to Aaron Wall, that’s possible.

Actually, his exact words were:

And linking out will still help too, assuming you pay your content writers based on something other than pageviews.

But content sites like Associated Content and a few up-and-coming others are starting to pay their writers according to page views and click throughs on the ads they sell. That won’t fare well for content development over the long haul. If you really want quality content you’ll have to hire quality writers. Or do it yourself.