Do you own a small business? Are you having a hard time understanding Twitter?

As a small business owner and social media user going on two years now, I can honestly say that initially I did not really see the point or power of Twitter at all.

However, after sticking it out passed the learning curve, picking up a couple of followers, and following really intelligent people, thanks to Twitter, I get to make connections and learn something new every day. In fact, at this point I feel like Twitter is a tool that all small business owners should use as part of their overall efforts to build a distributed social media footprint.

Nevertheless, if you are like many in the small business community who have tried Twitter without success, then you might be fond of saying, “I just don’t get it.”

Read the whole article by Mark Hayward on Twitip.com.  His list of 20 beginner’s tips is good advice!

Checkered Past Moving & Estate Sales specializes in estate sales on the Long Beach Peninsula. From organizing to displaying, advertising and selling households, Suzy Whittey eliminates the stress of liquidating your own personal items, or a loved one’s estate.

Suzy came to us with a clear idea of her site design, all the content (text and photos) needed to get the site off the ground, and with a clear vision of what she wanted: Her on-paper design turned into a functioning site that she could update herself.

As Sabrina said, “a little bing, bang, boom and Suzy was in the driver’s seat”. Sabrina set up the site using WordPress, customizing a theme to Suzy’s specifications and converting the text and photos into pages. She then walked Suzy through a brief training session (just under an hour) and whoosh! she was editing up a storm.

Kathy and Sabrina worked behind the scenes on some basic search engine optimization, which took longer than any of had hoped to take effect but, once the search engines finally took notice of our changes, the results have remained solid for some time.

Watch CheckeredSales.com for news of upcoming sales, or sign up for the email notifications.  Oooh!  There’s a great sale coming this weekend with two generations of railroad collectibles!  Gotta run!

…but  if I don’t, I just sit here in the dark, muddling, and I hate that.
Oh, please don’t do that!  You’re the brave one who is willing to ask.

Would you explain a little bit what you mean by  web 2.0 technologies and the “wonder of social networking”
Web 2.0 is a term that loosely defines a whole group of changes in the internet that started to happen a year or more ago.  It’s a change in the way the internet works and lets people interact online in ways like they can on facebook; having discussions, groups of people commenting, some of the things like only part of a page refreshing.  It lets you see things happening in real time.  It has a lot more to do with how things work behind the scenes.  Think of it in terms of live theater; you may see Peter Pan fly across the stage and not know how it happened or how many people did what.  But you know it’s cool!

Social Networking is another broad term and it really refers to the same thing.  It could mean a blog, which is like a running journal of a website.  It could mean twitter or facebook or youtube or myspace.  It could mean review sites like tripadvisor and yelp.  The thing they all have in common is that people can access them through computers, cell phones and other devices and interact with one another; it isn’t just the website doing all the talking; you can leave comments, have discussions, etc., in real time if everyone is at a computer.

Social Networking then, really refers to the act of interacting with others online; it is the online equivalent of a cocktail party or a women’s tea or the gang going out to dinner or a staff meeting.  It’s people getting together, in real time, interacting, just not literally standing next to one another.  Web 2.0 is the name for the technology that makes it happen.

Why it is important to your marketing plan is multi-fold.  First, it lets us put information in front of people without their coming to you.  We don’t have to send them an email to tell them what’s on your site; they sign up for RSS and get notified when something changes.  They go on facebook and get the inside track of information.  They go on YouTube and see video of your product/service.  If you aren’t there, they look at someone/somewhere else.

Also, the search engines are changing all the rules and using a presence on these social networking sites, and having social components to your own site, important to stay in their search results.

Also, more and more people are surfing the web from their phone instead of their computer, so if we don’t use web 2.0 to make our site easy to read on a cell phone, we lose them.

I could go on and on, and I will if you like.  I don’t want to overwhelm you but do want to help you understand.  So keep those questions coming!

Keleigh

Q:  I just wrote a blog post that comments on what someone else wrote.  That’s okay, isn’t it?
A: We like the rule-of-thumb that says, “If you wonder whether it’s plagiarism, it probably IS”.  Another way to think about it is to ask yourself, “Did this come 100% from my head?”  If the answer is no, cite your source at a least, link to the source when you can and asking permission is always a good thing.

Q: But I can link to other people’s sites, right?
A:  Probably, but good manners (and perhaps the law) say you should ask and, if the site owner doesn’t want you to link to them, don’t.  Blogger Brad Templeton has a nice overview of this topic which is surprisingly not as straightforward as you’d think.

Q: I used someone else’s photo, but [a] it’s for a non-profit  [b] it’s for my scrapbook [c] it’s just on my facebook [d] I just emailed it to friends.  That doesn’t break the law, does it?
A.  Yes, it does.  Taking what came from someone else’s head, be it words or photos or things or ideas, is stealing, which is what copyright is out to protect.  There are degrees of theft and consequences, but stealing is stealing.

This site has a brief overview of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Engine of Creation.

This Squidoo Lens is a quick read on plagiarism, copyright and fair use.

Keith recently enjoyed a visit from a client who maintains his own site and who we haven’t heard from in several years.   Keith had optimized the site for this fellow and achieved top-10 ranking for his chosen key words.  However, the client had noticed a quick and severe drop in his rank recently so he stopped in to see what could be done, on a tight budget, to rectify the situation.

Since Keith is retired these days, it isn’t often we get to enjoy his sage advice and experience on small projects.  The beachdog.com web team was delighted to find that we’ve learned our lessons well; Keith’s advice was exactly what we would have recommended.  So we decided to steal it and share it with you!  Ha!

Thanks for stopping in today.  A lot has changed in the web since we last worked on your site!  In December, for the first time in more than three years, Google launched an entirely new algorithm for how it ranks sites.  Bing is new and picking up speed quickly.  Microsoft and Yahoo are one search company now, with Yahoo largely running the paid advertising and the two sharing a search database.

What we’re seeing, more than anything, are changes in what the search companies think is important.  For example, your site being easy to read from a smart cell phone, load time, compatibility with social networking — things that weren’t on the search rank radar when your site was last optimized.

6 Recommendations for DIY Search Rank Improvement

1 – Join your local Visitors Bureau, Chamber, Convention Center and other travel/tourism-related organizations and buy a link from their sites to [yours].  Links to your site from other sites talking about the area, and about [your industry], will help your site rank higher.  The more popular the other site is, the better it is for your site.

2  – Complete Google Map info. Local search is increasingly used, by full-size and cell phone surfers.  Make sure Google has as much info as they’ll let you give them.  Go to http://www.google.com/lbc to sign up and claim your business so you can edit it.

2B – Sign up for Google’s Webmaster Tools. This is numbered 2B for a reason; it’s the second half of telling Google about your site.  It also helps promote your site.  http://www.google.com/webmasters/

2C – Read Google’s SEO resources for beginners. If you’re going to optimize your site on your own, this is a must-read.  Why?  Because Google has 73% of the market share of searches in the United States.  If you fail with everyone else and succeed with Google, you’re still ahead of the game.

3 – Add [key word rich] content with a focus on use of geographic keywords. In 2010, content is king.  The more you write about [your subject] and [your town name] and use the words that you think people will search for, the better your rank will be.  Hands down.

4 – YouTube videos – refresh/update photos on your site.  Name and give alt text for them using geographic keywords when possible.  More than ever, people don’t read.  They look at pictures and they watch videos.  They email pictures and videos to their friends.  If you can offer these things and make it easy for them to share, they’ll promote you.  Digital and Video cameras are available for less than $100.  Keep one of each [in your business] and pass them around.  Besides – Google owns YouTube.  When you post to YouTube and then feed it back through your site, you’re telling Google you exist and have new content for them to share for you.

5 – Update your site with WordPress.  Not only will converting your site to WordPress make it super-easy for you to keep it updated yourself and do all the things I’m talking about, above, it will make it easy to make it viewable on a smart phone and make it easy for site visitors to share about you on social networking sites.  A table-built site, like the one [this site owner has] now, is not viewable by cell phones.  Even if it were, Google is now PENALIZING sites that are table-built.  So if you’re not going to upgrade to WordPress, at least have your site rebuilt using CSS instead of tables.

6 – Change update date and copyright info. I can’t say enough about this.  If you aren’t updating the dates on your site, Google (etc) assume your info is old.  They don’t want to give their customers bad info, so your site gets pushed to the bottom of their answer pile.

Keith Schwartz, Fetching Fanatic