•Merchant Credit Card Processing Services: Easy, Cheap and Necessary
Your online business needs to accept credit cards. That’s true whether your business is the next ebay or you’re just selling your old collectibles on ebay. You’re simply holding your business back if you don’t accept the payment method of choice of the internet. Sadly, many people think they won’t qualify for a new merchant account to accept credit cards, or that it will be too expensive or complicated. That might have been true a few years ago, but not anymore.
Why Anyone Can Accept Credit...
•Business Web Content Writing Success: Scan-Ability
Scan-ability is a measured, objective, scientifically proven criterion of successful written web content. While making content easier for users to scan rather than read word-for-word involves a number of factors, simply re-structuring web content into sections and lists can yield stunning improvements.
Proven Web Content Success Factor: Scan-ability
I've found that scan-able content written with web publication in mind seriously out-performs content that was written as though for print:
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•Buying Furniture Online Can Be Safer than Offline
Furniture sales have historically been a major area of consumer complaints. Luckily, there are a number of reasons why buying furniture online may be safer than offline.
No Fast-Talking Salesmen
Many complaints say the furniture salesperson made promises that were not kept. In reality, furniture salespeople don't always know what they're talking about. The actual fulfillment of furniture orders is often handled by a different department, or even a different company.
Not having salespeople...
•Web Content Mass + Keyword Optimization + Links = SEO
How does web content really affect SEO? It's often said that the answer is simply that content does not affect SEO very much–it's all about more technical issues. Yet a website's content still plays an enormous and fairly direct role in search engine ranking.
Of course, the whole goal of the search engines' ranking schemes is precisely to deliver good, relevant content to users. The mechanism for how search engines select and reward good, relevant content is essentially just a technical...
•Grow Your B2B Small Business without More Marketing
Want to grow your business-to-business small business without chasing after new clients? Expand with new value-added services that complement your existing offering. Find out how.
If you have a business-to-business small business, some of your clients inevitably will go out of business, get bought out, undergo management shake-ups, or just get seduced by a new vendor. You have to grow your business just to stay in business.
But how?
• Undertake costly and time-consuming marketing and...
•Wedding Planning on the Web
Planning a wedding? Whether you're a wedding planning pro or a do-it-yourself bride, I know one thing you don't: you aren't using the web enough.
The web has become the dominant way to shop for electronics, travel, cars, housing, even education. But you can just as easily use the web to find caterers, event halls, dressmakers, DJs, photographers, videographers--even a wedding planner if you decide to take a break from doing it all yourself.
Here's how the web helps you plan a wedding:
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•Google's Good Writing Content Filter
The web pages actually at the top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. Don't let the usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, frames, and JavaScript, distract you from the importance of good content.
I was recently struck by the fact that the top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what one reads on the web. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing. Does Google, the world's...
•Stealth Web Advertising Tactics of "Illegal" Sites
Advertising a website is never easy. But imagine how much harder it would be if advertising your website were illegal.
Gambling websites face just that challenge in reaching US and Canadian audiences. In both countries, the government has put media outlets on notice that accepting advertising from gambling websites is illegal. (Note: in the US, at least, the industry disputes this, and charges have never been filed by the US or Canadian federal governments.)
The sites have come up with...
•Small Business Web Shopping Cart Software: 7 Reasons Hosted Is Better
Why should you pay for a remotely hosted shopping cart for your small business website, rather than just install a free OpenSource shopping cart on your site?
There are a lot of reasons:
1) Focus. Your business is selling stuff, not installing and managing a complicated script. You'll have enough issues running a business that you won't be able to outsource to someone else the way you can with a shopping cart script.
2) Price. Paid hosted shopping cart software's price is inconsequential:...
•Web Business: What's in a (Domain) Name? For Casino Sites, a Lot
You've seen them before and wondered what the heck they were thinking: small businesses with domain names like reallylonganduniquebusinessname.biz. Half-out-loud you say: what, was reallylonganduniquebusinessname.com taken? A new advertising technique of illegal casino websites helps prove that your snickering is absolutely justified.
Cheapskates and Johnny-dot-Com-Lately's
If you've consulted for small business websites as long as I have, you have probably encountered more than a few whose...
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