Pacific Business Tips

Posts Tagged ‘Small’

Many couples are pursuing joint careers and also trying to raise a family. Unfortunately the demands of family life get in the way of these careers and suffer as a result. Many moms and dads have made the choice to make their families the priority and as a result have had to give up their careers. There are other choices that also have flexibility built in which allow both to coexist. We will review this concept in more detail throughout this article.

You are in a staff meeting with your boss and suddenly the phone rings. One of your children needs help at school or day care. Of course there is no hesitation, since your family comes first, you leave the meeting to deal with the situation at hand. As you are leaving, you glance at your boss who is wondering why you have rudely left his or her meeting. You wonder, will this be held against me? Will my next raise or promotion be delayed? Will that plum assignment go to the next person?

Many people have experienced this situation and realize that families come first and they just have to take their lumps as they come, negotiating the best deal they can relative to employment, raises and promotion.

A small business on the other hand offers much more flexibility, especially one that you operate out of your home. There is flexibility regarding when you do your work as long as you meet your customers deadlines. Now you can take the kids to school, dentist and doctor appointments without a seconds thought. Catching up can be done anytime, even after the kids have gone to bed. This flexibility provides many people with much more peace of mind and an overall improved quality of life, which is almost unknown for the corporate employee.

There is a down side, which must be managed of course. With your office in the next room, there can be a tendency to work longer hours even if they are early morning or late at night. Many small business owners, while enjoying the flexibility they have to work when they want actually find that they are working more hours than the average employee would. Finding the right balance between your personal life and work life is always a challenge even for those folks who enjoy the flexibility of running a small business out of their homes.

The best part of course is that you are the boss and when one of your children calls, there is no hesitation to help out and certainly no concern about what the boss is going to be thinking!

If you have a website of your own for your small business first of all congratulations. Many of you competitors do not have one yet. You have a leg up on them. For those that do have their own website they may not have it optimized for the maximum results from the search engines.

Here are a few ways you can get a leg up on them with proper search engine optimization for your small business website.

1. Duplicate Content: As a general rule keep all of the content on your website fresh and original. Don’t use someone else’s content unless you have paid for it and it is 100% yours to copyright.

2. Links: Outgoing links are bad. Incoming links are good. Internal linking to other pages within your site are good. Use hyperlinked keyword phrases to tell the search engines and your visitors what the page is about.

3. Keyword Density: Keep you keyword density at 2%-5% per page. This means that if you have an article of 400 words on the page don’t use your primary or secondary keyword phrases more than 20 times. Personally I think that is to much and would shoot for 8-10 times. More than that and it sounds like spamming and it probably is.

4. Title Tag: Keep you words to a minimum and include your primary kewyord and secondary keyword one time.

5. Description Tag. Keep your words to a minimum and include your primary and secondary keywords to describe what your web page is about

6. Keyword Tag. These do not serve much of a benefit from a search engine optimization standpoint, but it is o.k. to include 2 or 3 as they relate to your page.

7. Alt Text. Search engines can not read pictures, only words. So tell them again what your site is about by including your primary and secondary keywords followed by the word graphic or image.

8. Headline Tags. h1, h2, h3 followed by the keywords in order of importance. Then use those again one time in the body of the text following the headline tag.

9. Bold, underline and italicize your primary keyword one time in the first paragraph only. Use keyword variation throughout the page without any bolding, underlining or italicizing. Bold your primary keyword one more time in the last paragraph and finally again as the last word in the bottom of the page.

Search engine optimization for your small business website is really all about making it easy for a search engine to understand what your page is about. The easier you make it for them the better they will rank you for that keyword search.

When you start up a small business, one of the questions you need to address is what software is essential to my business?  As a small business consultant, I have seen many companies, owner managed businesses and sole traders start up and be faced with this question, invariably linked to very scarce capital resources. The main purpose is to get software that can quickly sort out complex data and unburden the computer with the help of a fast processor in a stable manner.

Although there are other software suites available, available in a number of versions, Microsoft Office provides the essential applications and is the most commonly used.  For business purposes, the options open to you are; Office Standard, Small Business, Professional or Ultimate.

Microsoft Office Standard 2007:

The entry level for Office, this version includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.  These are the basic essentials of most businesses, a word processor (Word) a spreadsheet (Excel) a  presentation package (PowerPoint) and a combined email, calendar/ diary, address book function (Outlook).

Microsoft Office Small Business 2007:

The Small Business version includes all the above applications with the addition of Publisher 2007 while the Outlook version includes Business Contact Manager, which helps you to organise all your business contacts, rather like an rudimentary CRM system.  Publisher is a desktop publisher package, designed to help you create publications and marketing material.  In fact, this can really help you to save money.  You can create your own letterhead, business cards and compliment slips and print them off as required, rather than go to the expense buying several hundred from a commercial printer.

Microsoft Office Professional 2007:

This  version includes everything above and includes Access 2007.  This database is invaluable if you need to handle large volumes of data and want to make it relational, such as contact lists, orders and stock.  It includes templates of common applications and is reasonably easy to use.

Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007:

Probably a bit over the top for a start up, comprising as it does, all the above applications with OneNote 2007, Groove 2007 and InfoPath 2007 as well.  OneNote is an extremely flexible application that allows you to keep unstructured notes in a series of tabs.  For example, if you are researching product lines, you could keep screen shots, URLs, and competitive information, all in the same place.  When the business is larger and can justify a server, OneNote is an invaluable area to let your employees keep ideas and brainstorming thoughts.

Groove  is another application that is really designed for use by a number of people on a network.  It helps you to keep common files in one place and notifies those people who need to access them when there are any changes to those files.  InfoPath is an application that allows you to create forms used to gather data which can be used in conjunction with databases or online.  As the forms are based on XML, they have extensive applications in Ecommerce.

Of course, every business has different needs, so you will need to choose the version most applicable to your requirements.