Free Offer: SEO audit for small Brooklyn businesses

For the month of October, I am offering a free SEO audit to any independently owned small Brooklyn business, entrepreneur, or sole proprietor with an existing web site.

What does this mean? Send me your web site address, and I will provide you with a document that details what you could be doing to drive more traffic to your web site.

You must meet the following criteria:

1. Your business must be based in Brooklyn
2. Your business must have no more than 50 employees
3. Your business must be independently owned and operated

This offer also applies to freelancers and sole proprietors such as artists, acupuncturists, etc. There’s no need to be a bricks and mortar operation in order to qualify. The offer is good October 1 – 31, 2009.

Why doesn’t anyone read my blog? 5 blogging fixes for newbies

Starting a blog is easy. But building a readership for that blog is not. If you are a small business owner, you may have decided to start a blog to bring more attention to your business. But if you thought, “If I write it they will come”, you may be wondering now where all those readers are. Here are the top 5 mistakes I’ve seen, in no particular order.

1. You are using your blog as a platform for advertising yourself instead of offering useful content. Try offering some of your expertise. Your services are the solution to a problem that people have. What is that problem? State the problem, and then offer free advice. Most of what you write should be useful. You should only occasionally try to plug your services.

   Of course, make sure that people know where to go if they do want to find out more about your offerings. If you have a separate web site, be sure your blog links to it. If your blog is your web site, make sure your contact info is easily accessible.

2. You are not participating in the “blogosphere”, yet you expect others to participate on your blog. You need to find other blogs that are relevant to yours, and participate meaningfully in discussions. Even better, add those blogs to your Blogroll. Stop thinking of them as the competition, and start thinking of them as colleagues. And be a good citizen of the web– contribute to the discussion, don’t just leave a comment that says “Visit my blog” — it’s very doubtful that your comment will get approved.
3. You don’t post often enough. People are not going to check back or bother subscribing if you post too rarely. Write several posts before you launch your blog, and then post them one at a time, about two posts a week. (And yes, I realize that I’ve already violated my own rule! But, it’s still a good rule).
4. Google hasn’t found your blog. Google finds sites by following links on existing sites. Make sure you link to your blog from your static web site, if you have one. Or go one step further and have the home page of your static web site programmed so that an excerpt from your most recent blog post automatically appears on your home page, with a link to the rest of the post. (Here’s an example: www.jdainternational.com)
5. You are not taking advantage of categories and tags. Here’s some good advice on how to use categories and tags. Scroll down to the “Categories vs. Tags” section. This will help your site get indexed with the proper keywords that will bring the right traffic to your door.

There’s a lot of information out there on this topic. Here are a few other blog posts to get you started.

• 10 Techniques to Get More Comments on Your Blog at Problogger
• 19 (More) Strategies for Finding Readers at Problogger
• How to get traffic for your blog by Seth Godin

Does your web site say what you are?

I am repeatedly amazed by how many businesses, large and small, do not define themselves on their web site home pages. When I point this out to clients, they are stunned.

Take, for example a Brooklyn hair salon with a highly functional and well designed site. When you arrive at their home page, you can tell immediately that they’re a hair salon, and if you already know that the famous neighborhood Park Slope is in Brooklyn, then you can tell it’s a Brooklyn hair salon. But, Google can’t! The words “hair” and “Brooklyn” do not appear on their home page! The word “Slope” as in “Park Slope” does appear, but is invisible to Google because it’s part of a graphic in the logo.

With the yellow pages model, hair salons are forced to think of themselves as hair salons, and can be found in the hair salon section under the letter H. The freedom of the web unfortunately frees us up to completely miss the most basic opportunities for getting found.

One way to make sure that your business is correctly defined is to create a footer that appears on every page of your web site. The footer should include, in HTML text, your business category as it would appear in the yellow pages as well as your location.

If you do nothing else to promote your small business web site, do this

Register your business location and web site with Google Local. Your web site itself may rank low for the search term “Brooklyn bike repair”– but without doing a single thing to your web site, you can get listed on the first page of Google’s search results by verifying your business address with Google Local. When you do this, you have the opportunity to appear on the Google map that appears at the top of your search results when you search for location-specific businesses.

Simply go to http://www.google.com/local/add and add or claim your business. Even if your business has already been listed, you should claim your local business listing so that you can edit it and add more specific information.

For example, a client of mine is an artist with a storefront studio. In addition to selling his art, he also does commissions, such as ketubahs and pet portraits. By claiming his listing, he was able to label his business with up to 5 categories. Now, he is not limited to coming up for the broad term “Brooklyn portrait artist”– for which there are a lot of results. He also added “ketubahs” and “pet portraits” as categories and he now comes up for those as well.

Here’s some more information on Google Local