So, here we are at the end of yet another year in our lives. Not a particularly pretty year, not a particularly prosperous one, not a particularly positive one for business.
What lessons have we learned?
To be more frugal? To not be taken in on deals that are too good to be true, such as demonstrated by the mortgage and housing crisis? To be wary of banks and investment firms? To forever be on the lookout for corporate greed in the workplace?
For the online entrepreneur, it was a tough year as well. Buying of retail goods fell off the charts, many online stores went bye-bye. Wholesale selling fell as well, as budgets tightened up because of rising fuel and delivery costs as well as less buying on the retail end. Selling on eBay slowed to a virtual crawl with the skewed search results and default Best Match search in place. Auctions just aren’t that popular anymore it seems. People want what they want and they want it now.
Website designing and SEO projects fell for many design firms as well, as clients became wary of the world situation and decided to hang onto their dollars and “wait just a bit longer” ~ kind of like waiting out a huge storm.
And yet the eternal questions about selling online and having a website linger on…………………….
Here are the questions I’ve heard this year, and here is my take on these questions.
1) How many venues should one sell on?
As many as is practical. If you sell on eBay you definitely need a website to compliment it, especially if you have an eBay store. You should also be selling on at least one more venue, just as backup. If you are smart, you will sell different items on each, spreading your stock out a bit, and this way you can direct traffic flow to each, thus making each profitable in the long run. You also benefit from not backing yourself into a corner with just one venue with an expanded search engine presence.
2) To blog or not to blog?
Amazingly I actually heard of a friend’s webmaster who sharply disagrees with me on the absolute necessity of blogging. I am 110% pro blogging, for various reasons. My friend’s webmaster told him a blog is not a necessity at all. Well, everyone is entitled to their own opinion!
However, a blog is what “get’s the word out” about your products, your services, your thoughts on business and trends and general opinons. It’s also what adds quality content to your website, through your blog posts, which can be added to your website ~ at least through linking if not through an active RSS feed ~ as articles. Articles pack considerable punch with search engines, and with the consumer. Articles (aka posts) can educate, inform, and open up new avenues of thought and traffic. Returning traffic.
Blog articles can also promote your products, and lead traffic back to your website or eBay store. Blog articles can be search engine optimized and if linked back to your website, contribute their share to your website’s SEO.
Yes, in case you haven’t figured it out, I’m staunchly in favor of blogging, blogging often, and of writing original content, not creating a blog full of pingbacks from other people’s blogs. That’s lazy, plain and simple.
3) When to use the alt attibute and when to use the title attribute?
This comes up alot. Everyone has heard that you are “supposed” to use an alt attribute for any pictures on the website or the blog or wherever. The purpose of this is NOT for keyword stuffing, as it has been made out to be. The purpose of the alt attribute for pictures is for those Internet users who are sight disabled, or, those who utilize browsers that are text only. This way they know what is there in place of the picture.
The title attribute is used as a tooltip. The major browsers still do not coordinate with each other and display things the same. Firefox does not display tooltips, and MSIE displays the alt tag also as a tooltip. Hence the title attribute is a way to evenly display tooltips across the board, whether for pictures or links.
Keyword stuffing ~ search engine robots and spiders are getting smarter and recognize keyword stuffing for what it is. If you stuff, eventually you get penalized. If you get penalized you fall off the Internet map for a while, how long depends on how much “punishment” is being doled out to you for your offense.
The wisest course of action is to only use keywords on any page, in any alt attribute and in any title attribute that relate directly to the page content at hand. And don’t sprinkle them too liberally. Only sprinkle as how it logically makes sense or you’ll ruin your SEO recipe.
4) Templated Websites vs. Custom Coded Websites ~ which to choose?
Having a hand coded website is a wonderful thing. However, so is a templated website ~ it’s not as “cookie cutter” as it sounds.
A hand coded website design is fabulous because it means you can get exactly what you want in terms of look, navigation, feel, punch. It’s not for everyone.
Templated websites can be customized to give you the exact same effect, if you hire a designer who is skilled at customization and branding. You get the added convenience of then being able to update your website / shopping cart / information site yourself usually through an easy to use administration interface.
It’s going to be a learning curve for you either way ~ if your designer who is putting together the hand coded website will be teaching you how to update it yourself, that’s excellent. If they don’t, well, you end up becoming dependent on them as your webmaster. That’s often not cost effective. The website does not always get updated in a timely manner then either as you are dependant on when they can “fit you in”.
The same thing could theoretically happen if your designer has put together a highly customized website that has a template backbone ~ if it is their intention to keep you dependent on them, they simply won’t tell you how to manage the admin area. This is not a common occurence though.
I don’t like keeping my clients dependant on me when they can easily learn the admin area and manage whatever they can themselves. Which is probably why I’m in favor of designing highly customized and branded template websites ~ be they e-commerce or information websites ~ and again, this topic came up in a discussion with another webmaster who felt differently. It all comes down to personal choice.
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I’ll be back after the New Year with a few more topics and my take on them ~ how to find your niche market, both on and off eBay; a discussion on bounce rate and when to take it seriously; and a discussion on priorities ~ page rank or search engine visibility?
Out with the old and in with the new ~ goodbye to 2008, take our hard knocks and learn from them; hopefully 2009 will be kinder and a bit gentler on all of us, and may prosperity reign!
