Starting a successful website is a multifaceted challenge. Think of it this way: the Internet is a book with several million pages. Some of those pages (Google) are cardboard and preternaturally thick and the book seems to open right to them. Some of those pages have those little post-it sticky notes on them and some of them are so thin they stick to their neighbors– readers can’t find them unless they know the page number. Once you get your website up and running, there are several things you can do to make your pages stand out.

Pay Attention to Every Page

Each page of your website is valuable. The more pages you have (provided those pages have real, useful content) the better your site will be ranked. The more information you provide, the more search terms you organically introduce to your site. Remember to create a site map that outlines all of your pages with links. These links will facilitate crawling (more on crawling below).

Use Robots.txt Files

Using the Robot.txt file in the appropriate locations tells search engine bots which pages they should crawl and which they can safely ignore.

Build Incoming Links

Incoming links are critical: they demonstrate to the search engines that your site is part of a larger network of sites. The bigger and better the sites that link to you, the better your indexing will be. Try to build incoming links to multiple pages in your site, not just your front page. This will create the dynamic 3-dimensional link structure that search engines love. Be careful to avoid external sites that have poor reputations. Search engines penalize these sites and they’ll penalize you by association.

Monitor Your Site

Keep tabs on how well your site is indexed over time. As you make changes to your content or site structure, you will see what works and what doesn’t. Don’t be afraid to try new tricks! Read tutorials and implement what you learn. Building a good ranking takes a lot of work and time. Don’t give up!

Content Rules!

It’s important to be consistent about adding new, quality content to your site. The more often you update your content, the better. Make sure it’s actually legitimate, useful content though. Search engines are getting better and better at identifying fake content designed solely for the purpose of improving rankings. One way to avoid trouble is to monitor your use of keywords. Make sure you only use a few keywords for each 500 words.

Quality Metadata

Good content shouldn’t be limited to your visible pages. Make sure your metadata is well-written too.

Be Patient

There is often a time delay between page updates and search engine indexing. Don’t despair if you don’t see an improvement in your ranking immediately after making updates. It’s also the case that the longer your site is up and active, the better it looks to the search engines. So keep working at it and, over time, your rating will improve.

Sometimes one of the hardest things about marketing is asking the right questions. You may look at your marketing materials and think they’re great, but are you thinking about them from your perspective or the perspective of your clients? Removing yourself and your perspective from the equation is an important step. Before you can think like a client, you have to stop thinking like a business owner (unless of course your clients are business owners themselves). Below are a few questions that any business owner can ask herself to improve and build on her marketing strategy.

What is the Real Long-Term Value of Each Good Client?

One client may not seem like much, but in the long-term a good consistent client can make or break a company. Okay, so maybe that’s a little much. But if you think of every client as a critical part of your business, you set yourself up to treat each of them with respect. The better you treat each client, the better your business will be.

Who Do You Want to Attract?

Good marketing starts with good targeting. Consider the ideal customer. Maybe this is someone who doesn’t need a lot of extra support. Maybe this is someone who raises the profile of your business or who is tied into the business community and gives you great word-of-mouth. Whoever your perfect or ideal customer is, target your marketing materials at that person directly. It may seem somewhat short-sighted, after all there are a lot of people out there who may benefit from your products or services, but if you are aiming your message at the people you want most to attract, chances are good you’ll attract those people. If your perfect clients start arriving, they’ll bring more perfect clients with them. This is the type of equation where quality truly is better than quantity.

What Do You Really Sell?

Sure, you may think you sell eyeglasses or security systems, but chances are what you’re really selling is something less tangible than that. Maybe it’s peace-of-mind, a competitive edge or a style statement. Getting to the bottom of what your clients are looking for will help you figure out how best to present whatever it is you’re selling. Market to the demographic and your sales numbers will improve.

Of course, this is just a beginning. But if you start really asking yourself the hard questions about what you’re doing, why, and for whom, you’ll be amazed at how much clearer your thinking becomes.

Okay, so maybe this is stating the obvious, but blogging has become one of the most important tools for building a business through audience, and it’s about time we all took a moment to reflect on why. Of course, I’m blogging right now… and now… making this a meta commentary. If you went to a liberal arts college, you will probably be falling all over yourself at the stunning post-modernism. If you didn’t, you’re probably annoyed. Sorry, I’ll move on.

First off, blogging matters because it’s content. Content is what the Internet is made of. It’s the stuff we consume, and we’re all hungry consumers. Content is information and, on the Internet, good, meaningful, non-fluff information is currency.  As more blogs appear every day, the heap of content begins to self-sort. What do you think rises to the top? The good, meaningful, non-fluff information that people actually care to read.

So, quality brings readers. Readers bring business. It’s a very simple equation yet so few people are really working to create blogs worth reading. In part, this is due to the hard work, writing acumen, and creativity that good writing requires. This would be a problem if it weren’t for the thousands of unemployed writers out there. So the problem isn’t finding a writer, the problem is prioritizing writing.

So, step one: write (or hire someone to write) good content. Invest in your company blog because it reflects directly on your company. Again, this is obvious. So why aren’t more people concerned with quality over quantity? I blame the search engines.

The search engines (Google) are the reason blogs became such valuable tools in the first place. Sure, good writing has always had innate value, but on the Internet, static content won’t bring in readers all on its own. With Google’s indexing and the preferential treatment Google began to bestow on fresh, new content, blogging took off, and not in a good way. For a long while (and still, to some extent, today) simply posting new paragraphs of semi-legible writing got Google’s attention. This prompted a huge increase in quantity without much of an increase in quality and, at the beginning, everyone was happy because everyone saw increased traffic. Of course, what happened next was the same thing we will see over and over again… the good content stuck around while the rest, well, didn’t.

Again, this is partly thanks to Google. As Google tweaked the algorithm to identify content that was actually read (based on traffic), it sorted the good stuff from the bad. Still, there is no shortage of poorly-written content. This is actually a great thing for the serious business writer. In a sea of bad writing, it’s not too difficult to rise up and get noticed.

This illustrates the importance of quality, but what about the other benefits of blogging? For starters, a regularly updated blog shows potential clients several things. It shows them that you are serious about building your company. It shows them that you care about sharing relevant news. It shows them that you are interested in having a dialogue. In the relatively impersonal online marketplace, engaging with potential clients about subjects other than what you’re selling creates a connection. It builds trust. The more you can foster non-sales-based connection, the more your potential clients will want to support your company and the more conscious of your clients’ needs your company will be. Let’s face it: we are all world-weary consumers. We all need a break from the sales pitch. How refreshing to find that breath of fresh air on a commercial site!

This is a little bit delicate. You may be wondering how you’re supposed to convert readers to clients if you never mention your products or services. Good point. It is important to communicate what you’re selling. We do it here. But we also work to provide plenty of other content that isn’t self-serving. In the rapid-fire world of technology there is always something that is both news-worthy and relevant to our web hosting services. By combining the two, we remind readers about who we are while offering more than a sales pitch. Really though: don’t worry too much about this. If someone is reading your blog, they’re already on your site. Let the rest of the site do the selling.

A blog doesn’t just provide your clients or potential clients with information, it also provides your employees with a window into the company, and with a forum for sharing their own observations and knowledge. Essentially, the blog creates a social network around your business. Convinced yet?

We welcome your suggestions about how we can make our company blog better. What would you like to read about? What posts do you like or dislike? We got all metaphysical with this because we believe in practicing what we preach. Amen.

This is a phrase we’ve all heard before. That infamous first impression is the moment of truth: when a new person is deciding how to feel about us for the first time. While it may seem overly dramatic, it is hard to deny the power of the first impression. It may mean the difference between getting hired and, well, not getting hired. Even if you endure multiple interviews, the impression you give in that first moment truly does shape enduring opinions about your character. The same is true for making business deals, or forming friendships.

When I first arrived at the door of TurnKey Internet, I was ready for my nerves to sabotage my carefully planned first impression. My resume looked good, my outfit was professional, my hair was coiffed, but still, I was prepared for the worst. That’s why I was so surprised when I was greeted by smiling faces, friendly handshakes and a laid-back professionalism that exuded both confidence and welcome. I don’t know why I was expecting the worst: maybe it was my previous experiences with technology companies, or maybe I was just letting my nerves get the best of me. Still, I was bowled over by the lack of pretension and abundance of humor that greeted me at the door.

I share this story because I think, when most of a company’s interactions happen electronically, it’s easy for the people on the other end of the computer to miss out on the true heart and soul of the company. As someone who works in marketing, I often wonder how to best portray this aspect of TurnKey Internet to new clients. Making a first impression online is a challenge! Of course, there is the customer service and the products, but a company is so much more than that.

I hope by sharing my first impression of TurnKey Internet, I will give you all a little window into the heart and soul of the place. While our CEO, Adam Wills, brought the friendly, professional spirit to the company when he started it, his spirit is contagious. Everyone here shares his sense of pride in what we do, and we hope you will give us a chance to demonstrate that.

Anneke
Marketing

Often in the web hosting industry the terms advertising and marketing are used interchangeably. While this might not seem like the end of the world, the truth is, the two things are not the same. In order to achieve optimal exposure for your business, it is important to have a solid understanding of both.

Advertising and marketing are like squares and rectangles. All squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. In other words, all advertising is marketing but not all marketing is advertising. Confused yet? How about a few straight-forward definitions:

Advertising refers to ads. These ads may be online, in a newsletter, in a magazine, or really anywhere ads appear. Typically these ads cost money and they are designed to attract customers to your business. Ads are incredibly important and they are critical for the success of your business but ads alone aren’t enough. It’s the ad campaign that really creates a business identity. That’s where the marketing comes in.

Marketing is the overarching public image strategy for your business. It involves the designing of ads, from the single run to the multi-ad campaign. It also involves the crafting of a company image. Marketing is the process through which you craft your company message. What image do you want your company to project? What look and feel do you want your logo to communicate? What tagline best represents the products, services and goals of your company? Without a strong marketing mission, your ads won’t have a leg to stand on.

It may also be difficult to create momentum without a solid marketing strategy. While a single ad may work well, if you don’t have a strategy, how will you follow up? Marketing should be rooted in your business. It should recognize the core values inherent in your original vision, and the changes your business has gone through as it has evolved. Sometimes it is necessary to change your business’ image. Without a marketing strategy in place, changing an image suddenly can alienate customers and corrupt a recognizable brand. A solid marketing strategy will help you incorporate your old image into your new image. This provides continuity and enhances brand-awareness so you build on what you’ve got rather than poking holes in your foundation.

The best way to begin developing a marketing strategy is to sit down and think hard about your business. What do you offer? What type of customers do you have? How are you different from your competition? Often a solid mission statement will help you to articulate your business’ goals, and from there seeing how you stand out will be much easier. If you don’t have a mission statement, write one now. It will prove invaluable for all future brand efforts and will always provide a reference point for anyone you may hire.

So advertising and marketing go hand-in-hand, but advertising is the tip of the iceberg while marketing is the core. The key idea here is representation and consistency. If you are true to your company’s vision and consistent with your message, you will continue to grow and your business will continue to solidify. So invest in some top-notch marketing! Your business will thank you.

Social media is here to stay. It’s about as mainstream as mainstream gets and pretty much everyone has realized the import of the medium for businesses. As a marketing tool, it’s invaluable, though not without its pitfalls. I have written before about how to use social media to grow your business, market products and run specials. Today I am going to talk about how to use social media to build your business’ reputation with customers.

Interacting with customers in a public way is commonplace on the Internet, but on social networks it gets personal. Social networks, by their very nature, encourage participation, interaction and conversation. For individuals that makes keeping active friendships easier. It keeps families closer. It provides a forum for debating the issues of our day. From a business perspective, it presents a potential problem. In some cases, without the proper forethought, monitoring and attention, that problem can be devastating.

For a business, customer service is a cornerstone of growth. Without good customer service any business can fail, and fail fast. With social networks, customer interaction becomes virally public. In the old days, a customer might complain on a forum or on a blog, but today they complain in a Facebook feed… YOUR Facebook feed… and everyone sees it in real time. How you handle that complaint will define your customer service to existing and potential customers. This makes developing an internal customer service policy for social networks paramount. But how many companies are doing this? Is this critical element of social media business being ignored?

On a social network, a snide remark from a tired employee can influence thousands of potential customers. Incorrect information can snowball into a support nightmare in minutes. Every single interaction is being watched by your customer base, your bread and butter. If you’re not coaching your employees on how to handle social network interactions, you better start… fast.

One way to handle this is to restrict access to your social network account. Only give access to employees you trust, who understand the importance of decorum. It is also very helpful to develop a standard policy for social media interactions that focuses on openness, honesty and fairness. The good side of this kind of transparency is that customers can see when one of their own is being unreasonable just as easily as they can see everything else. If you handle interactions admirably, you will build trust, a kind of trust that no amount of traditional marketing can create.

So the social media of our times is one of the most useful and personal tools we’ve ever had for business. It crosses the divide between personal and commercial, paving the way for companies to build relationships like they used to in the mom and pop businesses of old. But with that incredible access comes great risk. Developing a strategy for social media interaction today will help protect your company tomorrow.

At TurnKey Internet, we like simplicity: it’s in our name! We believe that businesses can succeed best when they don’t have huge technological barriers, whether those barriers are the technology itself, the time it takes to get it working or the money involved. That is why we offer simple, affordable, ready-to-use solutions that allow our clients to get business going, fast.

This philosophy has never been more realized than with our cloud hosting solutions. These solutions offer all of the benefits of in-house hardware without the risks or costs. Many of our long-time clients have switched over to our cloud packages and now they are wondering how to make the most of what they’ve got. In addition to the many benefits the TurnKey Cloud offers from a technological standpoint, the cloud has become synonymous with forward-thinking. A company with a cloud infrastructure is a technologically savvy enterprise. You’re leading the pack. Why not let your customers know it?

There are myriad ways to advertise your new cloud infrastructure to your customer base. Write an article for your company blog detailing the advantages the new infrastructure will offer to your clients. Mention the switch in your company newsletter. You may even consider taking a page from Google’s playbook and temporarily incorporating a cloud into your company logo. Use all of the tried and true venues for company promotion (the social networks) and get creative–include “now in the cloud” in your forum and email signatures or on your company voice mail.

Existing customers will be excited to hear that you are innovating and adapting to new technologies as they become available. Knowing the company they trust has a thumb on the zeitgeist will  position your company as a source of information and as a pinnacle of progress. It will also make your customers feel like they can trust you to stay efficient while you keep delivering the products and services they need.

The best part is that switching to the cloud is better for your business in every other way as well. You save money, reduce your carbon footprint, protect your data and comply with all federal regulations. Now you can get some new customers out of it to boot.

While most people tend to think of web conferencing as a tool for connecting with remote colleagues, there are astounding possibilities for using web conferencing for marketing new products to potential and existing customers. For many businesses, especially those selling goods and services online, one of the biggest barriers to sales is education. If you sell a software-as-a-service product, for example, and your clientele doesn’t really understand what your product is and how it can benefit them, they’re not buying. Overcome this barrier with an instructional interactive webinar!

Demonstrate Your Product
A product demo is easy with an online conferencing tool that allows you to stream video and screen share. Voxwire Gold Web Conferencing has these capabilities, enabling you to show your clients, in real time, how your product works and what it can do for them. Use images from your clients’ websites, incorporate audio and video and dazzle them with a full-blown sales presentation from the comfort of your office. While many people won’t make the time to travel for a product demo, they will sit through a short presentation online.

You can use Voxwire this way even if you’re selling big-ticket items like real estate. Upload images of houses for a virtual tour. Walk potential buyers through rooms without having to meet in person. This saves you time and money, and will help whittle down the potential buyers to the real serious customers.

You don’t have to do these webinars live either. Prepare a demo and record it. Then post a link on your site for new potential customers to learn about your product first-hand.

Interact with Clients
Sales videos are great, but only if customers actively watch. There is no way to guarantee they will with traditional video and, more than that, there is no way to guarantee that they’ll click on your link or follow up. With an interactive sales webinar, you can talk with customers while you show them your products. You can show your video in the window and talk over it, or pause to add detail. You can invite participants to enter text chat questions that you can address as you go, or even invite them to connect with video for a face-to-face conversation.

Host an Event
Everyday webinars are wonderful sales tools, but you can up the stakes by hosting your own online conference within the Voxwire interface. Invite up to 1,000 attendees to sit in on your presentation. Welcome all of them to contribute comments via text chat, or highlight specific attendees by awarding them moderator privileges mid-meeting. Large events like this attract a larger number of attendees than individual instructional webinars, and they create industry buzz in the process. Create a double-edged campaign with a regular weekly meeting and then a large, once every few months, webinar. Invite colleagues to present their own new products, and bring the marketplace to you.

Search engine optimization is all the rage everywhere you look, and for good reason when traffic equals sales. But optimizing a site for search engines is harder than it sounds, especially if you’re not ready to spend hours and hours learning about how to do it right. Over the past several months, we’ve been asked by clients over and over again how they should configure their hosting to make the most of the search engines. Then, suddenly, it occurred to us: why not set up a hosting plan that is already optimized? So we did.

Today, I am happy to announce SEO Hosting from TurnKey Internet!
Now our clients don’t have to wade through the mountains of conflicting information to get an indexed website with decent traffic. You don’t need to know anything at all about SEO to make the most of these hosting plans. Everything is automated and ready to go from the second you gain access to your account. In addition to a boatload of features which I will get into below, your sites will be hosted on our lightning fast Dell Poweredge R410 servers with 8+ cpu’s and raid 10 disk protection, hosted from our tier-1 New York datacenter. If you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry: it’s good!

Those days of slaving over tutorials are in the past!
We’ve configured our SEO servers to allow clients to take complete control over their portfolio of websites, while easily managing everything from one location. You will access your account via cPanel, and will have full WHM (web host manager) access. This means you can create an unlimited number of accounts, domain names and web sites each with their own dedicated IP address. This is the key to great SEO!

Dedicated IP Addresses
Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, index sites on dedicated IP addresses as unique properties. This is very important for SEO. It is easy and cheap to set up hundreds of websites on the same IP, and to link them all to each other to try and build up some SEO juice. The search engine hive minds know all about this strategy and, if they weighted those sites that “live” in the same neighborhood (same IP’s) the same as sites on unique IP’s, they’d be sending traffic straight to the people trying to game the system. By privileging unique IP’s, search engines are trying to ensure that sites are naturally indexed, and that that indexing is a result of unique sites hosted by unique people.

For businesses, this is not good news. Building links is one of the most popular and effective methods for driving traffic and, until now, it has been necessary to buy several different expensive hosting accounts with different IP’s to get the proper indexing. Now, that is a thing of the past with TurnKey Internet’s SEO hosting package! We provide unique IP’s all under the same hosting account, so you can set up many different sites that all get indexed as unique properties. This will save you immense amounts of time, effort and money, while ensuring that your sites get privileged by the engines. And, as I mentioned above, you can manage all of these properties from one easy location.

Many Class-C IP Ranges
Not only do you get many different IP addresses with TurnKey SEO Hosting, those addresses are spread over many different class-c blocks. This means that, even if the search engines were to start recognizing IP’s on the same block as “living” in the same neighborhood, your sites would still keep their unique status because they are on different blocks. In the SEO game, so much rests on the whim of the search engines. They can change the rules as they go, and we all have to race to keep up. Keeping your IP’s on separate class-c blocks pre-empts the possibility that the search engines will recognize this sort of SEO hosting and penalize it, protecting you and your properties from the whim of Matt Cutts and his cohorts.

Additional Advanced Web Hosting Features
First and foremost, TurnKey Internet is a web hosting company. We take pride in what we do and in the features and services we offer. Our SEO hosting packages are no different from our other hosting packages in this regard. With each account we offer Fantastico, Softaculous, WHMXtra, RVSiteBuilder Pro, and R1Soft’s continuous data protection backups. These are all built right into your cPanel controls, so you can implement any and all of them as you see fit. We see this SEO hosting package as everything we already have and more.

To learn more about our SEO Hosting packages, visit: http://turnkeyinternet.net/seo-hosting

Congratulations! You made it through 2010, a tough year for business. Our mission is to help businesses grow, and that has been harder over the past few years than ever before, as more and more people are out of work, and the sluggish economy keeps them from bouncing back. But there are still people out there doing well, and they are doing well because they are innovators and because they run their businesses smart. When economic times are tough, making the most of what you have becomes vitally important.
That is why we spent 2010 developing new tools for our clients so they can better serve theirs.

So far in 2011, we have seen the continued growth of our software-as-a-service products. These products are affordable, ready-to-use business growth tools that many of our clients have quickly and seamlessly incorporated into their day-to-day business operations. While there are many companies out there that offer a single business solution, we provide all of these tools in one place. It is our belief that our clients prefer to get everything they need at once–hosting, newsletter, backups, mail, conferencing, and more–for one low monthly price. Not only is this convenient, it streamlines business operations and saves considerable time and money. Each of our business solutions is a top-notch product that can compete and win in it’s niche. Together, our products provide a comprehensive tool box for the business entrepreneur.

We continue to believe in the ingenuity and perseverance of small business owners—the life blood of our economy. As a business serving small businesses, we are always interested to hear about the unique challenges facing you as you continue to grow in 2011. The more we know about you, the better able we will be to develop new products and services tailored to what you need most.

We look forward to helping you grow your business in 2011.

Learn more about our business bundle: http://www.turnkeyinternet.net/bundle/