WordPress websites work great for businesses of all sizes due to their flexibility and affordability. Large companies using WordPress include the New York Times, eBay, UPS, CNN, and more. We recommend them for the small businesses we work with, as well, because of their limitless add-on options and ease of scalability. Although a learning curve exists, following these six steps helps optimize WordPress websites for success. 1.) Choose a good host. This is basically your webs

Many of my clients are still unaware of what SEO is or why it matters to their small business… so I am posting this to go back to basics. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of being found and getting traffic to your websites via the free or organic listings found on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. When someone searches via one of these major search engines, the search engine scours the internet to find the best match for their users search. This is d

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing the content of your webpage  so that your site is easily and readily found by your potential customers who are using search engines to research their purchases. SEO is necessary and although time consuming, can be done fairly easily. Whether or not you choose to tackle your own SEO on your website or you choose to hire an SEO to do it for you, you need to know that there are good, ethical SEO practices (White Hat)

Yesterday the Iowa Western Entrepreneurial Center and Small Business Development Center held the first Business Summit in Council Bluffs, Iowa  featuring our own local Google expert, Chris Russell, Data Center Manager at Google,  Council Bluffs. Chris Russell opened the summit with a great presentation on Google Apps and how cloud computing options (like Google Docs, Google Calendar) are optimized for small businesses and using these options can give small businesses a true c

Hopefully at this point you have at least a facebook account where you socialize with friends and family. You may also have a Linked In account where you “network” with colleagues in the community and industry. If you don’t have these things I would suggest getting these things going and start building those natural contacts with the friends you already know. Setting up basic profiles and socially participating is the easy (and fun!) part. Now you want to determine how to use

The main reason is to provide interesting, useful and frequent content to your customers, potential customers, industry experts, media, etc. The second reason is by getting these people interested and reading your content a chain reaction starts. Individuals start linking to your posts via other blogs, emails, facebook pages, forums and web pages. Because of this more people read your blog and other things related to your blog like your web page, facebook page, etc. Because o

As a Small Business Development Center Director for Southwest Iowa, I tell ALL of the businesses and start-ups that I work with that they NEED a website because most consumers and businesses are searching for what they want on-line.   This is good and bad news.  The good news is that people are defining what they want on their own. When they find you and click on your website you can bet that they are a very qualified lead. However, Being found on the Internet through search