Most businesses are part of some large regional or national group. This could be something like the American Corn Growers Association, or the Plumbing Heating Cooling Contractors Association. These groups may have local, regional, national or even international levels, and exist for almost every different type of profession. Another type of of organization is a local business group such as rotary club, Kiwanis club, or Chamber of Commerce. These groups have members of different professions who do business in same city, state or town. Most of these groups are interested and growing and making themselves known and will have websites. When you join these groups your membership usually entitles you to get a link back from the organization.

Some organizations also offer additional link opportunities. In some cases you are allowed to enhance your listing with a small paragraph about your company. In other cases you have access to a full page where you can go into more detail about your company. Some organizations even allow you to submit research, editorial pieces, or informational articles about your company. When submitting your information to these services here are some tips to help you get the most out of them:

• Make each submission different, unique text has a greater value than text that has been repeated on multiple other websites.
• Try to make the linking text (known as anchor text) your company name and not your web address.
• Try to get links to multiple pages of your website, don’t be content with just a link to your homepage.
• Put a link up on your website linking to corresponding page that has a link back to your company (this is known as a reciprocal link).

These links are probably the easiest to get and to keep. The only thing you have to do is meet the membership requirements of the group. As many of these organizations are non-profit they are considered trustworthy and reliable by search engines, and given more value. In the next part of this series we’ll be discussing Getting Links from Directories.

For most small and local businesses this fairly common problem, however many businesses don’t know what to do about it. To solve the problem you need to understand how search engines work and how you can increase your visibility to them. Search engines have programs that move across the web reading pages on websites. When they encounter a link they make a note of it and come back and read the content of that page at a later date. The designers of search engines had a sense of humor so they named these little programs that crawl across the web “spiders”. The best way to get the spiders to “find” your company and website is to get a link on another website.

There are a lot of different ways to get links, some are very easy to get, some are very hard to get and some will cost you money. Some of the more common places you can get links are chamber of commerce, business trade organization, networking groups, directories, press releases, syndicated articles, blogs, and link exchanges. Each of these types of links has some good and bad points associated with them, and we’ll go through these in subsequent parts. However as a general rule of thumb the more links you can get pointing to your website the better.

A second point and equally important aspects of links is understanding that not all links are created equal. Search engines think some links are more important than others. For example a link from your brother’s auto body repair shop is probably not as important as a link from CNN, The Wall Street Journal, or The New York Times. So while getting links is important, getting higher quality links is the ultimate goal.

In Part II we’re going to look at Getting Links from Business and Trade Organizations.

The simple answer is as often as possible. Okay, that wasn’t very helpful, you were really looking for a number of times per week, month or year. First you need to look at old content and make sure it hasn’t gone out of date. If it has you should fix it first for two reasons, it’s usually easier to fix something as opposed to writing from scratch, and secondly you want to make sure you aren’t giving out any bad, misleading, or inaccurate information that may create a problem, legal or otherwise for you down the road. Generally we recommend reviewing all of your content once every three to six months.

Now we can move on to new content, and how often you should be adding it to your website. The answer is a often as your resources allow. For many news sites or blogs new content goes up several times a day. For some sites that’s not only physically difficult, but from a practicality standpoint not feasible or necessary. On the aggressive end of the spectrum adding one new page per day would be a top goal to aim for. A more realistic goal is to add one new page per week. At the other end of the spectrum one new page a month should really be considered the bare minimum.

The next question is is adding all of this content going to cost me money? The answer is it depends. You can write the copy for your website yourself and only you can decide if that’s an economical use of your time or not. For many organizations using a ghost writer makes more sense. In the early days of the web every time you added a new page to your site you had to pay the designer to update all the links and publish the new page. While many websites are still built using this publishing model, it’s not really a long term viable solution. Many designers are now using Content Management systems (CMS) to allow them to make updates and have multiple authors and editors. These publishing systems make it east to add content but come with tools like spell checking and scheduled publishing for future posts. So you could have a ghost writer write 12 new pages for you all at once and then slowly trickle them out once a week over the next three months.

Some general rules of thumb are, be consistent try to publish new pages every Tuesday, or the first Wednesday of the month. Add content slowly, adding 1 page per week for a whole year is better than adding 52 new pages all in one week. Be as topical and up to date as possible, everyone wants to know what’s hot and interesting right now, not what I need to do in six months in the future.

Thankfully, browsers have improved and developed and while not exactly uniform in how they handle code they are all a lot more standards compliant than they used to be. What does standards-compliant mean to business or organization, why should they know about and why should they want their web projects designed to meet web standards? For most business having a standards compliant web site built will only require a little more time and effort at the design stage of the game, however the payoff down the road could tremendous. Current best practices call for websites to designed as two separate elements. The content should be kept isolated from the context. This makes editing and changing the content simple and easy for people that aren’t technically savvy. By isolating the presentation layer it allows complex and radical changes to be performed site wide in a matter of minutes as opposed to weeks and months. In the early days of web development coming up with a new design for your website required every page to be changed, a process that could takes a considerable amount of time. Now by changing a few templates the context for the entire site is changed. Separating the content and the context is the first step on the road to standards compliance.

Once the content has been separated it can be marked up with the proper language. Unless you are working with a user base that is dominated by site visitors with older, slower and outdated computers XHTML is the best choice. While browsing on a phone or other mobile device is still something of a novelty and not for everyone, it is clear that this is a trend that will be growing in the coming years. Designing in XHTML gives you the most forward looking and longest lasting choice available to you. Your website will display properly in mobile and other portable devices and will work and at the very least “fail gracefully” in older less compliant browsers.

If XHTML is so great how come all web designers aren’t using it? Well most web designers have picked up a few bad habits over the years. We picked up a few bad habits from the “old days” when things worked less smoothly and we’ve reluctant to give them up. Of course what’s makes this even worse is that designing to web standards would actually save us more time than hacking around the problem. The second most popular reason is lack of client side code compatibility. If you have a website that relies heavily on Javascript designing to standards compliant code becomes a bit of a problem and sometimes even an impossibility. Moving as much of this functionality out of the browser and into the server side code usually solves the trick and gives you a more stable program anyway. The only exception would be form validation. The last reason is lack of precision. For many print designers who have moved to the web and are looking to have absolute control the web presents a few problems. Different browsers render code differently. They are becoming more and more similar, but there are subtle difference between the two. The only way to have the same level of precision you have in a print project is to resort to images and tables. This however brings us back to the maintenance aspect of a project. Image based sites are difficult, time consuming and expensive to maintain. For most projects that amount of precision simply isn’t required.

Should every website be 100% standards compliant, and should your designers and programmers burn the midnight oil working towards that goal? In a perfect world maybe, but in the real world that’s a goal that’s seldom met. What you should strive for is compliance on almost all of your pages. All of your site templates should validate and and be compliant. However having a few pages with special functions that can’t pass validation is a reasonable goal as long as you are ultimately serving your site visitor, and not a bad HTML coder and designer.

• As of 2005 there well over 1 billion people using the internet
• In the United States over 65% of the population or 225 million people have access to the internet on a daily basis
• Over 85% of US consumers who have internet access use it for research before making a purchase
• Over 40% of US consumers have internet access use the internet as their first tool for researching a purchase

At this time having a website is no longer an option but has become a necessity. With 65% of the people in the United States having computer and internet access can you afford to not put your company in a spot where these customers can find them. Adopting a wait and see attitude will only allow your competition to gain a stronger foot hold and advantage of you. The question you should be asking yourself isn’t “can I afford a website for my business” but “can I afford not to have a website for my business”.