Microsoft Releases SEO Toolkit

Offers small businesses help ranking on Bing, Yahoo, and Google

Even if you’ve already accepted the importance of SEO, think hard for a moment: when was the last time you clicked past the first page of search results?  Odds are, your answer confirms the need for optimization, and Microsoft wants to help with an SEO toolkit.

A post on the Small Business Blog from Microsoft announced this morning, “Microsoft has released a free SEO toolkit that can help you improve how search engines see, index and point to your site. . . .  [I]t processes your site in a similar manner and provides a report of the items and potential solutions to optimize a site’s organic search results (regardless of search engine).”

That’s a pretty nice offer.  The lack of a price is always a great starting point, of course, and it’s also helpful that the toolkit is supposed to provide more than Bing-related suggestions.

Small business owners shouldn’t stand to lose much more than a bit of time by trying Microsoft’s SEO toolkit, then.  Which is a pretty reasonable risk given how rare it is for people to click past the first page of search results (or even scroll down a little ways).

One last semi-endorsement: the toolkit is the most popular offering on the Bing Toolbox site.

Significant Bit.ly Release On The Way

Shorten URLs with greater ease, added management features

About eight months ago, we covered a URL shortener comparison test in which a competitor called Bit.ly tied for first place.  Now, it looks like this aid to Twitter-using marketers is about to get even better, as Bit.ly 1.3 is supposed to be released this week.

Not all of the specifics are available just yet, but on the Bit.ly Blog, an official post outlined a few changes: “Links are shortened automatically once you enter them (a feature you can disable, if you prefer).  And it’s even easier than before to create custom URLs and to share your short links on Twitter.”

What’s more, “[W]e’ve added a ‘Manage’ tab where you can see and search all the links you’ve shortened through bit.ly.  Trying to remember a link you shortened a few weeks ago?  Just type a few characters into the search box and you’ll see suggestions for pages that match your search term.”

This may give Bit.ly some advantages over Ow.ly, the other URL shortener that fared well in Pingdom’s test.  Or at least, this update should serve as a reminder to small business owners to use *some* URL shortener, since they allow people to conserve space and use more actual words on Twitter.

One more important note: all of the features mentioned here should be available for free, even though a pro version of Bit.ly is also available.

Still Value in Print Advertising

By Abby Johnson,

Although many reports have already labeled the print advertising industry as dead, you may want to watch this video before you completely forget about your offline advertising efforts. Although the Internet has had a tremendous impact on the advertising industry, there is still a great deal of potential value in traditional print advertising.

In this SmallBusinessNewz report, Abby Johnson discusses various scenarios in which print advertising is the only way to reach consumers. On the other hand, there are also situations in which digital advertising is the better option.

Check out this video to learn more about why print advertising is still relevant, right here on SmallBusinessNewz.

Don’t Waste Your Customers’ Time with Your Site

If it’s Not Easy, They’ll Just Leave.

If you’ve ever analyzed your website’s bounce rate, you may have found problems with people leaving before they get through the buying process. Have you noticed that a lot of people left your site at the point where they have to fill out a form? This may be because you’re asking for too much information.

By this, I don’t necessarily mean that you’re asking for information that people don’t want to share for personal reasons. Perhaps you’re just asking for too much in general. You’re taking up too much of the customer’s time.

Time is an incredibly valuable thing these days, when consumers have much more information coming into their lives than ever before, particularly online. People have news feeds, Facebook, email, online video, search, and plenty of other things to take up their online time. Sure, shopping is one of these things, and you may fit into that, but it doesn’t change the fact that time is a factor.

Essentially, it should be as quick and painless as possible from the point where a customer reaches your site, finds what they’re looking for, and buys it.

“For instance, if you have an email form and you’re collecting email addresses to put them on your email newsletter, you may ask their name, their interests, their email address, have some checkboxes – where did you hear about us…thinking that that’s just a normal field, but when someone looks at it, they say, ‘I don’t really want to spend the time to fill that out,’” says Brandon Eley, author of the book Online Marketing Inside Out.

“Reducing the number of form fields that you put on a form dramatically increases the number of people who will actually fill it out,” he adds. “So only ask for the information that you really need. The same goes for a check-out process or a registration process. Make it as simple and concise as you can, and you’ll really increase those conversions.”

In addition, it is a good idea, if you run an e-commerce site, that you have a consistent navigation system in place throughout the site, so customers can always get to what they are looking for without having to look for how to look for it. Have a search box on every page. Don’t make it hard on the customer, because they’ll just leave and find a more usable site.

Time is increasingly scarce, and that means people have less patience. Why do you think Google is talking about making site speed a ranking factor in search results?

Twitter Redesign May Affect Businesses

New layout could show community involvement (or lack thereof)

Small business owners who use Twitter may want to prepare for a bit of a change.  Twitter’s Creative Director, Doug Bowman, has shown off a partial screenshot of “what may end up a significant redesign.”

Note: there’s no sign yet that this is going to ruin anyone – there are no “this is a commercial account with a low trust rating” stamps visible, for example.  It just looks like Twitter may subtly encourage all users to be proper members of the online community.

You can imagine how the “days on Twitter” counter might lend older accounts more credibility, for example, whereas the owners of newer accounts might wind up looking like uncool latecomers who never believed in the site.

Also, the “tweets/day” and “replies recently” stats may reward accounts that are active, but not just blasting out marketing messages all the time.

Of course, Bowman warned that nothing’s been finalized yet, and there’s presumably a whole lot of stuff that his one (partial) screenshot doesn’t show.  So even as you think about these few details, brace for anything.  And that includes the timing of the overhaul, since neither Bowman nor anyone else connected with Twitter seems to have uttered a peep on that front.