The WebsiteDoctor office will be closed from now until Jan 5th, although if you send us a short email I suspect there’s a chance we’ll reply to it during the holidays ;)

Happy Christmas folks, have a good rest!

Alastair.

The reason startups no longer depend so much on VCs is one that everyone in the startup business knows by now: it has gotten much cheaper to start a startup. There are four main reasons: Moore’s law has made hardware cheap; open source has made software free; the web has made marketing and distribution free; and more powerful programming languages mean development teams can be smaller. These changes have pushed the cost of starting a startup down into the noise. In a lot of startups—probaby most startups funded by Y Combinator—the biggest expense is simply the founders’ living expenses. . .

And because Internet startups have become so cheap to run, the threshold of profitability can be trivially low. Which means many Internet startups don’t need VC-scale investments anymore. For many startups, VC funding has, in the language of VCs, gone from a must-have to a nice-to-have.

Full article “Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?”

Obviously this applies very much to technology startups, and less so to traditional SMEs who have different costs structures, but even in the traditional SME it’s becoming easier to cut startup costs. What do you think?

Given the stateful state (!) of LinkedIn I thought it would be useful to have a LinkedIn group for Irish Twitter Users, so I have created the “Irish Twitter Users Group“.

If you’re Irish and use Twitter and LinkedIn, please join in here!

The WebsiteDoctor account is slow burn - i.e. infrequently updated - but will be very highly on topic for business and internet marketing topics, and WebsiteDoctor news.

My personal twitter stream is updated more frequently but contains more off-topic items.

- Alastair.

Why so quiet lately?

LogOn’s blog has been quiet for the best part of a year now, but it’s not because we’ve gone out of business! In fact we’ve been really busy completing some awesome projects - like building a complete custom e-learning environment from scratch for the International Federation of the Red Cross (in 7 weeks!) (check out the cool animations we did), like building beautiful websites like Precious.ie, fantastic designs like HotelsInOne.ie’s main website and custom Wordpress templates like their blog - my personal favourite of all the design work we’ve done. (But wait, aren’t we an SEO company, not a web development company? I’ll answer that in a paragraph or 3).

Another reason I’ve been very quiet is that I’ve been busy with offline social networking with many businesses in Dublin and around Ireland through networks such as DCEB LINK!, The Kaizen Group and Networth. I’ve also been busy giving seminars, presentations and training courses, like my recent presentation to the ICES group on Making Money Online, and for DCEB Enterprise week at City Hall, an Online Marketing Overview.

Unfortunately other important things got left by the wayside: like getting this website up and running and reflecting the quality of service we provide. It was quite uncomfortable giving people website advice when this site was a mess, and I didn’t want to draw attention to it amongst my web development and SEO peers, because hey, we’re a tough audience! But it’s finally good enough to unveil.

Now we’ve taken these first steps towards “Heal thyself, physician!”. This site will continue to change and improve, probably on a daily basis for the next 3-4 weeks, and hopefully it will continue to evolve ad infinitum. I’d appreciate any feedback and comments you have.

What about the brand/business direction changes?

The last 2 years have been very educational for me – as a recovering geek I’ve been soaking up every bit of business knowledge I can get my hands on. Business is a fascinating world (I’m really looking forward to getting to Level 20 and get the new abilities).

Over the course of the last year or two I realised that the LogOn.ie brand is fantasic in many ways (I really love it!) but also sadly it is somewhat limiting and not descriptive of where I want to take the business.

To that end I read a lot of good books (thanks in particular to Dr. Weiss’s book The Ultimate Consultant for naming advice ), brainstormed with peers, friends and family,and after many, many late night discussions, we finally decided that Website Doctor was the right brand for where the consulting and training business was going to go. I was able to acquire some great domain names including the .com you’re visiting now.

Website Doctor is the training and consultancy division of LogOn Internet Marketing Ltd. LogOn.ie is the web development and search engine optimisation division!

Are you going to resume blogging now, or what?

Short answer:yep.

Longer answer: now that we’ve got our ducks in a row on the business side, and put shoes on the cobblers children (got our own site in order), I’m going to be blogging a lot more often again. Stay tuned. I’ll also be experimenting with using Twitter, which I’ve had mixed feelings on - thanks in particular to @TomRaftery for some really great advice on how to use it without suffering from overload.

What’s next for Website Doctor?

We’re running several training courses and seminars in Dublin over the next 4-6 weeks. We hope to have some high quality video available online after those. Stay tuned to the blog for special offer discount codes on the training courses and seminars, and for more updates to our services.

Finally, if you got this far, thanks for reading! If you have questions or comments, please post them below or fire me an email at

If you like this, you might be interest in our online marketing training courses.

Alastair giving the Online Marketing Overview presentation at Dublin City Hall

Notes:

An Overview of Online Marketing

Your Website: The Minimum
————————-

The minimum I believe your website MUST have:

1. A professional appearance
2. What you do (Products/Services)
3. Contact information (minimum: phone number, email address and address)
4. Appear near or at the top in Google for your business name

Why do you need a website?
————————–

“Because everyone else has one” is not a good enough answer! What is the purpose of your website? What are your website’s Goals?

Goals
—–

When someone arrives at your website, you generally want them to take one of the following actions:

* Buy something on the site (direct sales)
* Contact you (lead generation)
* Find information
Each of these is a Goal.

Call to action
————–

For every goal you should have at least one clear Call to Action. Examples:

* Click here to contact us
* Buy Now, Add to cart

Measure
——-

To improve anything you must first measure it. You can track the number of visitors, where they come from, how long they spend on each page. Install Google Analytics free.

Apologies for the poor audio quality - City Hall is a wonderful venue but the acoustics made it difficult to get a good recording!

Thanks for watching - check out other posts on our blog and subscribe to our YouTube feed!

“Submit Your Site to Over 312600 Search Engines”
“Submit your site to 148 major search engines in one click”

312,600 search engines, 148 search engines! What a joke - save your money!

You need to concern yourself with only four search engines. That’s right, only 4. And even then, you can safely ignore two of them and still get the vast majority of relevant search traffic to your site.

Google and Yahoo accounted for over three quarters of all searches carried out in the US in April. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s MSN/Windows Live Search service came in a far-away third, with 9 percent of the market

The stats in the UK are even more slanted towards Google. (It’s hard to find data for the Irish market because it’s so small, but the UK is a good indicator).

I’m sure you’re convinced at this point, and the exact statistics are not important. Let’s see how to get your site listed!

First of all, you don’t HAVE to submit your site. If the site has incoming links from other sites that are already listed in the search engines then the search engine will find it automatically, no action necessary!

Submitting your site to the top search engines

If you really want to submit your site to the top 5 search engines then here’s how:

1. Google - submit your web address here
2. Yahoo - submit your web address here
3. MSN/Live.com - submit your web address here
4. Ask.com - create a sitemap and then follow the instructions here
5. AOL - no submission necessary! (AOL search is powered by Google)

If you do not have any incoming links then you need to start link building (you should do this anyway). We can help!

I hope you found this article helpful, please give your feedback via the comments form below - thanks!

Well, a website needs to pay attention to a few content, design and code requirements to be placed in a good position at any search engine’s results. Therefore, we can classify this process into four basic steps, in the following order:

1. Define the website’s goals and target audience

This first step is planning the optimization (and sometimes even the development process). You must define your site’s goals, whether it is a brand new site or an existing one which needs a better placement.

• Select some keywords and create a short description of the website’s page(s). Think about a selection of the main keywords of your website and a short description about it. If you have a complex website, with a lot of pages and sections, it’s highly recommended that each page has it’s own keywords group and description. This information is important to create the so called metatags, which is information partially used by search engine’s robots to classify your website as relevant or not to the user that searches for something related to what you offer on the Internet. The keywords selection is a very specific to each website, a good place to start is the Experts Guide to Keywords Research for more advice on this topic.
• Make your pages content richer. Put the keywords explained above into your webpage content. Write some good text about your company, products and services organized in sections with titles, subtitles, paragraphs and lists. Of course, each page that offer a different content must have it’s own keywords, related to what you are offering.
• Make links to your own pages. Have you already noticed that some websites repeat their menu links in the footer? This is an acessibility resource to the user that navigate into your website. Besides, the repetition of your links helps with the relevancy of your site on search engines: the more links you have pointing to some page in your website, the more important it became to search engines! So, each page can have links pointing to all the other pages of your site.
• Choose an appropriate title each page. The page title has a huge importance in the optimization process, because it’s the first thing the user will see in the results list of the search engines. Don’t choose a long title, because the last words may be cut-out in the user’s browser. The limit of 60 characters is a good reference. The title must be coherent to the page’s content and, of course, show your important keywords.

2. Promote the site

• Find partners links. Link and be linked! Make good partnerships with websites related to yours and trade links with them. If you make a link pointing to an external page and this same page points a link to your site, you share and increase your popularity on the web. Just take care with links overage. If you point links to a lot of sites that don’t have anything to do with yours, your site can be decharacterized and your optimization efforts can be damaged.
• Manage pay per click advertising. If you want immediate results on positioning, reserve part of your budget to invest in pay per click advertising. The more you pay for a keyword, the more your announcement will be shown at the first pages and positions to an user that searchs for that keyword. The most popular pay per click advertising service is Google Adwords, but there is also Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Search Advertising.

3. Don’t abandon your website: give it a periodical maintenance

• Brand new information. It is important to keep your website updated with new pages, or with the addition of new content to existing pages. This way search engines’s robots won’t “think” that your site is old and outdated. You can provide news about your company, a product or anything else that could be relevant to the users. If you use a CMS like Wordpress to manage your site, this task is pretty simple and fast.
• Quality control. Verify broken links, images lacking the ALT atribute (which provides an alternate text or description about that image to the user) or even broken images. This way, the search engines can index your site correctly and you offer a quality site to the visitors.

4. Analyse the website’s stats

After all the optimisation efforts, it is crucial to check your website’s stats and your competitors’ accomplishment in search engines. You can use this techniques also in the planning step, to check the numbers before and after the optimization process.

• Ranking check. Search for different keywords – related to your site, of course – in different search engines and take note of where your site is located in the results list. Do the same with your competitors’ site to evaluate their market share. This research allows you to realize where to concentrate more optimization efforts and what your competitors are doing that can be good or bad.
• Popularity link check. Do you know how many links the search engines results points to your site? How many sites have links to yours? And what about your competitors? Alexa has a traffic and ranking analysis system, where you can check your website’s link popularity, most visited pages and even a chart that allows you to compare the traffic of your site with the traffic of 5 other sites.
• Statistics. If you have a system that provides your site’ stats, explore all the mentioned informations, such as number of unique visitors, total visitors, returning visitors, pageviews etc. It helps you to stay informed about your site’s accomplishment. An example of a great metrics analysis system – for free – is Google Analytics.

I hope that gives you an overview of where and how to start the optimization process!

What has kept me off the blog in the last week or so? Two weeks ago I was…

• Last Thursday week speaking about SEO and Internet Marketing at the Online Edge Seminar hosted by Digiweb Hosting (thanks Emma for a great organisational job).
  
• Travelling to Galway on Saturday morning train for a truly superb Barcamp Galway (again thanks to the organisational guys at DERI and everyone else involved).
• I gave a talk on SEO including about dodgy SEO cowboys, link building and the Wizards Third First Rule “People believe lies they want to be true”
• Great evening in the pub on Saturday night (of course including making sure we spent 100% of LogOn.ie’s share of the sponsorship in the pub)
• I’ll write up more on Barcamp Galway later.

This week extracurricular activities included:

• Creating a 25 page formal proposal document including concept art in 24 hours. Huge thanks to Dimitar for getting exceptional artwork on time (as usual). Huge thanks also to Sinéad, Pauline and Kylie for the real work of getting the document worded and formatted correctly: we simply wouldn’t have made the deadline without your help, you guys rock!
• Flying to Zurich at short notice late in the week and getting a train down to Geneva for a couple of meetings to discuss the proposal (getting the train was much better than flying the short hop like I did last time)
• After wrapping up business I got to spend Saturday night at the Neuchatel Wine Festival (what a great party experience - these guys would teach the Irish a thing or 2 on running a party)
• 3 hours sleep later, up at 8am Sunday to catch the TGV to Paris
• After 5 hours we arrived in Paris on time to the minute, TGV rocks!
• Headed over to Parc des Princes to watch Ireland vs Argentina (you can find my rant about Ireland’s RWC07 performance elsewhere)
• Flying back in Dublin Tuesday morning via Ryanair (always an interesting experience in itself).

That’s not everything I’ve been up to, but it’s definitely a good cross-sample. I now have a new plan.

My New Plan: Sleep For A Week

Join Us Live - we’re on (ustream.) TV!

You can see a live stream from the main conference room here courtesy of Conn from EdgeCastMedia .

I’m currently attending Dr. Ed Curry’s “If I’m so smart, how come I get paid so little?!” at the moment, Ed is having some fun putting a panel of his bosses under pressure with some tough questions! “What is your biggest career disappointment?” and more!