I’m a firm believer that every brick-and-mortar business should have a website. That’s probably a sentiment shared by many web designers and marketers, but a lot of business owners (especially small business owners) aren’t convinced of. When they are convinced they need a website, they have a tendency to think it isn’t a worthwhile investment, so the website is built half-assed with no real useful content.

So how can web designers and marketers convince these non-tech savvy business owners that their website is important and should be taken seriously? Well, aside from hitting them on the head with a laptop, you can explain to them that their website is like a permanent answering machine for their business.

At the very least, their website should have all the basic and vital information a customer needs to know about their business. Displaying this info online will save countless man hours usually spent answering the same questions over and over again.

So what questions should a business website be able to answer? At the very least, the answers to the 8 questions listed below should be clearly visible on the website. The answers to all these questions should be pretty basic, so even if a website is just built using a template service like GoDaddy or WordPress, they should be able to add these answers with no problem.

1. What’s Your Business’ Name?
The first thing customers will want to know about a business’ website, is that they’re in the right place. Having the business name (and logo) prominently displayed at the top of each web page will assure the customer that they have come to the right website for information on a business.

2. What Do You Do?
I often see really enigmatic mission statements or super long company descriptions on homepages. Reading that kind of stuff is usually a waste of time and will only lead to more questions from customers.

A business website should feature a brief yet complete description of what they do.  If a business can’t explain what they do in one or two sentences, then they either have no idea what they’re doing or they’re doing something really shady.

3. When Are You Open?
The #1 question I ask when I call a brick-and-mortar business is “When are you open today?” To avoid getting countless calls from dumb customers like me, a business should have their hours of operation front and center on their website. This is especially true if a business has odd hours (i.e. 6pm – 4am or closed on Thursdays). If a business is closed on holidays, they may want to think about adding an Hours page that details all the days their closed.

Sidebar: Brick-and-mortar businesses aren’t the only ones with hours of operation. Online businesses are also run by human beings who need to sleep and take breaks from working. If an online business isn’t open 24/7, I think it’d be super helpful to display their hours of operation. That way when I order something from a small online shop, I’ll know when they’re likely to process my order or when I can call them to ask about my order.

4. Where Is Your Business Located?
Nowadays, finding a business’ location is pretty easy if you own a smartphone or have access to Google Maps. Unfortunately, not every business is listed on Google Maps. This could be because they’re a new business, they just moved, or they simply haven’t created a listing online for their business yet. In any case, displaying the business’ address on their website is always a good thing to do.

Extra kudos if the address hyperlinks to Google Maps with a pin in the business’ exact location. If a business has a lot of locations, it might be best to create a Locations page with all the different addresses listed.

5. How Do I Contact You?
Yes, customers will still contact a business no matter how much information they display on their website. Displaying the business’ phone number prominently on the homepage (and all other pages of the website) is a great way to give customers a sense of security because they’ll know help is only a phone call away.

If a business doesn’t want to deal with customers calling them directly, they can set up an contact form on their website so customers can email them instead. I highly recommend using a service like Wufoo for creating contact forms.

6. Are There Any Restrictions I Should Know About?
When I was in high school, I bought tickets to see one of my favorite bands at a local concert venue. When I got to the concert, the security guys stopped me and told me I couldn’t come in because the show was 21 and over. That would’ve been nice to know before I bought my tickets.

If a business has age, gender, religious or other restrictions, they should definitely display those on their website to avoid any confusion or embarrassment from would-be customers.

7. Are There Any Requirements I Should Know About?
If a business has certain requirements it’s customers must adhere to, then I’d say that’s a pretty important thing to put on the website. For instance: if a restaurant requires all men to wear a dinner jacket, that would be something worth putting on their website so guys like me won’t get embarrassed when we waltz in with just a tshirt and jeans on (yes, I’ve done that before).

8. What Things Should I Know Before Doing Business With You?
Listing any random things customers should know about before visiting a business will really help convert new customers into loyal repeat customers. Here are a few examples of things I would list in this category for the Oblong Offices:

-Our offices are located on the water. If you get sea sick, let us know beforehand!
-We have a very friendly dog in our office who loves to lick people
-Free Wi-Fi.

There are dozens of other questions that could be added to this list, but I’m just starting off with the basics in this post. Any business owner should be able to answer all 8 of these questions in less than a minute, and add them to their website in less than 30 minutes.

If you’re a web designer or marketer working with a business that doesn’t have these 8 questions answered on their website, you’ve got some convincing to do. So get to it!

Have you ever taken a job for way less than what it’s actually worth? I think most of us who work online can, unfortunately, say yes to that question. There are a lot of reasons you might work for cheap. Maybe it’s work for a family member, or its for school or you just want to learn more about a new technology. Those reasons are all fine and dandy for why you should take on a new project, but its a dangerous game you play when you undercharge a client for work. Lots of things can go wrong during a project, and because the client has money invested in the project they’re going to be all over you as soon as a problem occurs. Not being paid adequately can make these times one of the most painful experiences you can go through as a professional web person.

In the post below, I describe six pitfalls I’ve experienced while working on projects for cheap. These 6 reasons are the basis for why I’ll never do work for cheap ever again. If you find yourself already trapped in an underpaying project, I’ve also included some possible solutions and prevention tips to help you out.

If you want to read more about how to charge the right amount for a project, I highly recommend reading Design Is a Job by Mike Monteiro. Mike wrote an excellent chapter on charging for your work, but the entire book is a must-read for anybody who works online.

Here we go:

1. Cheap projects are often rushed

The Problem:

Doing work for cheap can often lead the client (and you) to think that the work is not as valuable and therefore isn’t worth the time it takes to plan out everything.

You: “Sure, I’ll set up your new website! Just send me your WordPress log in and I’ll get started today.”

Most clients won’t be able to tell you the specifics of what they need for their project. They can only tell you what they want the end result to be, leaving you to fill in the details.

Client: “Oh, I also need a small store on my WordPress website so I can sell my cool new t-shirts.”

You: “OK, do you have an SSL certificate on your domain? How do you want people to pay for stuff they buy on your website? Paypal, Shopify, Virtual Merchant?”

Client: “I have no idea…Can you figure it out for me???”

You: *smash head on keyboard*

The Solution:

To flesh out exactly what a project entails, you need to put on your detective hat and do some research. Ask the client lots of questions about what they’re looking to get out of the project, and you’ll be rewarded with a good amount of clues to help figure out exactly how much work this project will be for you.

Once you’ve got a pretty good handle on how big this project is, it’s a good time to reflect on whether or not you actually want to do it. Backing out now will save everyone a lot of time and grief if you know the project is going to be too much for you to handle. If backing out isn’t an option, have a meeting with your client and see if there’s a way to lower your workload for the project. Maybe they don’t need that online store just yet, and can hold off for a few months on building it.

In Short:

Doing work for cheap can make you feel like it needs to get done quickly with little time for planning ahead. When you have no plan, you’re almost guaranteeing yourself that there will be problems down the road that will stall the project or make you start all over. Which brings us to reason #2:

2. There are ALWAYS hidden complications.

The Problem:

With any project, you can pretty much bet on unforeseen complications popping up from time to time. It’s unavoidable, but that’s just the nature of working on the web. The real problem is that you’re being underpaid to deal with these complications, which makes them that much more painful when they arise.

Let’s take a closer look at the example conversation earlier in this post.

For the ordinary client, the web is a magical place where they put up a website, add some products and start making money hand over fist within a few days. They have an idea of what they want their store to look like, but that’s about as far as they’ve thought. And one more thing: they’ve already signed a deal with some random merchant service that will handle transactions, leaving it up to you to build the store and shopping cart from scratch. They don’t realize how much work it takes to make a secure and easy to use online store. You’ve now got a laundry list of things to do: make sure there’s an SSL certificate installed properly on their domain, build the storefront and shopping cart system, create a back-end system for adding/editing products, make sure whatever payment system they signed up for is properly set up and connected to the website, etc. The amount of 1-800 calls you have to make to set up even a small online store will make you feel like an air traffic controller, and you’ll be able to write a small novel during the time you spend on hold.

The Solution:

The best solution for the example above is to convince your client to switch to an all-in-one service like Shopify or find an easy plugin for WordPress. This will severely cut down the time you spend setting up their online store (aka:slamming your head against your keyboard).

The all-in-one shopping services do tend to have higher fees than the more custom services, but I think there are enough benefits to working with services like Shopify that you can convince your client to use them at least until they have enough money to pay you to build a fully custom store.

In Short:

The best way to avoid complications is knowledge and planning. Have a good understanding of what you’re getting yourself into, and you’ll be able to avoid a lot of complications down the road. Also, make sure your client is aware that complications WILL happen. It sucks when you get an angry email from a client because they weren’t expecting problems during the early stages of a project.

3. Not the best way to learn new things.

The Problem:

If you’re thinking of doing a project as a learning experience and thought it might be great to get some money in the process, DON’T DO IT. A client is giving you their money (albeit not very much) to do work for them that they expect to be completed in a timely fashion with little to no errors. If anything goes wrong with the project, the blame is going to rest squarely on your shoulders. The client won’t care if you’re trying to teach yourself something new. They paid you, so they expect you to be able to complete the project and fix whatever problems arise.

The Solution:

If you want to learn something new: create a test project for yourself where no client is involved. There are two reasons why this is a better way to learn: You don’t have a client’s money on the line so you can take your time with the test project, and you don’t have a client breathing down your neck so your learning environment is far less stressful.

If you’ve already promised a client that you’d do a project that will require you to learn on the job, then make sure the client is 100% aware that you’re going into unfamiliar territory. The more the client is aware that you’re learning as you go, the more lenient they’ll be with hiccups during the development process.

In Short:

Remember this little mantra: Learn on my own time, not on the clients dime. Clients pay for your professional and expert skills, not for you to test out new things you’ve never done before.

4. You’ll become the client’s “Internet Guy”

The Problem:

In my experience, clients don’t like to call 1-800 numbers to get help from a random IT guy. They’d much rather get help from someone who they think might know the answer and that they have a direct line to: you. In the client’s eyes: you’re their “internet guy” who can solve any issue they may be having. I get emails from clients all the time that are clearly problems with another service they are using, but because I’m slightly involved in the process they expect me to be able to solve the problem for them.

Why does this happen?

The simple answer is because you didn’t charge the client enough. If you charge the client a low amount, they won’t value the work you’re doing as much and will expect more out of you than is appropriate. If you charge them the correct amount (which varies depending on the project), then their perception of the work you’re doing will be greater and they’ll be less likely to contact you about unimportant or irrelevant issues.

The Solution:

Clearly define what your role is in the project. If a client asks you to help fix something you’re not a part of, stand your ground and tell them to call tech support. The client may whine, but don’t give in to their complaints. Establish boundaries before you become the their personal slave.

Alternatively, you could charge them for any extra work that’s outside of your established role. They’ll either back off and get help elsewhere, or you’ll do the extra work for them and get paid for it. This still requires that you establish what your role is for the project. If you don’t, the client will argue over every little thing you try to charge them for and you won’t have a foot to stand on.

In Short:

Boundaries are key to not being misused by a client. Talking to the client about what your role is before the project begins will help avoid any awkward situations down the road.

5. The less you charge, the more time the project will take.

The Problem:

This is practically an unwritten rule of working for cheap. If you undercharge for a project, that project will almost certainly take up more of your time than regular projects do. There are a lot of factors that lead to this happening, but like most of the other pitfalls on this list: the biggest factor is perceived value. If the client doesn’t value your work enough a lot of things can start happening: they’ll forget to mention key things about the project, not respond back to your emails in a timely manner or (worst of all) they’ll pile more tasks onto you midway through the project and expect you to not charge them extra for it. All of which will lead to you spending more time on the project than originally anticipated.

Here’s an analogy for you to think about: if you buy a cheap wash cloth, you probably use it for everything: drying dishes, washing cars, cleaning shoes, wiping spills, etc. If you buy an expensive wash cloth, you’re far less likely to use it for all those things. You’ll probably only use it to wash your face, or just hang it as a decorative towel in the bathroom and yell at people if they touch it. Clients treat you the same way they do wash clothes (sorry to compare you to a wash cloth. I love you.). If you undercharge for your work, clients will see that as an opportunity to use you for a bunch of other things that aren’t part of the original project goals.

The Solution:

The easiest solution is to never undercharge for work you do, period. If that’s not an option, then you will need to start thinking in terms of time management. Establish an allotted amount of time you can work on the project every week. Tell the client that you only have X amount of hours in the week to work on their project. If they want you to work on it more, they need to give you more money.

In Short:

This problem is all about time management. Establish a time limit for how much you’ll work on the project per week and you should be able to avoid spending an exorbitant amount of time on a project that’s not worth enough to keep the lights on.

6. Clients set unrealistic goals or constraints

The Problem:

Clients often have odd or even unrealistic expectations of what can be done online, especially when they have a small budget. If a client is approaching you with something they’re calling a “side” or “pet” project and they aren’t willing to shell out the appropriate amount of money for your services, stay away from them. They’re trying to sell you on their pipe dream that is full of half-concocted ideas and a whole lot of assumptions about what can be done online for cheap.

From my experience, a tell-tale sign of bad things to come is when a client gives you strange constraints on a project.

Client: “Please don’t ask my customers questions about the new website. I want to make the transition to the new version as smooth as possible without bothering my customers.”

The Solution:

The client won’t know if they’re being unreasonable so its up to you to inform the client when they’re setting unrealistic goals or constraints on the project. Ask the client for a detailed explanation on why you should do what they ask. If they say “Because I’m paying you!” then its probably time to fire the client. More often than not, the client will be fine with changing their goal or constraint to be more reasonable, especially if you give them an alternative.

Sometimes, unfortunately, the client is dead set in their ways and it takes a lot of convincing and sending plenty of articles from experts on why you shouldn’t do whatever it is the client wants done. The upside is that once you convince them that you’re right and that you know what you’re talking about, you’ll have an easier time convincing them of other things (like why you need more money) because your value to them has now been increased.

In Short:

Don’t let your client walk all over you. If they set unrealistic goals or constraints, tell them.

So there you have it; 6 reasons you should never work for cheap. In any client relationship, your perceived value and the project’s monetary value are directly proportional. If you undercharge a client, they’re likely to undervalue your work and try to use you like a ShamWOW rag they bought during a late-night drinking binge. If you’ve already promised a client you’ll work for cheap, then make sure you lay out some really strict guidelines for the project so you can avoid as many of the above pitfalls as possible.

I know that working for cheap can be a very enticing thing for newer web professionals. I’ve definitely been guilty of undercharging clients because I was new, and wasn’t confident enough in myself to charge an accurate amount. But I’m over that now. I know my work and how much its worth, and I’ll be damned if I don’t get paid correctly for my work from here on out. This doesn’t mean I won’t take the odd job here and there for a relative or to teach myself a new technology, but I won’t undercharge for the project.

I’d love to hear your horror stories about working for clients on the cheap. Head over to OblongPixel’s Facebook page and post on our wall.

Our featured post is a great article on how to create a content plan for your business. The Ultimate Guide to Content Planning

Don’t miss out on all the amazing content!

Social

5 Facebook Posts to Engage Customers

The Hidden Cost of Cheap SEO & Social Labor

5 Ways Strategic Social Media Can Help Small Business

10-Point Plan for Connecting with Influencers

How to Write a Winning Proposal

Email, Phone Number and User ID Targeting on Facebook

Facebook Updates Mobile Fan Pages

Social Media Community Management Best Practices

10 Painless Tactics to Earn Attention on Twitter

Conversion Rate Optimization

3 Obvious but Overlooked Elements to Test on Your Landing Page

Optimizing for Conversion: A Look at Searcher Intent

The State of Ecommerce

Write a Call-To-Action That Converts

The Best Conversion Rate Optimization Posts

Search

Measuring SEO Success via Google Analytics

Restructuring Your Website & How to Minimize Traffic Loss

Interviews in Search: Ian Lurie

Industry

The Help Me Help You Dinner

What’s Hot in Web Typography

Ensuring Client Collaboration Through Agile Marketing

Content

The Ultimate Guide to Content Planning

Can We Make Creativity a Little Bit Productive

When Not to Use an Infographic: 6 Examples

Our featured post is a great article on approaching your marketing holistically and allowing all the different parts to work together. Thinking Holistically About Marketing Services

Don’t miss out on all the amazing content!

Search

Talking SEO with John Doherty

A Primer on Adwords Remarketing using Google Analytics

Who Should Care About Geo Rankings and Why?

Content

How to Do a Content Audit

Not Bloggin? Read This!

21 Utterly Random Ideas for Content

10 Grammar Mistakes That Can Keep Your Content From Spreading

Balanicng Your Morals With Personas and Aliases

A Beginners Guide to Domain Buying

Social

Thinking Holistically About Marketing Services

Facebook Marketing Mistakes

3 Ways Marketers Can Leverage the New LinkedIn

Facebook gives page owners new option to target friends of fans with Promote Button

4 Strategies for Facebook Search Ads

Facebook Page Manager App With More Support For Photos

New Page Post Targeting for Pages with Over 5,000 Likes

Facebook May Soon Allow Ad Targeting by Email

How Much Should You Plan to Pay Your Social Media Community Manager?

How to Manage a Day Job and Your Community

Promoted Posts – Breakdown and tips for best use

OblongPixel Blog Posts

Last Week’s Resource Round-up

You’re Lying to Your Boss: How your dashboard misleads & how to fix it

What to Expect When You’re Expecting: 10 Essentials to Check Before You Launch a Website

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the holiday weekend if you are in the US! Everybody else, have fun on Monday!

Are you about to launch a new website? Are you 110% sure that you and your web developer have remembered all the essential things your website needs to have before it goes live?

Chances are good that you’ve probably forgotten something during the development process. Making a new website is a big undertaking that requires managing a lot of small moving parts, and as a human being you’ve probably neglected a few of those parts while focusing on other ones. That’s OK though, because I’ve put together a quick list of 10 essentials you should make sure your website has before launch day.

Favicon

A favicon a 16 x 16 pixel icon displayed next to the title tag in the top portion of your web browser. It may not seem like a vital part of your website, but it does play a big role in how your website stands out from others when a user is looking at multiple web pages at once in their web browser. Most modern web browsers use tabs to display multiple web pages that a user has open at the same time. The more web pages a user has open in their browser, the smaller each tab appears. The smaller each tab appears, the more your favicon becomes the only way the user can recognize your web page from the multitude of others they have open. Favicons are also important because when a user bookmarks your website, the favicon is prominently displayed next to whatever the user names their bookmark for your site.

How to make a favicon:

The simplest way to make a favicon (if you don’t have a graphic designer working for you) is to use a favicon generator tool like www.favicon.cc. Once you have created your favicon using favicon.cc, download it to your computer and upload the .ico file  to your website. Once that’s done, you just need to insert the following piece of HTML in between the <head> and </head> tags on every page of your website. If you upload the .ico file to a sub-folder on your website, make sure you change the href attribute to accomodate for that.

Don’t know what to create for your favicon?

The three most popular styles of favicons are: a smaller version of the company logo, the first letter of the company’s name or an icon that represents the company’s overall theme or personality.

Page Titles and Meta Data

A page title (also called the title tag) is the text that appears next to your website’s favicon in the top portion of your web browser. The page title on each page of your website should clearly state what that particular page is about and shouldn’t be longer than 70 characters (including spaces).

Meta data is the data that describes what each web page is about. This data is not displayed on your website, but lives within the <head> tags of your website. Meta data, like the page title, should clearly describe what each web page is about on your website but in more detail.

The reason these two tags are important for your website has to do with search engines and how your website appears on a search engine results page (often called a SERP). The page title and meta description are often the first things a user reads about your website, so taking the time to craft a good page title and meta description for each web page on your website is a worthwhile investment.

The page title and meta description are often the first things a user reads about your website

For more tips about search engine optimization, read SEOMoz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO or check out the pages specifically about page titles and meta descriptions.

Google Analytics code and Google Webmaster tools

Google has an incredible library of free services for website owners and webmasters to help optimize their website. One of the best tools is Google Analytics, which tracks how people get to your website, what they do while on your website and when/how they leave your website.  Google Analytics can be a little daunting if you’ve never used it before. Even if you don’t know how to use Google Analytics, it’ll store your website’s traffic data for a few years, so even if you don’t have a use for the data now it’s good to start collecting it anyways.

Setting up Google Analytics is very simple. Read the Getting Started with Google Analytics guide for easy-to-follow instructions.

Cross Browser checks

Not every web browser is made the same, so not every web browser will display your website exactly the way you originally intended. This is especially true of older web browsers like Internet Explorer 6 (also known as the devil’s browser) that were built back in the days when companies were trying to monopolize the internet with their own special web browser. Nowadays, web standards are widely practiced by all web browser companies, so there’s less issue with cross-browser compatibility.

The problem is that a lot of users still use older web browsers because of work, laziness or maybe a paralyzing fear of new and awesome technologies. As a website owner, you have a tough decision to make: do you cut these people out and not worry about them, or do you spend more time and money on making your website accessible to everyone? My answer is usually to make a cut-off point and only worry about people using web browsers that are from within the past 5 years or so.

How do you test your website in other web browsers (especially over versions of web browsers)?

The easiest way to test your website in other web browsers is to use a cross-browser testing tool or service. Smashing Magazine put together a good list of free and commercial tools that you could use to check your website in different web browsers.

The real challenge comes once you find an issue your website has with a specific web browser. How do you fix the problem? Often times, these problems are caused by slight variations in the syntax used by a web browser when interpreting the code of your website into the visual representation a user sees. If you haven’t already, now might be a good time to hire a web developer to help you with your cross-browser compatibility issues.

Proofread everything 

This should be self-explanatory, but you’d be surprised how many people forget to proofread their website’s content in their haste to get their website launched on time. If your website is a gigantic library of blog posts and documentation, then its OK if you don’t proofread the entire thing, but you should still proofread the pages of your website that you expect to get heavy traffic. If anything, make sure that there are no spelling or grammatical errors on your homepage, about page or contact page. Taking the time to proofread your website will ensure that your content reflects that you are a professional who takes themselves seriously.

Graceful Degradation or Progressive Enhancement

Remember when I said you should have a cut-off point for supporting older web browsers on your fancy state-of-the-art website? Well the practice of graceful degradation or progressive enhancement is how you can make sure that users who are still using those older web-browsers will still be able to read your website’s content.

Graceful degradation and progressive enhancement are two different but similar practices for dealing with web browsers that don’t work well with your website. Graceful degradation is the practice of developing your website with the newest web browsers in mind, but keeping the HTML of your website as organized and semantic as possible. This ensures that your website will still be readable even if your website’s CSS and JavaScript fails to work in a web browser. Keeping your HTML organized will not only ensure that it’s readable if newer technologies fail on you, but it also makes it more accessible for handicap users who are using screen readers to view your website.

Progressive enhancement is a relatively new practice of focusing on your website’s content first, then adding a layer of CSS to style your content and lastly adding client-side scripting (JavaScript) to the website. There’s a great analogy explaining progressive enhancement using Peanut M&M’s on alistapart.com.

Since this article is about things you should be checking in the later stages of your website development and not early design stages (an article about that will be coming soon), you probably won’t be able to fully utilize either of these practices. The best thing you can do at this late stage of website development is to make sure that your website is still usable if someone has disabled JavaScript on their web browser. The easiest way to test your website sans-JavaScript is to go into your internet options and disable JavaScript (this option can usually be found under the Privacy section of your internet options). Unless you’re using some of the newer stylings in CSS3, you shouldn’t have much of a problem with your website’s CSS stylings in older browsers.

make sure that your website is still usable if someone has disabled JavaScript

Site Map

A site map is essentially an outline of the structure of your website. You need a site map of your website for two reasons: it makes it easier for users to find web pages that are buried on your website and its used by search engines to better index and define important pages of your website.

The simplest way to create a site map is to use a site map generator like xml-sitemaps.com. Once the site map has been created and uploaded to your website, you can submit it to Google, Bing or any other search engine to have it indexed. If your website is build on a CMS platform like Drupal or WordPress, then you should have a built-in site map page so you won’t need to worry about creating one yourself.

Social Media Links

Do you have social media profiles for your website? Include links to them on your website so users can connect to your business. There are a ton of great social media plug-ins for websites, especially for Facebook and Twitter, that allow you to do a lot more than just include a simple link to your profile page. You can show recent Tweets, how many likes your page has, recent comments on a post, etc. With all these great plug-ins, moderation is key. In the words of Uncle Ben, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Choose one plug-in for each social media platform you use (or just the three that you use the most). A flood of social media plug-ins is going to smother your website’s content, which is the real reason a user came to your website and didn’t go directly to your profile page. For a great discussion about social media buttons, check out Rand Fishkin’s video on the subject.

404 page

Sometimes, users try to visit web pages that are no longer on your website or were never there to begin with. When this happens, they see a very plain web page with some text explaining that the web page they were trying to reach is no longer available. This page is very boring and uninformative, but luckily it can be changed. Check out this post on tutsplus.com for great tips on how to improve your website’s 404 page.

Why Should I Bother Improving My 404 Page?

Here’s why: If your website consists of 10 web pages (website.com/page1, website.com/page2, website.com/page3, etc…) there are only 10 pages that exist on your website’s domain, but there are an infinite number of other things a user could type after your domain that would take them to a 404 page.

Semantic Markup VS. Heading Tags

Heading tags (ex: <h1>, <h2>, <h3>) are the tags used in HTML to denote significant content on your website, usually things like titles or headings. In the days before HTML5, heading tags were used for just about everything that wasn’t just plain text in a paragraph. This is because of two things: there was no good way of semantically representing various types of content on a website and search engines gave content within <h1> and <h2> tags more importance than other content on the page. With HTML5 came new, more semantic tags like the <citation>, <caption>, <navigation>,  <section>, etc… Heading tags (especially <h1> and <h2> tags) are no longer as important as they once were. Search engines are a lot smarter now and will give a better rank to a website that uses semantic HTML5 tags vs a website that just uses heading tags. For a better understanding of HTML5, check out the fantastic list of resources at html5rocks.com.

Can I still use heading tags?

Of course you can! Just be sure to use them for their original semantic purpose: as tags for headings and titles.

Bonus Tip

For those of you making a website all on your own: hire a web designer/developer to help you. I applaud the ingenuity of people who try making their own website without any prior knowledge of web design, but 98% of the time the thing they make is something that should not be seen by users. To avoid creating an abomination like this (http://georgerrmartin.com/), I would advise anyone who is undertaking their own website development to at least consult with a web design professional.

Once you can check off all 10 of these essentials, your website will be ready to conquer the internet. If you still feel like your website has some kinks to work out, that’s OK. Unless there’s something catastrophically wrong with your website, I encourage you to launch it as soon as possible. It’s much better to have your website live and slightly broken than it is for the website to not be live and still broken. Who knows, maybe the things you thought were issues actually don’t matter to your users and you can stop worrying about them.

If you think I’ve forgotten an essential thing to check before launching a website, let me know on the OblongPixel Facebook page.

Additional Website Checklists:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/07/15-essential-checks-before-launching-your-website/

http://colorlabsproject.com/blog/website-pre-launch-checklist/

http://boagworld.com/business-strategy/pre-launch-checklist/

Scenario 1: Your SEM campaign drives an average of 20 leads a day. You double your spend and your leads/day only increases by 5. That doesn’t make any sense! What the average didn’t tell you is that you are spending an equal amount of money on 4 ad groups but only one of them is driving any leads! You need to segment your averages to actually see the truth.

Scenario 2: At a large advertising agency, I was told by a higher-up that the click-to-call ratio on my campaigns was far below the other managers. I told them that many of my clients didn’t want calls; they wanted customers in the door. So I segmented my campaigns based on whether the customer wanted calls or some other type of conversion and found that the click-to-call rate on my campaigns was more than double anybody else in the company! This promptly caused them to re-evaluate how they were tracking our performance of course.

There are two major problems happening in these scenarios. The first is that you need to segment your campaigns to a certain level of granularity before you begin to see usable numbers. Ideally, you wouldn’t use averages at all but business owners and executives don’t have time to dig deeply into the data so they need something they can glance at and instantly have a feel for the health of their business.

The second is everybody needs to agree upon the metrics that are being optimized. If the client wants phone calls, you should set their dashboard to reflect that and you better optimize to that. You don’t want a client freaking out because their pageviews have dropped by 50% when they should be ecstatic their calls have increased 100%!

Because clients and executives are paying you to interpret the data for them, you are responsible for making sure they are looking at good dashboards. So here are a few ideas when evaluating what to present to your client based on their favorite metrics:

Click-to-convert:

If your client is in love with Click-to-convert, segment each of your clicks by referrer so that they can see how individual channels are doing. This can still lead to faulty conclusions but at least they are further down the path to enlightenment when you re-educate them.

Cost/Conversion:

In most cases, I would NOT recommend segmenting this data by marketing channel. Most marketing campaigns act as a cohesive unit rather than completely separate channels. Spending a bunch of money on social media may have a huge impact on search conversions but may not drive any conversions directly. Segmenting this would lead to the conclusion that social media isn’t performing and that money should be routed into search engine marketing.

Google Analytics has new functionality that allows you to see multi-touch conversions. It allows you to see if somebody visited your site through social media and then later came back to your site through search to buy something. You must be careful how you present this data to non-marketers though because the gut reaction may still be to devote all resources to that final touch where the conversion happened.

Pageviews:

The classic pageviews addict. All they want is to see pageviews climbing and cost declining. But we all know (hopefully) that traffic doesn’t equate to sales. The right traffic equals sales.

The best thing you can do for this person is to put some indicators of quality right next to their pageviews graph. Show them that time on site is going up or bounce rate is declining. Show them that pages/visit has doubled even though traffic has been cut in half. Or you could really rock their world by showing them that sales have doubled!

Our featured post is a new tool we just released for analyzing people’s content on Twitter. How to Influence an Influencer

Don’t miss out on all the amazing content!

Thoughts on Community as an Inbound Marketing Strategy

Find Your Social Media Link Building Sweet Spot

350+ Social Networking Sites 

Google Maps Facts

Finding Your Tone of Voice

The Googler Who Looked at the Worst of the Internet

The Content Lifecycle

5 Things Toddlers Can Teach You About Marketing

Gen Y Workers Love Seattle

The State of SEO and Internet Marketing Webinar

Anatomy of a Successful Landing Page

3 Blogging Criteria for Writing Great Posts

Announcing the 2012 SEO Industry Survey

SEOmoz YouTube Contest Winners

9 Facebook Marketing Tips From Top Experts

Why 92% of Startups Fail

Big List of Social Media Sites

Last Weeks Resource Round-up

Thanks for tuning in and have a great weekend!

The key to influencing these influencers is to understand these themes. You must understand what they are attracted to and why.

“The quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”

An influencer’s ‘food’ are the links they find and share in the tubes of the internet. If you can examine their links, you can find the way to their heart. All that info is already out there, but you need an easier way to gather it and summarize. Lucky for you, I have built a way to do just that!

Twitter Resource Analyzer

The Twitter Resource Analyzer takes two Twitter handles and a number representing how many days of tweets you want to analyze, then spits out all of the links they have shared. It calculates how much overlap they have, what percent of their tweets have links, how many links per hour they share and it gives a count of how many times they share resources from each domain as a whole. Then, of course, you can export it all to CSV and have your way with it.

This tool is deep in Alpha territory so be gentle! It is a little slow to load because it has to expand all of the shortened URLs. There is a lot of room for improvement and if you have ideas or are a developer, contact me on Twitter @DesignMunchies.

I hope you guys enjoy the tool enough to break our servers!

Twitter Resource Analyzer

Share how you use the tool with @OblongPixel. We will write a blog post later summarizing the best ones and credit you!

Note: This post is both a summary and my thoughts/interpretation of a talk given by Jen Lopez from SEOMoz at MozCon 2012. You can find Jen’s original presentation at  http://www.seomoz.org/mozcon-live/agenda.

SEOMoz loves inbound marketing and so should every other company. Not just B2C companies or online-only companies, ALL COMPANIES. I imagine most of you reading this have heard the term “inbound marketing” in the past year or so, but you might not have a grasp of what it means yet. It’s actually pretty simple: Inbound marketing is the strategy of getting found by customers who are already learning and shopping within your business’ industry. Inbound marketing employs “free” traffic sources to turn your business into a giant bat signal for people who have some interest in things pertaining to your company. Jen has a really nifty graphic that includes a more extensive list of inbound marketing tools (shown below).

In Jen’s presentation, she points out a few of the more prevalent tools in the inbound marketing toolbox:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Social Media

Content

Blogging

Email

User Generated Content (UGC)

All of these tools are great, but according to Jen, the heart of any inbound marketing strategy has to be Community, and I agree 100%. Community is what makes inbound marketing such a great strategy. It’s what makes all the traffic sources in the graphic below “free.” It would take an entire building’s worth of employees to generate the amount of business your community can get for you. Managing an entire community may seem like something that only a large company with lots of manpower can handle, but I think anybody can do it  if they plan ahead and follow a few simple tips (check out Jen’s tips at the bottom of this post).

Community Influencers

Like any good marketing strategy, there are key people you should be paying attention to when managing a community. Below is a list  of community influencers you should pay especially close attention to and a few strategies for nurturing these types of community members.

Brand Advocates

Social media, especially sites like Twitter and Pinterest, make it super easy to find people who are talking about and advocating your brand without you even asking them to. How great is that?!

Nurturing Tip: Having people evangelize your brand is great by itself, but what if you took the time to actually recognize these brand advocates of yours? Imagine how much more they would talk about your brand to all of their friends and followers. The best part is that it doesn’t take much to reach out to these advocates. A simple shout-out or retweet is usually enough to show your gratitude.

Product Feedback Specialists

Your customers use your product “in the wild” and possibly on a daily basis. They are experts at finding new and unique ways to use (and probably break) your product. So why not use this knowledge to your advantage and ask your customers for product feedback?

Nurturing Tip: Set up a Q&A session on Google Plus, Quora, your company blog or even Reddit, and let your customers give you open and honest feedback about what they would like to see out of your product.

Content Generators

People love to rant & rave about experiences they’ve had, and some of those people are actually pretty good writers. Most reviewers are more than willing to let you use their review in other content you produce, especially if you give them a writing credit.

Nurturing Tip: Can’t afford to hire a copy writer for your business? Try sifting through all the reviews your company has on Yelp or any other online review site for some great free content.

Content Sharers

Content is King. If you make great content, people will share it with their friends and followers. Those friends and followers now have a great first impression of your company that was given to them by someone they consider to be an influence.

The downside is that making great content isn’t easy, and its something that most companies overlook. It’s also one of the only things that everyone thinks they can do, but in reality most people suck at it.  Fortunately, there are incredible freelance content creators out there that you can hire, and it won’t cost you half your yearly salary.

Nurturing Tip: Visit sites like elance.com, guru.com or odesk.com, and search around for a freelancer who has experience in your industry or has a lot of positive reviews. Hiring a professional content creator will do a few things for your company: it’ll make your content more likely to be shared by your customers, it’ll make you look more professional and show people that you care about your business and it’ll improve your SEO. Yes, that’s right: having good content improves your SEO. Search engines like Google and Bing care about the content you put out on the internet and will increase your website’s ranking for keywords included in your content.

Link Builders

Another big part of improving your company’s SEO is your website’s inbound links. Having other websites create links back to content on your website will improve your website’s rank for keywords contained on that particular web page. Getting customers to become link builders for your business requires two things from you: Good networking skills and great content. Open lines of communication with customers or people who work for websites you want a link from, then produce great content that those people will want to share with their own community.

Nurturing Tip: Most bloggers and news reporters care about how much their own content is shared. If you do them a favor and share a cool story of theirs with your community, they might do the same for you and share a link back to your website.

Customers

Connecting to customers is key to building a great community and producing a successful inbound marketing campaign. One problem a lot of companies have is that they don’t know where the majority of their customers talk about their business online.

Nurturing Tip: Try using a service like KnowEm.com to find out which social network has the largest community of people talking about your business. You might be surprised that social media giants like Facebook or Twitter might not be where your community hangs out.

Biggest Critics & Biggest Fans

These two groups can often be the same people. Your biggest critics can turn into your biggest fans if you take notice of their complaints and address them publicly. Likewise, if you ignore the praises of your biggest fans, they may start to resent their praises falling on deaf ears. Similar to your brand advocates, you should keep on the lookout for your biggest fans and critics and be sure to reach out to them as soon as possible.

Nurturing Tip: Make a Google Alert for your business’ name or product name and positive and negative keywords. This way you’ll know as soon as someone says anything positive or negative about your business and you can address it immediately.

Forum Participants

Forums are a great way for you to seek out customers who are experts when it comes to your product(s) and are willing to help other customers who have questions. Forums can also help you get a feeling for what some of the larger pain points customers are having with your product.

Nurturing Tip: Invite frequent forum users to a special webinar where they can learn exclusive news about your company or product. Or hold a private Q&A session with your product dev. team where people can ask questions directly to the experts at your company.

Site Uptime Monitoring Service

You might not be looking at your website 24 hours a day, but your customers sure are. You can use that to your advantage by turning your customers into a free alert system that notifies you the moment something goes wrong with your website or product.

Nurturing Tip: Set up a special Twitter account specifically for people to talk about complaints or issues with your website or product. This will also help keep your main Twitter profile clear of people spamming you if a major problem occurs on your website or with your product.

OK, that’s all great, but what can you really do to cultivate these types of community influencers?

Create an inbound marketing task force.

Creating an inbound marketing task force is easy: look for people in your company who are already active on social media and have a deep knowledge of your product. An ideal task force would include people from customer service, marketing, product development and someone appointed as a community manager who can oversee the task force.

Why do you need a task force? Can’t one intern to do all this work?

Inbound marketing (and community management) is a team effort. You need to nurture your community and at the same time think of new ways to keep it growing, and that is not a task one person can perform adequately. The upkeep on a community is definitely not an easy task, but it’s also very rewarding. Below are 10 pro tips from Jen to help manage your community and maximize the amount of inbound traffic they produce for your business.

1. It’s a team sport

Inbound marketing and community management are a team effort. Everyone on your task force should bring their own unique skills to the team, but also be able to help out if another team member is busy or unavailable.

2. Test, test, test!

Use free analytics tools to your advantage! Test different headlines in posts. What gets more engagement from your community: pictures or videos? Your community will forgive you for A/B testing especially if you’re transparent about it.

3. Turn critic into a fan

It’s worth mentioning this again. Your biggest critics can easily become your biggest fans if you address their issues and let them know you care.

4. Delight them!

Who doesn’t love being named “Customer of the Week” randomly? Delight your customers with cool random prizes or shout outs.

5. Give a sh*t!

Giving to charities or running a fund raiser is a great way to show that your business has a heart of gold. Plus it’s a great PR boost!

6. Be Proactive

Give your customers incentive to talk about your business. For a great example of how to do this, check out this article about Kotex and their Pinterest campaign. http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/kotex-makes-gifts-women-based-their-pinterest-boards-139161

7. Give ‘em Props

Notice that one of your customers did something cool? Let them know you think they’re awesome.

8. Use G+ Search

Google Plus has a great search feature that allows you to search for trends, posts, pages and people that are related to your business.

9. Everyone helps

Encourage customers to help each other. A good community should communicate with each other as much, if not more, than they communicate with your business.

10. Listen + Act

Sometimes customers have great ideas. Show them that you listen and care about what they think by acting on their suggestions.

After all these tips and strategies you might be saying to yourself, “How can I possibly do all these things at once?” Well, when you boil this article down to its essential parts, the biggest aspect of a successful community and inbound marketing campaign is communication. If you show customers that you care about what they say, then they’ll be far more likely to share their positive feelings about your business with other potential customers.

Don’t miss out on all the amazing content! Our featured post is a FREE webinar happening on Monday by Rand and Dharmesh titled: The State of SEO. You really don’t want to miss it.

Your Data Won’t Beat My Gut: Without emotional intuition, your data is lying to you

SEOmoz and Folowerwonk join forces!

MozCon Resource Round-up

Facebook 80% Bot Claim Examined! Why you shouldn’t lose faith yet.

The Correlation Between Social Sharing and Inbound Links

8 Ways to Improve Your Facebook EdgeRank

Facebook Now Reports Average Sponsored Post Position

Big Fat Noob Guide to Writing a Solid Post

Using Social Media to Build Links and Impact SEO

Who Subscribes to Your Page Without Liking It?

Facebook Tests Paid Post Ads in News Feed

F**k it, Ship it

6 Ways to Improve Your Open Rate

3 Website Metrics to Watch Daily

How to Find Your Target Audience

Make sure to come back next week for a new edition of Resource Round-Up!