Business Information for Entrepreneurs by an Entrepreneur

Every business website should have an "About Us" page. In fact, it is one of the most important personal elements on any website. Whether you are building a new company website or remodeling a current one, you should spend some time revisiting your About Us page to find ways you can improve it.

Marketing research has proven in the past that consumers like to do business with companies they trust. It's not your price for a product. It's not even how fast you can ship it. Ultimately, the aggregate consumer wants to know and trust your business before they hand over their precious credit card - and your about us page helps them find that level of comfort.

About Us Page Mistakes

Most small business owners simply do not know how to construct a proper About Us page. Instead, they write up something on the spot and usually it is filled with potentially costly mistakes. Take these for instance:

Telling what your company does
If your company name is Carol's Catering, it is likely your consumers know what you do. In fact, most About Us pages for small businesses make the mistake of telling what they do instead of who they are. Don't make your About Us section another page with a sales pitch.

Leaving out the people
Oftentimes, About Us pages do not have a single iota of information on the business owner, much less any other important people. Make the page more personal, giving insight into who operates the company and helping to make a human connection.

Boring, stiff copy
Another big mistake small businesses make is writing an About Us page that contains unmotivated copy. The tone is stiff, stuffy, business-like, and not at all creative or inviting.

What an About Us Page Should Be

Your About Us page should be inviting and contain these elements:

• Share the company story - Let the About Us page tell how the company got started. Share an anecdote that was the impetus for the company's formation. Provide a timeline. Share why your company is passionate about what it does. Customers love to understand the background of a business.
• Tell the human story - Consumers know your business is more than just a brand. Tell more about the founders and other important directors, and even about the people who customers have contact with.
• Show the company's personality - Even if your company is in a "stuffy" conservative financial industry, it doesn't hurt to show your personality. Have a little fun in the About Us page to show that you're all human, too.

Tips on Designing Your About Us Page

With common mistakes and what an About Us section should include in mind, here are a few ideas to spice up your About Us page.

• Picture and Bios - At the very least, upload a picture and bio of each executive of the company. If the company is small enough, do this with all your staff. Make the bios fun; that is, show a little creativity. Let the visitor know why it would be fun to talk to or meet the person.
• Owner Video - Create a short video of the company's owner giving a brief tour of your facility. Seeing the owner in a hard hat can let readers know that everyone is willing to get their hands "dirty" on the job. You could even do interviews with the owner and other important people in the company and post them on the About Us page.
• Show Timeline Photos - Does the company save photos throughout the years? Consider posting a "travelogue" timeline with pictures of 70's hairdos, 80's clothing styles, and even the humble beginnings of a company. This will help demonstrate that you are an established company, as well as one with a good sense of humor!
• Include Social Media Links - If your small business has social media accounts, be sure to invite online readers to join them. It is easy to obtain icons for popular social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You might even include a script showing the feeds from your recent posts on social media accounts.

With your About Us page, the bottom line is to make the content interesting. Share a little bit about the company, and show the human element of your business. Brag a little about how the company has triumphed over humble beginnings. With an About Us page that attracts and connects visitors to the business, it could spell additional conversions for your online sales.

Small business SEO is a vitally important part of successful online marketing. Small businesses do not have the same resources as large corporations to buy online advertising on all the popular websites, nor compete with pay per click on certain top keywords. Thus, a sound small business SEO strategy is necessary.

However, there are small business SEO methods that could work to your disadvantage. Be advised that many website owners have tried sneaky or tricky search engine optimization strategies and have suffered dearly with the resulting fallout.

What are some of the possible results of doing things search engines hate?

• Your site will be poorly ranked - Not the worst outcome, but if you do not employ sound small business SEO strategies, your website could suffer low rankings on certain keyword or search terms.
• Your site won't be found - One possible outcome is that your small business SEO won't be successful at all. Your website will not be categorized or logged properly by the major search engine "bots", and your ranking will not appear in search results.
• Your site could get sandboxed - Don't think that major search engines won't exclude you altogether. Google is notorious for finding culprits of sneaky small business SEO tactics and banning them from search results altogether.

So what is it that search engines hate most? Here are the top 8 most despised small business SEO methods.

1. Duplicate Content

   The biggest crime in the eyes of search engines is duplicate content, which is text that has been plagiarized from another website. Too many small business owners make the mistake of copying and pasting text from another resource, rather than writing their own unique content. The result is that your website simply won't appear in the search results. Make sure your web content is 100% unique to avoid being lost in the search engine abyss.

2. Flash

   Flash is an animation format released by Adobe, and it is one of the most popular formats for introducing short animated vignettes on a website. Even some video formats are using Flash.

   However, Flash does not provide any helpful content information that will help a search engine rank your website. If you use Flash, keep it as just a visual part of your website and not the entire web page of content.

3. Splash Pages

   Having a cool animated "splash" page can make a good impression on your visitors and customers. However, an animated "introduction" to your real website content does not get past search engines. Plus, extra time and clicks can easily turn off some visitors. Avoid losing visitors and improve your small business SEO rankings without the use of a splash page.

4. Old Content

   A website that has not been updated with fresh content is not good search engine optimization and does not impress search engines. Keep your small business website fresh with regularly updated content and new page publications of relevant keywords.

5. Image Maps

   An image map is dividing a graphic or image into different clickable links. While this can be great for your visitors, image mapping does not provide any anchoring keywords for search engines to latch onto. If you must use image maps and clickable images, be sure to use captions and <alt> tags to define the image in small business SEO keywords.

6. Keyword Stuffing

   A search engine hates nothing more than a website that "stuffs" massive amounts of keywords to trick it into thinking the site offers something relevant. Websites that get caught stuffing hundreds of keywords on a page with the purpose of trying to jerry rig or skew results could get quickly banned.

7. Hiding Keywords

   Similarly to keyword stuffing, hiding keywords within your HTML coding is also poor small business SEO, and it could have the same sandboxing results.

8. Cloaked Landing Pages

   Scurrilous web designers will try to trick a search engine by designing a relevant web page with all the appropriate keywords, but quickly redirect a visitor to another website that is completely unrelated. This is called "cloaking" a website and can quickly get a website fully banned from Google. Keep your small business SEO legitimate and present a website that a visitor expects when they click a link.

In your ever-evolving quest to improve your small business SEO, there is a seemingly never-ending list of strategies. One SEO strategy that has become clear just within the last few years is the leveraging of inbound links.

Inbound links are found on other websites that point their visitors to your website. Google has made it clear that this type of "recommendation" from other websites is important to their algorithm system. Thus, inbound links should be a major part of your small business SEO strategy.

However, not all inbound links are created equal. A link to your site from a small web page that gets 5 hits a week is low priority in Google's eyes - but so is a inbound link from a large website that contains totally unrelated content and completely different keywords and terms. Especially since the last Panda update, who points to your website can make a tremendous difference in whether your website is categorized as first-page quality or spam.

A good inbound link should be:

• Relevant - Google's automated 'bots' like to know that the website providing the inbound link is related to your industry and keywords.
• High traffic - A website with high traffic volumes will pull more weight with Google and thus rank your inbound link higher.
• High rank - A website with a high page rank in Google that links to your site will also be the most effective.

Finding and obtaining relevant inbound links may be easier than you think. Here are a few of the best methods to get your inbound link list growing:

Link Your Blog to Your Website

First of all, you should focus your small business SEO internally. If you have a small business website on one domain and a blog on another, that is a perfect opportunity for linking.

Your company blog should link to your small business website domain on the main page. Your blog is also a good place to slip that link in to each blog update or post you publish. Strategically use keyword anchor text to link back to your website to help you appear in the results for your top keywords.

Include Links On Your Social Media Profiles

Your social media accounts are another great way to improve your small business SEO with inbound links. Most social media sites allow you to create a profile page and include one or two links. Use them wisely. If you can, always include links to both your company website and your company blog.

Encourage Social Media Followers to Repost

Write and post occasional social media updates that include a link to your website or blog. Note that this shouldn't be practiced on EVERY update, but that you can link back to your own sites whenever you publish relevant, useful, and interesting content. When you do, encourage your followers or fans to re-tweet or share with their friends so the links gets spread virally.

Many SEO experts believe that since the Panda update, the weight of social network sharing and backlinks has become more important than ever. Thus, backlinks and activity from the social networks could be boosting your SEO more than most other strategies.

Write Articles for Other Sites, But NOT Article Databases

Previously, writing articles for the directories was a prudent way to build backlinks. However, since the last Panda update, most all of the major directories have been stripped of their PageRank, and links pointing out of the article directories have been considered spam.

Consider instead taking the initiative to contact industry-relevant blogs and resources, and ask if you could have an opportunity to be a guest author. You can pitch ideas for articles and back up your expertise with your credentials. Writing articles is still a fantastic strategy for building backlinks, but you only want to be published in industry-relevant, high quality websites.

Many SEO link building strategies have changed since the Panda update, but with the growing weight of the social networks, link building is perhaps easier now than ever before.