Business121 Small Business Newsletter #30

In this week's Business121:

1. The Dominance of Google and Web Marketing Success
2. Writing content to help promote your small business site
3. How can I draw money from a limited company?
4. How to avoid problems with partnerships
5. Budget 2006 VAT changes for small businesses
6. Bytestart Online VAT Calculator
7. Good candidates are hard to find for small businesses
8. Make small business tax less taxing says pressure group
9. WestFocus Innovations Day - May 18
10. Leap in business confidence for second half of 2006

The Dominance of Google and Web Marketing Success
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According to data from the “WebSideStory Index”, published earlier this year, Google now has a 75% share of the search engine market, followed by Yahoo! on 9% and MSN on 5%. These figures seem to match quite closely our own stats at Bytestart and other sites we work on.

A few years ago, many small business owners would try to optimise their web pages to suit a variety of search engines (including Altavista, before that disappeared). This could involve creating several versions of the same page to ensure higher search rankings.

With Google now completely dominant over the search engine market, pretty much all small business sites are at its mercy. When Google undergoes a major algorithm update, some sites can suffer a massive fall in traffic overnight, or if they’re more fortunate, the reverse can be true. These updates are so important that many have been given their own names by the search engine community – such as “Big Daddy” and “Jagger”.

“Even more so in the U.K. than in the U.S., when people think of search, they think of Google,” says Rand Schulman, from WebSideStory. “This has large implications for U.K. marketers, whose search engine marketing and optimisation strategies should be Google-centric.”

Fortunately for anyone concerned about the power Google has over the UK search market, Google does seem to reward established, high quality content sites more than ever.

Whereas you may be able to jump to the Top 10 of MSN for your preferred keyword phrase quite quickly, Google prefers to let new sites wait for months before it designates rankings. This 'Sandbox' effect aims to prevent the unscrupulous from launching 'spamming' or other low-quality sites. You have to work harder to have long-term success on Google – but it is worth it.

Rather than recommending a strategy to do well on Google, the aim of small business site owners should be to create high quality, error-free websites, with good quality, relevant content (the more the better). You should aim to exchange links with other sites in the same business area as you (Google uses 'link popularity' to determine how 'important' your site is).

Make sure you take care when inserting Meta Information into your pages. A good, relevant TITLE is favoured by Google, and ensure that the meta information phrases are genuinely related to the content on each page.

For good search engine results across the board, site structure is also important – good INTERNAL links can help a great deal, so try to link your site together in a logical, and clean way. Pages buried deep within your site structure will probably never register with Google, or the other search engines.

For far more in-depth tips and advice on how to create a Google-friendly website, why not try our dedicated Google section at - http://www.bytestart.co.uk/content/promotion/7_7/index.shtml - which includes information on the Google PageRank, how not to get banned by Google, and much more.

(James Leckie)

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Writing content to help promote your small business site
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One of the best ways to attract visitors to your site is by providing related sites with quality editorial relating to your subject area. Not only will this give you a chance to promote your service or business, but it can also indirectly aid your search engine promotion efforts via link popularity.
http://snipurl.com/_Write_to_promote

How can I draw money from a limited company?
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There are three main ways in which money can be drawn from a limited company - repayment of a director's loan, salary and dividends - but there are key issues to understand regarding each of these. It's important to organise the balance of these three items (when they are all available) in order to minimise your tax liability;
http://snipurl.com/_Drawing_money

How to avoid problems with partnerships
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Many small businesses are partnerships. Yet circumstances and ambitions change, partners fall out or die. Without a good partnership agreement things can get acrimonious. Here’s how to protect yourself from the start;
http://snipurl.com/_Partnerships_guide

Budget 2006 VAT changes for small businesses
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Summary of the VAT changes announced in the 2006 Budget - including changes to the registration limit, fuel scale charges and the VAT Annual Accounting Scheme;
http://snipurl.com/_VAT_2006_changes

Bytestart Online VAT Calculator
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This handy calculator will work out how much VAT you should charge a customer based on your net billing. You can also use this script to work out how much VAT is included in a VAT-Inclusive sum;
http://snipurl.com/_VAT_calculator

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SMALL BUSINESS NEWS
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Good candidates are hard to find for small businesses
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Small and medium-sized businesses across the UK are struggling to recruit staff with some 172,000 reporting that they receive no applications for some job vacancies. This provides a valuable opportunity for many recruitment agencies and Bibby Financial Services is urging the industry to sit up and meet this need;
http://snipurl.com/no_good_candidates

Make small business tax less taxing says pressure group
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The Forum of Private Business (FPB) is calling on MP’s to lift the burden of confusing and time-consuming tax returns. The FPB’s league table of taxing forms points to P35’s, Self Assessment, VAT returns and expenses and benefits as just some of the areas where we need to simplify administration.
http://snipurl.com/_simplify_tax

WestFocus Innovations Day - May 18
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The WestFocus Innovations Day will take place on 18th May 2006 at Kempton Park Racecourse Conference Centre and will provide free help and advice to organisations and individuals looking for new ideas, sources of finance, networks of contacts and examples of best practice.
http://snipurl.com/_Innovations_day

Leap in business confidence for second half of 2006
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UK economic growth is expected to accelerate in the second half of 2006, according to accountants and business advisers BDO Stoy Hayward.
http://snipurl.com/second_half_growth

** For the latest Small Business News, visit http://snipurl.com/Bytestart_News **

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(c) Business121.co.uk 2006