Entrepreneurship

Recently I got the opportunity to advise a relative of mine in the purchase of a new restaurant. He recently retired from a global corporation after 30 years of service and had been looking for a while to fulfill his long time dream of starting his own enterprise.

As someone with experience as a business owner, and someone with acceptable knowledge of the market he requested my advice on his new venture. I accepted to review the prospects of the business and give my opinion on it.

After looking at the asking price, the location, I thought he had a great opportunity on his hands. He was buying at a very deep discount from a serial entrepreneur who had over expanded too quickly. The business would require, in my opinion the execution of a few initiatives/opportunities such as:
1) adding delivery service - this business was one of the only few who did not offer it in the area
2) extend the hours of service to include Sundays which being a blue collar neighborhood, should mean Sunday to potentially become the best selling day of the week. Current owner were not open on Sundays.
3) Adding to the menu a new ethnic product which was widely known by the customers in that neighborhood but was not being offered by anyone else in the area. On top of that my relative had some previous success selling this
particular product in a different market.

So he purchased the business and I moved on with the day to day activities of my own enterprise. I knew the potential was there, but since he was coming from a 30 year protectionist environment at his corporate job, I knew the real question mark would be about his ability to think and act like an entrepreneur.

One weeks later I get a call from him, telling me he had decided to return the business back to the seller.
After a couple of days of disappointing sales he decided to return it to the seller which thanks to a clause in the contract, he was allow to do.
I was amazed to see his transformation after only one week in charge of the business, how quickly this would-be entrepreneur was ready to say "this is not for me, take me out of here".
He named to me all the reasons why the venture was not going to work, and quite honestly they all made sense. Comparing them to the reasons I saw a week before for the venture to work, I realized that Henry Ford's words, "Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right,”could not be more true.

While I listened to all his reasons I could only think to myself that it was the fear to fail, that made this venture fail and not the actual circumstances around the enterprise.

Of course you always want things to work, but you also need to be aware of how importance is to learn to fail. The more you fail, the more you learn and the closer you are to your next victory.

It also made me appreciate and respect the mind of an entrepreneur. The ones who risk failing.

I thought once again that entrepreneurship is not for everybody. It really takes courage and the ability to go out there every day knowing that most likely you will fail, which means a lot, but those who refuse to take a chance, miss out on the opportunity to fail and learn. There is something beautiful about never giving up, about failing and keep getting up, again and again.

I am now more convinced the world belongs to those who master the art of failing.

In the following item, you will learn the basics of SEO. I will define 3 specific points that according to my experience are the top 3 issues you should address when starting to do SEO for your website. Once you master these 3 element you are on your way to better rankings

1) On-site SEO

2) Link exchange Program

3) One Way Links

1) On-site SEO

When it comes to search engine optimization there are internal and external actions (on-site) that can be executed in order to change the perception of your site on the internet.

On-site SEO refers to all activities that should be performed directly on your website with the basic goal of making sure your site is accessible to search engines and your content is appropriate for both human visitors and the search engines.

Not all site are the same, so the strategies can be different from site to site, but in general on-site SEO actions usually includes:

Keyword and key phrases analysis and selection

This is the starting point to an effective SEO campaign. On this step you get to identify and select an "elite" group of keywords and key phrases that all the SEO efforts will be directed to.

It super important that you identify your top 5 keywords or key phrases. If you fail to clearly define the right keywords for your business, you will find yourself working very hard only to find out those keywords do not sell, do not convert!

A simple technique that can help you find the right keywords, is to request feedback from friends, family, employees and even customers. You can combine the findings on these type of surveys with the use of software like google keyword suggestion

Become an expert of your keywords and key phrases. Know your top 10 and your top 5. Those will become
your target keywords. Once you have decided what keywords to focus on, all other SEO activities will be
base on these selection, so you want to construct on nothing less than solid grounds

Metatags
(Titles - Description - keywords)

Metatags are a part of the html code of a webpage. They play a very important role since from a search engine viewpoint, they act like a guide that shows search engines as well as human browsers what your website is about. For SEO, it is widely accepted the importance of the title tag in the rankings on the SERP (search engine results page).

Powerful (Well written, well selected title tags not only help you to achieve a better SER position but they also can make a difference on which site on the first page users actually click. Therefore the strategic importance of writing title tags for bot the search engines but also keeping the human eyes perspective in mind..

You should assign particular high importance to the analysis and writing of each title tag you assign to a particular page.

Keyword-rich adcopy

Content is they king on the Internet. You should optimize your ad copy to make sure it is informative and delivers effectively the information to your users. You also need to make sure that content is written strategically using your targeted keywords.

Proper links structure -spider friendly

The structure of your site must be clean and easy to follow by the spiders search engines use to crawl and index your website. If the spider cannot access all the pages of your website, it means those pages will
not be included in the index of the search engine, therefore, those pages do not exist in the eyes of the
search engines. That is situation you cannot afford. The perfect example of a website that is easy to spider and easy to index is craigslist. Keep that structure in mind when building your website.

Identification and removal of all no found or dead links

Most search engines use dead or broken links as an aspect to evaluate the relevance of your site. Sites using dynamic creation of pages, sometimes create dead links that are hard to visualize when browsing your site but that once detected by the search engines will hurt your rankings.

Sign up for google webmasters tools. This action will help you detect dead links as seen by the search engines and manually remove them from your site structure.

HTML analysis and Spider Friendly copies of dynamic pages.

Search engine technology favored pages that are displayed with simple html. The simpler, the easier for them to index.

Using drop down menus, java scripts as well as creating dynamic pages (usually detectable when a url has a "?" symbol) are common ways to create visually-rich pages that are easy to navigate from the human standpoint. However, the precious content of those pages could eventually be ignored by search engines, since current crawling technology does not allow them to index the content of most dynamic pages.

A solution to that problem is to create a simple to read html copy of each scripted (dynamic) page on your site.

Robots txt file management

Robots txt is a file that gives directions to the search engines about what to index and what not to index on your site.

Sitemap creation and submission on xml format

Google recommends the creation of a sitemap on xml format that tells Google more about the structure of your site. Google then uses that information to crawl your site on the next googlebot visit.

Creation of urls keyword-rich

Create urls that included targeted keywords which is another widely accepted technique that helps search engines to recognize the content of your page.

2) Link exchange Program

Performing an on-site optimization is only the first step of an effective SEO campaign. An equally crucial part is to find ways to make other website to link to yours.

Even though no one really knows for sure the exact formula (algorithm) used by search engines to measure their rankings, the amount of inbound links a site has is right in the heart of the ranking calculation.

As a general concept search engines try to display a ranking of relevant sites to a specific query where the first site on the list (SERP) is the most relevant.

Engines use hundreds of factors but probably the single most important one is the amount of inbound links a sites gets.

Search engines interpret each link as a vote. The higher the numbers of votes, the most relevant a site is considered in the eyes of the search engine.

However, not only the quantity but the quality of the votes is measured.

The best quality links comes in a natural, organic way. That happens when the content of a site is that valuable that other sites link to you without even asking them. That is the ideal scenario however in a world of over 3 billion + websites even with great content, it becomes crucial to take specific action aim to get other sites to link to yours.

With that in mind, you must have an strategy to contact other relevant website to ask them to link to you (give you a vote) in exchange of your vote (link) to her website.

This is a simple yet powerful way to advance in the rankings. I personally recommend using software to
manage this task. Linkmachine does a great job but always remember that it is never, never about quantity, but about quality.

3) One Way Links

These links are unilateral "votes" and are given much more weight by search engines.

Some techniques to get one way links include:

Article submission:

There are literary hundreds of publishers looking for content for their sites.
This SEO technique consist of writing specialized articles about the subject of your site, including a link back to your site and submit it to article sites that have proven weight with the search engines.

You can write and manually submit articles in your to sites and article directories with high PR (be picky about where to submit your articles. I recommend at least PR of 4).

This technique can improve dramatically the number of inbound links since a good article can also be picked up by many other sites looking for content for their sites.

Press Releases

It is a technique similar to article submission but aim more specifically to the press. You can write a press release and submit to specialized sites with proven weight and high page rank.

Social bookmarking

Make sure every page of your website has viral buttons built in. Use the power of social media to spreed your message and get people to link to your website.