Business Alone

The ways an auto responder can be employed to automate your business tasks are many. Here are just a few of the typical business uses of an auto responder:

- if an email address is no longer valid, a message can be sent from the mail server that the email is now "undeliverable,"

- if the business changes its email address or URL, a new forwarding address can be sent to those that send mail to the old address,

- if you go on vacation or are otherwise unavailable for a time, your auto responder can alert customers to your absence and when you'll return,

As a solo Internet home business owner you are most likely the webmaster of your own web site.

Unless you have turned that function over to someone else (like your girl friend, your 2nd cousin "Harry," or the six year old next door), you will be in charge of optimizing your site for key words, meta tags, and other little HTML goodies that tell the search engines what your site is all about.

Many of us are in business to make money (imagine that . . .) and we certainly don't want to spend time fiddling around with such trivial matters as web site coding and search engine optimization. Right?

We've all heard the "knock" about web surfers - they stay at a site long enough to quickly glance or skim the home page "above the fold" and they're gone in seconds.

Is it five seconds, seven seconds, twelve seconds? Who knows?

The point is, the web site owner is granted only so much of the surfer's time online and he'd better make a good impression during that time or the prospect will most likely never return.

Of course there are a lot of elements to making a good web site impression. I'm only going to talk about one small piece of that puzzle right now: page load time.

The web site owner is granted only so much of the surfer's time online and he'd better make a good impression during that short time or the prospect will most likely move on to the next site on his list never to return.

Of course there are a lot of elements to making a good web site impression. In this installment we're only talking about one small piece of that puzzle right now: page load time.

That's the length of time, usually measured in seconds, from the instant a viewer clicks on his mouse to head to a particular web site until the point at which that web page is fully loaded in the viewer's browser.

Anyone who is unfamiliar with web site development, search engine optimization, and all the technical terms and usage surrounding HTML and computer language is apt to be very confused by the existence of meta-tags and all the varied opinions about them.

What are they? Why are they important? How do you properly construct, place, and use them?

I am not an expert in this science by any means. In fact, I am one of the people that probably discount meta-tag usage to some extent.

In the previous post we began a discussion of the meta-tags - what they are, how they're used, why they're important, etc.

It was noted that there is an immense amount of discrepancy between the experts as to which tags are most critical, how they should be constructed, etc.

We began by talking about the title tag. We'll now continue with the discussion of the other two important tags.

Those that have followed this blog know that I am a huge proponent of doing whatever possible to spread the word about your business and products via public relations activities and press releases.

I've blogged on the subject a number of times. Why? Because a small business desparately lives and dies on other people's advertising.

By that, I mean that your business can languish in obscurity or rise to great heights simply by the press and acknowledgement you receive from high traffic and "trusted" online sites.