Technical Skills For Your Online Business (Part 2)
31 Jul
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another skill that you might have to learn. If you are planning on building your online business using organic traffic (traffic from the search engines) then you will want to become an expert on SEO. Having a website is great and all but if you can’t get people to visit your website then you might be waiting on that paycheck for a while. Now to oversimplify what SEO is let’s say that there are two aspects of your website that SEO will try to control. First there is what’s referred to as on page factors. On page SEO refers to all the things you do to your website to make it appealing to the search engines. One tactic is to have your exact keyword phrase as your domain. Your keyword density or the number of times your keyword is used divided by the total number of words. Another example would be using your keyword as the title of that webpage. For on page SEO you would also pay attention to your internal link structure (how the pages of your website link to one another). These are all fairly common examples of on page SEO. The other type of SEO you would examine is called off page SEO. Off page SEO basically describes all the other websites that point to your website. Do you have a large number of websites pointing to yours (this is often referred to as links)? Do these websites cover a similar topic and are therefore relevant? What is the Page Rank (referred to as PR) of your inbound links? Are these inbound links embedded with your keywords? The ultimate goal of SEO is to rank number one in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for your keywords. If you’re number one in the SERPs then that means when a person types in your keyword, your website/page will be listed as the first website directly under any advertisers. If you rank number one for any keyword on Google that means you get a free traffic source. If you are running your website correctly then more traffic will mean more money. As far as SEO goes there are a number of ways that it can be outsourced. Outsourcing on page SEO would mean hiring an expert to analyze your website and make the necessary changes/suggestions. Prices for outsourcing your websites on page SEO will vary drastically so feel free to take your time and shop around. Also you should know that a number of companies offering SEO services won’t always break up the on page and off page factors. When it comes to outsourcing off page factors you would basically be looking for link building services. If you are trying to get your website ranked, the number (and PR) of links you will need is going to be dependent on your competition. You could pay a couple of bucks for thousands of links (usually PR 0 with no relevancy) all the way up to hundreds of dollars (relevant PR 9 embedded link) for a single link. Believe me when I say it’s to your benefit to understand how SEO works.
Graphic design is among the more underappreciated skills. Everyone wants their website to look all nice and shiny but people tend to think it’s the web designer that makes this happen. Graphic design is the skill you will need to make all those fancy banners and ads that websites use to grab your attention. Do you have a product or service that you are trying to create a brand for? Well, graphic design is how you create those recognizable images that people see and associate with your product/service. Have you ever heard the phrase a picture is worth a thousand words? Graphic design helps you load thousands of words (in the form of a picture) into your website. Just think about how long it takes a person to read a 500 word paragraph (will they even finish before clicking the back button on their browser). Now how long do you think it would take that same person to look at a few pictures and form an idea about what your website is about? That’s the power of imagery; you can communicate in a much shorter period of time. People also have the tendency to click on images as opposed to words or links. Why do you think so many websites use buy now buttons and eye candy to entice their buyers? Being able to create and edit images is a truly useful skill to learn. If you are among the many people that find graphic design to be a daunting task there are a variety of programs you can use to streamline the process. Depending on what type of graphic you are trying to create the prices can vary depending on your level of expertise. Usually consumer level products will satisfy your needs and often times come loaded with content libraries. Outsourcing graphic design can be expensive or cheap depending on your online business needs. For purchasing stock photos or vector graphics online you can pay anywhere from five to twenty dollars depending on the quality. When purchasing custom banners/headers or ads for websites you might pay anywhere from twenty-five dollars to fifty dollars depending on the level of complexity. For branding an info product (e-book) you typically can buy an entire assortment of graphics for one flat rate, usually anywhere from sixty to a hundred dollars or more. Judging from the cost of various graphic design services hopefully you can see that this is a great skill to have.
Web-design, is there anything more terrifying then the thought of trying to create your own website? So what does web design actually entail? For starters web designers are the people in charge of writing the code that makes your website run/display correctly. A web designer would utilize several languages such as HTML, PHP, XML, CSS, as well as JavaScript and others. This language would basically determine the general layout, flexibility of design, and functionality of your website. Okay I have to be honest now, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news is that the majority of people won’t be able to learn even a fraction of the languages that they need in order to be effective web designers. Unless you have an aptitude for learning and understanding computer languages, chances are slim to none that you will be able to learn these languages in a timely manner and still be able to maintain your online business. Now that the bad news is out of the way, what’s the good news? You don’t need to learn any of these languages to create your own website. The answer is simple and elegant …. Word Press. Word Press is a web publishing platform that allows ease of content creation/editing for its users. Publishing content with Word Press is fairly simple. The software is installed on your server and then you can edit by logging into your domains Word Press client. The general layout or appearance of your website is controlled through what is called a theme which is basically the style of your website. The functionality of your website is added through what are called plug-ins. Did I tell you that there was more good news? The best part about Word Press is that the majority of the themes and plug-ins are free. It’s for this very reason that Word Press is so popular, an estimated two hundred million websites use Word Press as of 2009. Even though Word Press makes web design an easier task there are still people out there that will want to outsource this part of their business. For people that plan on outsourcing their Word Press installation there are a number of options available. Basic installation services will merely install the current version of Word Press, which can run you anywhere from twenty to forty dollars. I wouldn’t suggest this option as it is fairly easy to install Word Press especially if you have your hosting through Host Gator. Host Gator has a rather friendly one click option for installing Word Press. If you really want to outsource Word Press Installation I would choose to have Word Press installed with a custom theme and functional plug-ins. Such a complete level of service will typically cost you anywhere from fifty to one hundred dollars or more. With that said, you should now understand enough about web design to know that your business will still be successful even if you can’t write code in PHP or HTML.
Before you begin your online business it might be a good idea to see which technical skills you have and which skills are you interested in learning. Regardless of what you find appealing, you should find comfort in knowing that your business will benefit from any of these skills. Now that you have some basic information about technical skills it looks like you’re ready to take the next step in building your online business.
