It pays to be patient.

Muscular and determined, swift-legged skaters speed around the track at the Olympics being held now, but most of their hard work came in the months and years before this big event. It’s the same way with getting a high ranking in the search engines.

Website visits quadrupled with TFC SearchRank

As a business person, you are up against a lot of competition. What can you do? There are two basic ways to get a high ranking in the “natural” search results (as opposed to pay-per-click listings) in Google, Yahoo, and Bing search engines.

1. Post Many Pages

Google, which has around 70% of the search market, is like a hungry bear in the springtime. It looks for the best fish in the stream, and those are the ones that are swimming the fastest. In the same way, the websites that are producing pages using keywords that are relevant to, let’s say a bicycle shop, such as “bikes,” “parts,” “seats,” “cross-country,” or whatever, will get a high ranking.

Therefore, post many many pages describing your business service or product, on a regular basis. A great way for most businesses to do this is to build your website with a program called WordPress, which allows for the easy posting of many pages in a blog format. WordPress also allows you to change your web pages from any computer, with the use of a password.

2. Get Incoming Links

The other way to raise your rank is to have many incoming links from other websites to yours. These other websites should be relevant to yours, and you will fare better if they themselves are popular websites. Thus, a bicycle shop that has an incoming link from the League of American Bicyclists, which itself has a high ranking, would be very good. If you have good contacts among your associates, make use of them and ask them for a link to your site.

Another way to get incoming traffic is to post press releases on any of the free press release sites. The best is probably www.PRLog.com. While search engines won’t use these to boost your rank, the press release websites themselves have higher rankings than your website, and readers will find out about you through the articles.

Search Engine Optimization Takes Time

All in all, it takes time to build up your ranking in the search engines. It’s called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and such services will tell you that it takes at the minimum three months to see any bump in incoming visits, six months to see more, and a full year before the method really kicks in. You can track the number of web visits, and where they come from, with the use of Google Analytics, which is free.

It is probably true that the businesses and non-profits that would benefit most from SEO are those that need a high number of clients or customers, and have much turnover traffic, rather than those who rely on a low number.

WomanCare Services in the Chicago area has seen its web visits increase from nine per day to more than 35 per day in a two-year period. (See graph above.) This success is due to our SearchRank program, of TreeFrogClick, Inc. in the Chicago area. For more information, call Kevin Banet at 708-393-4098.

Not too long ago, one of our clients got a phone call from a Channel 2 news reporter in Chicago. The reporter wanted some information about Natural Family Planning, and our client was the local chapter of the Couple to Couple League, which teaches the method.

The reporter was asking whether our client had seen a recent Time magazine article on Natural Family Planning. Local media often look to the big guys such as Time, the New York Times, the Washington Post for news ideas, and this reporter probably found our client by simply typing “Natural Family Planning Chicago” into a search engine. You can try this and you will find our client’s site, www.naturalfamilyplanningchicago.com, coming up first in the rankings.

That was good news for us at TreeFrogClick. We built the site in September 2008, and then began our SearchRank program for them the following March. With this program, we research and write three original articles about Natural Family Planning, birth control, and related subjects per month. As you can see in the graph above, the website visits have gradually increased. We also post the same article on our network of press release sites. (See the PDF info sheet of the graph above on our TreeFrogClick website.)

In addition to this, our client is now linked from the popular sexuality website, RHRealityCheck. While this website, which promotes birth control and abortion, is the polar opposite in ideology from the Natural Family Planning site, they consider our client an authority on the subject. And incoming links from authoritative websites on the same subject give a kick in search engine rankings.

It’s this kind of help that will make your website rank high in search engines and deliver more visits.

A popular new year’s resolution is not to make the same mistakes as we did in the past. Here are three blunders made by businesses and non-profits in our experience that will show you what not to do.

1. Can’t find Google

A man who is not too familiar with the ways of the web called us asking how people who did not know about his non-profit could find his website. When told to look on the website Google, he got to the website and asked, “It’s not here. All I see is this blank space and the words, ‘I’m feeling lucky.’ ”

2. Website — adios

A business owner in the Chicago area lost his website when a former employee, who built the site, refused to give the business access to the website. The former employee had registered the domain name in his own name rather than the company’s.

“Why don’t you prosecute him?” we asked the business owner.

“He went back to Mexico and we can’t reach him,” was the answer.

3. Missed the big time

Years ago a friend of mine asked me for a $300 loan to start up a computer company. “I’ll give you returns on your investment if the company takes off,” he pleaded. “I’m thinking of naming it something unique, like ‘Microsoft.’” I turned him down and the rest is history.

Well, OK, the last story is completely made up, but I got you to chuckle, didn’t I?

A Businessman’s View of the First Christmas

Anyone in business tends to look at historical events with a business eye. Since this is Christmas, I’d like to add my views on what may have happened in the events that led up to the birth of Christ. And since theologians nowadays seem to speculate all over the place about the events of the life of Christ, I will use some literary license.

The Gospel of Luke tells us that Mary traveled to the hill country of Judah to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who was six months pregnant. Since the distance from Nazareth to Judah was about 120 miles in those days, due to winding mountain roads, Joseph most likely traveled with her. A man can walk 20 miles in a day, so now we’re talking two weeks minimum round-trip travel time. Enough for a life-changing experience.

Joseph was called a carpenter, but at the beginning of his career may have worked only in stone, a more primitive working material. Coming from the small town of Nazareth, he was perhaps unaware of a technological revolution taking place in construction methods. Woodworking, especially using geometric measurements, was a new development from the Greeks, the high technology of the day. It could be that Joseph, in meeting and networking with others along the journey to Judah, was exposed to this new technology. He likely saw the uses of geometric wood cuts in animal-drawn carts and fine homes.

Expanding His Knowledge Base

I can just see this foster-father of Jesus saying, “Look, Mary, we can take this woodworking back to Nazareth and my customers will love it!” If this is the route he took, Joseph would have to expand his knowledge base to learn more math to accommodate angles and the rudimentary form of trigonometry of its day to make his wood cuts. Many months after their trip to Judah, Joseph could have taken the gold from one of the three wise men who visited Christ and invested it in new saws, hammers, nails and various types of wood. (Since the gold was a gift and not earned income, it would have escaped the hands of the tax collectors.)

It could be that Joseph hired other tradesmen and expanded his business. But people being who they are, his workers may have demanded higher wages and better working conditions. Since not one word of Joseph’s was recorded in the Bible, we can speculate that Joseph was not a good communicator, and could not solve his company problems. Maybe the stress of his new business led to heart failure, and that is why he died before Jesus was 30, as tradition says.

Yet, the Bible says that Joseph was a “just man,” and we can assume that he died with a clear conscience, and that is why he is the patron saint of the dying.

All this from a journey to Judah to visit a relative.

Sure, there’s lots to be thankful for this Thanksgiving week. But don’t get mashed like a sweet potato when putting up a website. Here are five guidelines to follow to avoid getting roasted in your next internet advertising venture.

What basics do you look for in finding a company to design a new website? Over the years, we at TreeFrogClick have made some crucial realizations. Here are five top qualities of a good website design firm.

A Good Website Firm

1. Good communication. Will the firm be responsive to you and return phone calls and emails? Or are they too big to be concerned with you? Will you be talking with offshore developers who have an accent and are difficult to get ahold of?
2. Appealing portfolio. Are the websites designed by the firm attractive? Do they have link navigation that is intuitive? Can you find all pages easily? Are the websites designed to be easily indexed by search engines? For searches, important words and links should be done in text rather than graphics.
3. Ease of use. Will you have the ability to make basic text and picture changes on your website from any computer with the use of a password? Or will you have to pay a high hourly fee to do so? What is their minimum hourly charge? $75 is a lot to pay to change a phone number.
4. Access to website. Will you have full administrative server rights to your website? Will you be given the passwords for FTP and the website itself? Will you have the ability to completely change your website, or is that right reserved by the design company?
5. Honesty and integrity. Will the domain be registered in your and your company’s name, and will you be able to verify this? Does the firm’s contract ensure this? Will you be paying unnecessary ongoing administrative fees after the website is built? Is a contract provided? Can you understand it?

Read testimonies of the firm’s happy clients and ask questions about the above points.

If you think you have it rough, remember that the pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621, after nearly half their members died in their first New England winter. Count your blessings and have a great celebration.

Read our free PDF fact sheet, “Seven Proven Ways to Drive Visitors to Your Website.”

How can you make your blog jump off the page and make readers’ eyeballs pop out? After all, lots of other people are saying just what you are, so what’s different about your stuff?

This problem was addressed by Paul Roberts, a 1950’s college English teacher who no doubt kept Folgers stock high due to efforts keeping awake while reading students’ lackluster essays.

Roberts wrote the famous essay, “How to Say Nothing in 500 Words,” and said, “Can you be expected to make a dull subject interesting? As a matter of fact, this is precisely what you are expected to do. This is the writer’s essential task.”

He says that all subjects are dull until somebody makes them interesting. “The writer’s job is to find the argument, the approach, the angle, the wording that will take the reader with him,” he says. Thus, instead of writing an essay about why college football is bad, and lapsing into a lot of tired old arguments, Roberts suggests zeroing in on a concrete image to give the idea some legs:

Picture poor old Alfy coming home from football practice every evening, bruised and aching, agonizingly tired, scarcely able to shovel the mashed potatoes into his mouth.  … What will he look back on when he graduates from college? Toil and torn ligaments. And what will be his future? He is not good enough for pro football, and he is too obscure and weak in econ to succeed in stocks and bonds.

This is what grips the reader — how to begin with a general argument and give it flesh with specific details. In the essay, Roberts offers a lot of good writing advice as well, such as how to avoid “padding” your essay with non-essential words, how to avoid trite expressions, and how to get right to the point.

Paul Roberts never saw a blog, but he’d be able to pen a whopping good one today.

A new study says that Americans’ trust of the media is the lowest it’s been since at least 1985, and that’s not surprising considering what happened this past weekend.

The large grass-roots conservative groups that marched on Washington, D.C. on Saturday went underreported. The Chicago Tribune said that “tens of thousands” came to the protest, which consisted of people unhappy with threats of a growth in socialism, spending and left-wing policies in the government.

WLS Radio’s Don and Roma, conservative talk show hosts in Chicago, however, said today that hundreds of thousands had come to the demonstration.

People have a sense that their news is sometimes pitched in a certain way. A Pew Research Center survey released Monday, reported in TechNewsWorld on media credibility, shows that now just 29 percent of Americans surveyed believe the media gets the facts right, the lowest since 1985.

“Those downward trends may intersect with rising chart lines for the use of Web sites and blogs as news sources,” TechNewsWorld said.

It’s all the more reasons why small businesses and non-profits should utilize even more their websites, blogs and videos.

Videos Watched More, Too

Also, Americans are watching internet videos more than ever, according to a recent report. Time spent watching these videos increased 46% in the second quarter, compared to a year ago, according to a Nielsen report, as reported in the Chicago Tribune Sept. 11.

Another recent report found that people are using the internet to relax and get their minds off the recession. “This fits within a broader trend of the internet increasingly becoming a go-to source for people to relax, take it easy and have fun,” said Aaron Smith, of the Pew Internet & American Life project.

Check out the solemn, prayerful scenes in the new video produced by TreeFrogClick about the Poor Clares of Santa Barbara, CA. They’ve gotten 88 views in less than a week.

Or listen to the grand-sounding Bach in the background of the video we just made for the Benedictines of South Texas.

Daniel Gutierrez was a young manager working late at night to prepare for the grand opening of a huge Best Buy store in south Los Angeles. His newly-hired staff, many of them recruited from that poor neighborhood, were hustling in a mad rush to open. But many of them were so stressed from the pressure that they rebelled in an angry manner and threatened to leave.

Gutierrez, not knowing what to do, hopped up on a sales counter and told them in a loud voice that they could go but if they did they shouldn’t bother to come back. Then he calmed down and said that they would work for two more hours. He also gave them a preacher-like sermon on how, if they worked together they would accomplish something monumental. The employees walked back to their work.

Difficult Family Life

This example of leadership is one of the exciting moments of the life of a popular motivational speaker whose roots were that of a difficult family life that included divorce and drug use, but who grew into a successful leader who now gives back to his community. As President and CEO of Pinnacle Achievement Group, Gutierrez calls himself “the world’s #1 Latino motivator,” and is a consultant to Fortune 500 companies, providing inspirational management coaching.

“I refuse to give up,” he says in his book, Stepping Into Greatness. “Not because I’m proud, but because I believe in my dreams, and I know that what God has begun in me, He will finish.”

This Texas native is another example of an entrepreneur and motivational speaker who has overcome personal adversity through an outgoing personality and incredible drive. What impressed me was his wide swings between his religious experience as a preacher-in-training to drug use and other immoral behavior.  And yet the good in his life triumphed.

His life shows how the use of one’s God-given talents for the good can lift a person above temptation of any kind. His website is at danielgutierrez.com.

Is social media really all that it’s cut out to be? I have to admit, I am skeptical when I read about the promises of tremendous success in selling a product or service just by chatting now and then with people you have never met. Who has the time to do all this?

I’m going to review several ways that I use social media and what kind of results I get. And I’ll try to be honest.

First of all, this column is sent out both to a newsletter list, and it is posted on my blog at SpunkyBiz.com, so I get double results for a single effort. Most of our clients at TreeFrogClick are on the newsletter list, so it’s a good way to keep my services on their mind, as well as to inform them on how to use the internet. It takes me about an hour and a half to both post the article on the blog, get the artwork, and send it via email. Occasionally I post it on one of the free press release sites.

I also have a profile on FaceBook, which for me has put me in touch with a lot of old friends and school chums. With most of these people, I have to admit, the renewed relationship really doesn’t go anywhere, but I did get a message from a friend recently who is putting me in touch with a potential client whom I’d like to serve.

Another popular approach, Twitter, is a very fast-moving message board, and the advantage here, so far, is that I find good business writers that I follow that provide an education in my field of online promotion.

In our YouTube channel, at GodCalls, which is for single persons looking for a religious vocation, our  seven videos have been viewed 1,100 times in about four months, which is a lot of exposure.

Yes, It Takes Time

The big difference between social media and paid advertising is of course, social media takes a lot of time. It means building relationships with people rather than simply paying a fee for a static ad somewhere.

“Social media is all about sharing, opening up, being transparent, providing real value to our customers. It’s about long-term relationships, not short-term campaigns,” says marketing expert Mark Ivey.

Since many small businesses and non-profits don’t have a lot of time to converse with others, or the time to learn it all, this is where our services at TreeFrogClick come into play.

Advertising is changing. Social media is worth it  — and it may help to hire an expert.

In the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL, the spaceship’s computer, says, “Dave, is something wrong?” Dave, in fact is thinking about pulling the plug on the computer, which controls every aspect of the ship, and HAL senses this.

This is what ran through my head while testing the online software of ArticleVideoRobot.com, an ingenious service that brings together text, sound, music and a synthesized voice to make videos. There is something wrong — we need the next generation of the voice synthesizer to make that part of it work well.

The software’s strong point is that video production is very quick and efficient. After playing around with it a bit, I uploaded a short article I had written on website promotion (see the PDF, Seven Proven Ways to Drive Visitors to Your Website) and made a three-minute video in 13 minutes. Much shorter than the 10+ hours it takes me to make a two-minute video. Of course, I would want to edit it too, but that was not allowed with my free two-week trial of the service.

Pulls It Together Quickly

ArticleVideoRobot breaks the article into individual slides, puts in headline text, and you simply add pictures and music. The problem is that the automatic speaking voice sounds stilted. I chose the voice “Brian” over “Dave” because it seemed better technically. There are two women’s voices to choose from as well. Some words don’t work well. The voice “Katherine” did a hatchet job on the pronunciation “Wikipedia.”

In all fairness, I have to say that you can upload your own voice-over, as well as photos. You can choose from their stock photos and background music selection, or you can use your own. There is a lot of flexibility. You can choose one or two pictures per slide, and can play around with which text is displayed. The transitions are chosen for you, and it all fits together nicely. I guess you could spell out the unusual words phonetically to get a good pronunciation.

The software can grab articles you have already published, and it can push the video out to 17+ video sites. A real benefit is that you can also download the video as an AVI or Flash file, something that YouTube does not allow. ArticleRobotVideo packages start at $47 per month for 50 videos, so if you plan to make a lot of videos and can figure out a good voice-over solution, it’s a good deal. It’s clear that we are moving toward more online video, so we need to keep up to speed about it all.