So, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed with my email lately. In this business, it's par for the course to subscribe to many lists in order to keep up with new search engine strategies, changes with the search engines and their indexing "rules" etc. etc. I find that I receive enough reading material in any given day that I could easily spend the entire day and still not get through it all. Sigh. Just cleaning my inbox out on a daily basis is too much I find. I get my inbox down to a reasonable 20 emails and the next day, it's grown again to nearly 300. I'm sure I'm not alone in this battle. How do you deal with it? Share your thoughts.

On another note, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article on the importance of your web pages' title tag. Here's the link to "5 Easy Steps to Top Title Tags." More articles to come in the near future.

We've all heard about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, but how many of us have heard of Social Media Optimization? I hadn't heard this phrase until this past week. I've spent the past week updating my knowledge on SEO and stumbled across both a video called Going Natural 2 and the related PDF called SMARTS Strategy Guide: Life and Death 2.0 - A Quick and easy Plan for Surviving (and Thriving) in a Social Media World. I'm not sure that this PDF title really sells the content though. After reading it, I'm thinking it should have been called something like "Warning: Contents will radically alter your perceptions of SEO and Social Media!". Because that's what it's done for me. Whatever the title, this 42 page PDF has given me a lot to think about and has pointed me in a whole new direction I didn't even know existed.

Take a look at this graph I grabbed this morning from www.alexa.com.

I compared the daily pageviews over the past year of Google.com (the red line) with twitter.com (bright blue line), youtube.com (gold line), facebook.com (green/teal line), and myspace.com (black line).

Do you see anything interesting? I certainly had some surprises here. First, MySpace is on top. Way out on top in some months, in fact. That really surprised me as I truly expected to see Facebook.com up there. Until yesterday, I didn't have a MySpace page. Now I do. (http://www.myspace.com/clusterwebdesign)

My second surprise was seeing that Google.com is intermingled on the bottom with Twitter.

What I find so surprising about these statistics is that, as a web designer and SEO specialist, the books tell you to concentrate your efforts on making the websites you create - including your own - search engine friendly. And much effort is spent doing just so. The books also tell you that social media, like MySpace and Facebook, are important to your business as well, and they list good reasons to do so, but in my opinion, those good reasons just didn't seem to me to be all that great and worth it.

However, the PDF and video tell a completely different story ... and I finally found my "aha" moment as it related to social media. Now it makes sense!

What I've taken from it is that, you should continue to invest effort into your SEO techniques but in order for you to receive truly great traffic to your site, effort MUST be spent on social media.

In my coming posts, I'm going to expand on HOW you need to incorporate social media into your online existence. Get ready for some exciting information!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to the first entry to my new blog! Here, I'll be committed to speaking about web design, web hosting, search engine optimization, internet marketing, and anything else Internet-related.

So, let's get started.

It continually surprises me how there are so many small businesses which don't yet have a web site in this online world. I often wonder about the thought process behind it. Do small business owners find it too costly? Too much bother? Ineffective? Simply not worth it? What surprises me about this is that there is strong evidence that, before making purchases, a growing number of consumers world-wide research their purchases online prior to buying. So whether you are selling a product or a service and whether or not you are interested in buying it online or not, it's all really irrelevant. If a consumer researches a product and finds it online at a business other than your own because THEY had a website and you either didn't or they couldn't find it, chances are, they'll go to your competitor - the one they found online.

One of the great things about having a website is that, it's simply so much easier to ensure that your information is current at all times. If you invest 100% of your marketing budget on paper products (flyers, pamphlets, etc.), the information may become dated if your products, services, or pricing changes. But you've invested so much into the printed marketing material that you feel obligated to continue using it until it's gone before reprinting with current information. By augmenting your printed marketing material with a website, you can always refer your customers to your website for any updates.

Another great thing about having a website is having the ability to collect potential customer contact information through an opt-in list. With an opt-in list, you can do a number of things. You build a potential client database to whom you can now market to, either through emails or an eNewsletter. The great thing about this is that, your message will be more likely read because the client has agreed to accept messages from you. This will in turn, improve your conversion rate. Additionally, you build your reputation if this is used appropriately. If you send a consistently well-written or designed message at regular intervals, not only will your business' name be fresher in their minds, but they now have a tangible item (the email or the eNewsletter) which they can forward to their contacts.

You can provide your registered users with special content that makes it worth it for them to register at your site. For instance, let's say that you create an opt-in list and you make a promise to offer monthly specials to only your registered users. Your users may feel it worth the effort (the 1 minute it takes to register) to register on your site. When they register and login to your site, perhaps new menu items appear to only them. Or pages that are "visitable" to everyone but only VISIBLE to your registered users provide only them with the details of your special offer meant only for them.

There are certainly more benefits to having an opt-in list, but those are just a few.

Each week, I'll write more about the benefits of having a website and go over what exactly your website can do for you. I'll also be covering search engine optimization techniques, Internet marketing, Internet training, and anything else "Internet".

Stay tuned!