If keyword is the word you hear most often with SEO, then links or linking is the word you hear second-most often. Links are the foundation of topical communities, and as such they have as much, if not more, weight with search engine crawlers than keywords do.

A web page without links is like a desert island. It’s sitting there, right in the middle of the ocean, but no one really knows it’s there. The island could be littered with diamonds. The plants that grow on the island might heal every disease known to man. But if man doesn’t know the island is there, none of that matters.

It’s the same with your web site. It doesn’t matter how great the information or the products on the site might be. If people can’t find it, it’s as good as a desert island.

The purpose of links, then, is to first link your web site to others that are relevant to the information included on your site. In addition, links provide a method by which traffic to your site is increased. And isn’t that the reason you’re playing the SEO game? Your desire is to increase the traffic to your site, which in turn increases the number of products that you sell, the number of sales leads you collect, or the number of appointments that you set with highly qualified clients. In short, links lead to increased profit and growth. So of course you’d want to use them on your site.

Another reason links are so important is that links into your site from other web sites serve as “votes” for the value of your site. The more links that lead to your site, the more weight a search engine crawler will give the site, which in turn equates to a better search engine ranking, especially for search engines like Google that use a quality ranking factor, like PageRank.

To say that links are an important part of SEO for your web site is probably an understatement. If you want your site to be found, you must have links in from other sites. Without those links, you may as well be an island sitting in the middle of an ocean full of other web sites.

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Business cards can be a challenge to design because you usually need to pack a lot of information into a small space. And the amount of information you put on a business card has been growing.

In addition to the standard address and phone number, now you probably need  to include information such as your mobile number, fax number, email address, and if you have a web site (which you should), your web address.

Format

Your first choice is whether to work with a horizontal format or a vertical one. Just because most cards are horizontal doesn’t mean they have to be. Very often the information fits better in a vertical layout, especially when we have so many pieces of information to include on such a little card. Experiment with both vertical and horizontal layouts, and choose the one that works best for the information you have on your card.

Type size

One of the biggest problems with business cards designed by new designers is the type size. It’s usually too big. Even the  10-or-11-point type we read in books looks horsey on a small card And 12-point type looks downright dorky. I know it’s difficult at first to use 9 or even 8 or 7-point type, but look at the business cards you’ve collected. Pick out three that look the most professional and sophisticated. They don’t use 12-point type. Keep in mind that a business card is not a book, a brochure, or even an ad - a business card contains information that a client only needs to look at for a couple of seconds. Sometimes the overall, sophisticated effect of the card’s design is actually more important than making the type big enough for your great-grandmother to read easily.

Be Consistent with Brand Materials

If you plan to create a letterhead and matching envelopes, you really need to design all three pieces at once. The entire package of business cards, letterhead, and envelopes should present a consistent brand Image to clients and customers.

There really are some amazing business card designs out there today, and with so many businesses vying for your customers attention, you really need to find a way to stand out from the crowd. Take a look at a few ways these businesses have done just that in Ivan’s post over at CreativeBits.Org - Best Ever Business Card Designs.

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The way you present your e-business to the world is the key to its success. Its so important that your website looks professional and credible so that customers will trust the products or services you are selling. Ideally, your site’s content will also be interesting and unique enough that they appreciate your brand and remember to shop with you again. You need to develop two types of content to make this happen: a “Hollywood pitch” and website copy.

The Hollywood Pitch

It’s important to have a clear idea of what your business does and what it offers to its customers—both for your own thinking but also because friends, family, customers, and even potential investors are all going to ask you, “So what does your business do?”

The best way I have found to encapsulate your new business concept is to use what I call the “Hollywood pitch technique.” You identify the basic elements of your business and compare them to familiar, existing concepts or previous successes in a pseudo-mathematical equation.

In Hollywood, new movie and TV program ideas are often pitched this way because it uses already existing success stories to give listeners a quick, positive impression of what you are proposing. Boiling down your business idea to this quick summary will also help you focus on what is important and unique about your business.

For example, the hit TV show American Idol might have originally been pitched in Hollywood as “an updated Star Search with Hollywood Squares-style celebrity judges and cell phone voting.” Similarly, the Austin Powers movies might have been pitched as “1970s James Bond meets Inspector Clouseau to save the world!”

Figuring out the key concepts and buzzwords for your e-business will also help you write effective copy for your website and construct effective “meta tags” to help your search engine rankings.

Now, ask yourself: How can you summarize your new business using this Hollywood pitch approach?

Copywriting for Your E-Business

Even if you’re selling commodity products like batteries or socks, you’ll need accurate and persuasive product descriptions to convince your audience to purchase from you.

If you are offering more unique items or services, your website needs to communicate the value of your goods in a concise and compelling manner.

If you’re embarking on a more information-intensive or publishing related venture, your copy will essentially be your product, so it is even more critical to your success.

In all cases, the Internet can once again help you deliver compelling written materials cost-effectively, even if you are not a good writer (or speller) yourself. Don’t underestimate the importance of well-written copy because it is more important than you may think. You’ll need good and regularly updated copy for:

• Website pages
• Product descriptions
• E-mail newsletters
• Customer service documentation
• Advertisements
• Business correspondence

If you are a good writer, you can probably fulfill your e-business’s content creation needs yourself. There are two basic situations, however, that may warrant your getting some writing help:

• You are not a particularly good or fast writer (or at least you don’t enjoy it).
• You are too busy to do a good job at writing the copy your business needs.

As usual, the Internet can help you solve your problem. (By now you knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?) There are thousands of experienced writers available who would be happy to contribute to your site’s content needs on a project basis. You can find good writers looking for work by going online and posting a small ad (usually for free) to ask for help with your specific writing needs. Good places to start would be ELance & Craigslist.

Regardless of how you recruit your part-timers, ensure you are specific in your ads about the length of the written pieces you need and the style (e.g., product descriptions, advertisements, informational articles, website promotional copy, etc.), as well as your deadlines and offered compensation.

You’ll soon find that finding and hiring freelancers is a great, cost effective way to increase your productivity. This strategy also will work well for graphic artists, Web designers, photographers, customer service staff, and even salespeople.

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Telling your story is at least a secondary goal for every organization’s Web site, but lots of Web sites exist almost solely to enhance brand image. For example, if your company sells children’s cereal, the games you put on your site do not have any direct impact on sales, but they might create loyal little consumers tagging along with their parents in the grocery aisle. Many low-priced consumer goods companies have Web sites to raise awareness. Entertainment sites for current movies have a like purpose.

If you have a site designed mainly for market awareness, you might emphasize contests, quizzes, games, or other ways of generating interaction with your visitors. But some market awareness sites are changing in subtle ways. Movie sites, for example, frequently do some Web sales (for the soundtrack, for instance) or they link to organizations whom are selling tickets for your film at the cinema near you. Cereal sites are starting to sell DVDs, action figures, and other toys on top of the free interactive games.

If your site exists mainly for awareness, do not overlook opportunities for Web sales of other products, but make sure that your site fulfills the awareness needs first. Cereal sites that spend too much time amusing children with games might upset a mom who wants to learn more about the cereal’s nutritional content.

Regardless of what your awareness site is trying to do, your search strategy focuses mostly on navigational searches. Cap’n Crunch cereal mostly gets searches (from kids or moms) for “capncrunch” or even “captain crunch,” but not for the specific games or action figures on the site (unless they have an ad campaign for them). Searchers will be typing in the name of the cereal, the name of the movie, or other brand names.

Market awareness sites are also more likely to be “trendy” than sites with other purposes, because they are great places to generate buzz about a product (movies are again a good example).

If you have a brand awareness site that you want to promote for your company, i wouldn’t rely on organic search engine rankings just yet. Organic SEO can take a while to get moving (you must design and optimize your pages and wait for search spiders to find them), therefore whilst your site matures and is waiting to get indexed by the search engines, id recommend paid placement techniques to start the marketing ball rolling.

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