Sandi Smith writes a creative article in the Manta Small Business Center about the biggest mistakes businesses should avoid when it comes to their websites. The 10 mistakes are listed here, but you can visit www.manta.com to read the complete article.

1. Unprofessional writing.

2. Looking like all the other sites out there.

3. Not maximizing the eight seconds you have.

4. No credibility.

5. No way to capture interested leads.

6. Not marketing your site.

7. Under construction.

8. Too much bling.

9. Nonworking links, typos, or other mistakes.

10. No goals.

Google’s Matt Cutts Talks Freshness vs. Quality

Chris Crum talks about Google Q&A with Matt Cutts.

It’s been a while since we looked at one of the Google Q&A webmaster videos that Matt Cutts does, but I found this recent one particularly interesting, considering the emphasis that has been put on freshness in search engines lately.

The user question in this particular video says:

Some people are under the impression that blogs are good for SEO only if they’re updated frequently. How much does frequency play into PageRank for blogs & other dynamic sites? Isn’t the content more important than the simple # of posts per day/week?

Matt’s response is that it is indeed much more important to have quality content, but frequency can be a nice thing to have for the users.

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On the 24th of March I was in Vancouver doing some pro-bono work teaching a group of charities and non-profit organizations some of the ins-and-outs of effective web site marketing. Well, a little ways into discussing how to boost Google local search engine results I was asked by a participant how her charity can be on Google Local without showing her address. I was stumped! The only way I knew how to do that was through a PO Box which I did not recommend and the out-of-the-question methods commonly used by spammers. Well, in a wonderful occurrence of synchronicity, thanks to Matt McGee’s post that day on Search Engine Land I discovered later that Google had just added that very capability to a raft of Google Local Business Center accounts; allowing business owners to hide their address (among other enhancements).

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