- Putting Customers Ahead of Investors, John Mackey, founder and CEO of Whole Foods

A couple of weeks ago, a shopping mall near my home announced that they would start checking the IDs of teenagers at entrances to the mall after 5:00 pm on Friday and Saturday nights, and not allow anyone under 18 to enter the mall unless they are accompanied by a parent or supervising adult over the age of 21.

Their explanation was that too many young people were using the mall as a social gathering place on weekend nights, behaving unruly, not shopping, and keeping away customers who wanted to make purchases at the mall. In many ways, the mall is a victim of its own success, being a popular destination for the audience that the mall shops target with what they offer.

A couple of local teens responded by starting a Facebook group as the “Official Boycotting Site for the Christiana Mall.” That’s probably not a response that the mall wanted to see, nor a result that they wanted to experience.

Social Responsibility and Small Business

As I read the news article about the mall, I thought of how it had become a place for teens to meet, and how it had become part of their lives. I wondered about alternatives that teens might have that offered such a safe and secure setting, and realized that there were little alternatives in the area where teens could meet on Friday and Saturday nights. That’s not the mall’s problem, of course. Or is it?

Looking past business-for-businesses’ sake, a question entered my mind. When had I ever seen the mall interact with their neighbors and the surrounding community? When had they ever gotten involved in sponsoring or helping community efforts to benefit their neighbors and the teens who are their customers?

Had they ever helped build or furnish a youth center, or donate to a skate park, or do something beneficial for the youth of the community? I searched around online to see what kind of footprint they may have left in the community that surrounds them, and didn’t find much. Actually, I didn’t find anything at all on a positive note.

Where does the social responsibility of a business enter into what a business does online? A business is defined by more that just what it offers in terms of services and sales. When I perform a search for the mall in question, one of the top ten results in Google is a headline urging that the mall be boycotted. A much better search result would be that the mall made a vow and has taken steps to dedicate time and funding to the building of youth recreational centers in the area. Our actions offline and online are reflected in what we see in search results.

As a small business owner, participating in the community around you goes beyond offering sales and services to your community. It means being involved in positive ways to help others, finding ways to offer goods and services that make the world better, being a good neighbor to the communities around you, providing fair wages to those who work for you, and supplying the best goods and services that you can at a price that people needing your services can afford. As business owners and employees of small businesses, we aren’t just business people, we are also part of the communities that we live within.

Have you considered how your business can be socially responsible? How it can help cultivate and grow positive change in the community around it for both its own benefit and that of its neighbors?

Search Engines and Public Opinion

Opinion and review sites that focus upon letting their users create content have been growing and will likely continue to do so, and many services, including search engines, are using those reviews. A recent paper from Google, Building a Sentiment Summarizer for Local Service Reviews (pdf), provides some interesting approaches to collecting positive and negative information about businesses within reviews. This may be the future of what we see from Google in local search.

One example from the paper:

Children’s Barber Shop (16 Reviews) service (*) (3.5/5 stars, 7 comments)

(+) The staff does a nice job with cranky toddlers. (+) We asked them not to cut the front of our sons hair, but they did. (-) Better try another salon if you want to be treated with common decency.

Beyond review sites are sentiments that may be expressed on blogs, in forums, on videos, and upon other pages on the Web. What might a search for your business name show in Google?

Embracing Social Responsibility

Embracing social responsibility in your business doesn’t mean building a facade that you are concerned about the environment, or consumer rights, or fair trade, or reaching out to your community in a helpful and meaningful way. A recent study and paper from the group TerraChoice, titled The “Six Sins of Greenwashing” (pdf), explored messages about green practices found on the packaging of products observed in big box stores in the United States, and researched the “environmentally friendly” claims made on those goods.

Many of those messages were misleading in a number of ways, and TerraChoice identified what they called The Six Sins as:

• Sin of No Proof
• Sin of Vagueness
• Sin of Irrelevance
• Sin of Lesser of Two Evils
• Sin of Fibbing

It’s a paper worth studying carefully as a business owner. Just placing a message on your letterhead or your web page tagline or your product packaging that appears to be socially responsible isn’t the same as taking positive steps to become socially responsible. The growing social web looks beyond mottoes and mission statements to actual actions. And they write about them.

Some Socially Responsible Steps

Some questions that might be worth asking yourself about your business:

• If your business sells goods on the Web and you can offer products that help the environment, why not offer those?
• If you have employees, what do you offer them to make their lives better in terms of health care, educational opportunities, daycare, and others?
• When you decide upon vendors, do you look past potential savings on supplies to the practices of those suppliers?
• When you consider working for clients, do you look past profit calculations to the benefits that they provide to society?
• If you hire volunteers when your business is first starting and you start making a profit, do you consider providing pay for those volunteers?
• Do you think about finding ways to give back to the customers that provide your livelihood, and to the communities that they live within?
• Do you pay attention to feedback from the stakeholders of your organization, from employees to vendors to owners to investors to the community around you, and consider their feedback carefully and respond as positively as you can?

I started this post with a quote from an article by John Mackey, and I want to end it with a quote from the same article:

To extend our love and care beyond our narrow self-interest is antithetical to neither our human nature nor our financial success. Rather, it leads to the further fulfillment of both. Why do we not encourage this in our theories of business and economics? Why do we restrict our theories to such a pessimistic and crabby view of human nature? What are we afraid of?

People want to connect with other people when they conduct business online, whether the business is a large one, or a small one. One of the advantages that a small business may have is that it can be easier for them to build positive relationships, engage in one-on-one conversations, and avoid the inertia of bureaucracy and endless meetings.

Some large businesses attempt to reach out on a personal level to their customers. We saw that recently in a blog post, Introduction to Google Search Quality, from Google’s Vice President of Engineering in charge of Search Quality, Udi Manber, in which he introduced himself and described some of how the search engine ranks pages. But there’s no contact information for Udi on the page, no way to write and ask questions, no place to leave comments, and no way to engage him in conversation.

The Web provides ways for owners of small businesses to hold conversations, through blogs and forums and social networks, by contact form and phone and email. Are you taking advantage of the chance to build relationships with people who want to do business with you?

Getting a Clue

In 1999, the ClueTrain Manifesto was published online, and provided a set of 95 theses about marketing as conversations. The Manifesto starts off with a point that’s impossible to ignore:

Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.

The Manifesto tells us that people will talk about our businesses regardless of whether we enter the conversation or not.

What the ClueTrain Manifesto didn’t tell us was what to say once we’ve started engaging within those conversations. If we add a blog to our business site, what do we talk about? If someone leaves a comment to one of our blog posts, how do we respond? If we join a social network like Stumbleupon or Twitter or a forum, as a representative of our business, how do we conduct ourselves? Can being social in that manner help our businesses?

What is a Merchant Anyway?

When you go to a blog connected to a business, and the posts are self-centered, and self-promotional, chances are that you won’t return. The StumbleUpon stumbler who only adds or shares his or her own pages with others can be quickly viewed by others as a spammer. The forum members who only write about their own problems, their own pages, without taking an interest in other members of the community end up talking to themselves in the midst of a crowd.

In John Ruskin’s The Roots Of Honour, he describes what the functions of a merchant are with respect to other people. He points to a number of professions and their roles in society:

Five great intellectual professions, relating to daily necessities of life, have hitherto existed — three exist necessarily, in every civilised nation:

The Soldier’s profession is to defend it. The Pastor’s to teach it. The Physician’s to keep it in health. The lawyer’s to enforce justice in it. The Merchant’s to provide for it.

And the duty of all these men is, on due occasion, to die for it.

“On due occasion,” namely: - The Soldier, rather than leave his post in battle. The Physician, rather than leave his post in plague. The Pastor, rather than teach Falsehood. The lawyer, rather than countenance Injustice. The Merchant-what is his “due occasion” of death?

It is the main question for the merchant, as for all of us. For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

I read this question for the first time in a college class on Victorian Prose, and it made me think of the many business calls that I had listened to while growing up, between my father and people interested in buying the machinery that his company produced. The first of those calls that I remember was one where he told the caller that his company didn’t manufacture what they were looking for, but a competitor’s business did. He gave them a contact number, so that they could meet their needs.

On rereading the passage, I’m reminded of an event that an organization in his industry held where my father was given a lifetime achievement award in front of a very large crowd. A few people spoke about him before he was given the award, and one of them started off by saying that my father was one of his toughest competitors, but in spite of that he played a strong role in helping the industry grow into a respectable and economically viable field that many people relied upon for their livelihoods.

When I visit StumbleUpon, one of the groups that stands out to me are the green marketers who represent their organizations by calling attention to news and positive developments in the world’s environment. News that doesn’t necessarily involve their own organizations, but fulfills their mission of trying to make the world a better place to live within.

Ruskin tells us that the role of the merchant is to “provide for the nation.” He goes on to tell us about the duty of a merchant in these words:

That is to say, he has to understand to their very root the qualities of the thing he deals in, and the means of obtaining or producing it; and he has to apply all his sagacity and energy to the producing or obtaining it in perfect state, and distributing it at the cheapest possible price where it is most needed.

Ruskin saw merchants as holding a special level of responsibility and trust within society, responsible for the economic health and welfare of society, and industry, for the employment and livelihoods of people, and for the mentoring of those interested in following within their footsteps.

How well do we fit within that role in these days of blog writing and linkbaiting, participating within forums and pages on places like MySpace and Facebook and StumbleUpon and Sphinn?

Engaging in Conversation with Others Online

What kinds of steps can you take to enter into conversations with the people who are interested in the markets that you inhabit?

If you own a web site, make it easy for people to learn more about you and your business, and make it even easier for people to contact you. Build credibility and trust into your words on your pages, and in your interactions with others. Focus upon providing a service to your customers instead of upon inflating your ego.

Enter into conversations and build relationships with people interested in what you have to offer within forums and social networks in a respectful and responsible manner, as a peer and as someone interested in what they have to say, as a person, as a representative of your business, and as a representative of your industry.

Reach out with an open hand to those who are interested in learning more about what you do, instead of a closed fist in fear that they might compete with you.

Listen to the conversations that are happening on the Web in your market, and in related markets, and anticipate the conversations that will happen that may include your goods or services, your business, your industry, and commerce on the Web in general.

Provide services and goods in a manner that shows, as Ruskin states, that you know the qualities of the things that you deal in, and the means of obtaining or producing those things, and do so in a wise manner that delivers quality reasonably priced where needed most. Put a human face on that delivery, and build positive relationships with those people with whom you interact.

Bill Slawski is Director of Search Marketing at KeyRelevance, Inc., blogs at SEO by the Sea, and has been one of the Business and Marketing Forum moderators at Cre8asite Forums for the last six years. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

But it’s possible that a search engine might consider that the source of content is more trustworthy, and more authoritative if it does include such a page. And that may make a difference…

Many large commercial sites hand off the creation of a privacy policy to their legal departments, and a privacy policy is usually part of what they present to visitors. There are some standards that have been created that make it easier for a computer to read and understand that a site has a privacy policy, and what that policy contains – but those are complex, and might be something that small business owners may avoid because of their complexity.

It may be worth it for small business owners to cut through the complexity and include a machine readable privacy policy that also reassures visitors about information that they share with a site.

Why have a Privacy Policy Page?

Credibility

Simply put, including a privacy policy page on your web site can add credibility to what you offer. It’s a sign that your business is a legitimate one which cares about interacting with consumers in a responsible manner. Along with an “about us” page and a contact page, a privacy policy can show that there is a real business behind the pages of a site.

Reassurance

Most visitors to web sites are unlikely to click through a link to a privacy policy when they visit a site, but some will. Regardless, if you collect information on a site, and if you offer goods or services online, you want to increase the possibility that someone will fill out a form, or send an email, or call you. Even if you make it as easy to contact you or order via form or phone or email, there are a number of additional steps you can take to make it more likely that visitors will take those steps.

Beyond just appearing to be a credible business, you want to reassure potential customers that you are safeguarding their trust. Including a logo that transactions made on a site are secure is one step towards reassurance. Displaying information about membership in organizations like a Better Business Bureau or Chamber of Commerce is another. Displaying security and privacy information can help to increase confidence in your business.

Privacy Policies and Paid Search

Having a privacy policy on your web site has the power to impact how a search engine like Google perceives the quality of your pages.

On the Google Adwords Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines page, we are told that there are “three main components of a quality website: relevant and original content, transparency, and navigability.”

The word “transparency” refers to how you interact with your visitors:

In order to build trust with users, your site should be explicit in three primary areas: the nature of your business; how your site interacts with a visitor’s computer; and how you intend to use a visitor’s personal information, if you request it.

If you advertise using Google’s paid search, the inclusion of a privacy policy may be one of the factors that the search engine is looking for when it comes to how transparent your business may be to visitors. We’re told in the Site Quality Guidelines page:

Visitors’ personal information:

Unless necessary for the product or service that you’re offering, don’t request personal information.

If you do request personal information, provide a privacy policy that discloses how the information will be used.

Give options to limit the use of a user’s personal information, such as the ability to opt out of receiving newsletters.

Allow users to access your site’s content without requiring them to register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering.

So the Google Adwords program appears to be looking for the same kind of indication of credibility and reassurance from the presence of a privacy policy that can help with human visitors to a site.

Privacy Policies and Search

Carnegie Mellon University runs the CMU Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS), which has been exploring “privacy and security software and systems” since 2004. One of their projects is the Privacy Finder search engine and search bar, which lets you search both Google and Yahoo in a manner that pays attention to the privacy policies of web sites. Their Frequently Asked Questions page tells us this about how it works:

Privacy Finder is a privacy-enhanced search engine. Once you state your privacy preferences (low, medium, high, or custom), the search results are ordered based on how their computer-readable privacy policies comply with your preferences. A privacy meter with four green boxes indicates that the website complies with all your privacy preferences. Websites that do not comply with some or all of your preferences will have privacy meters with fewer than four green boxes. The number of green boxes that are missing are proportional to the number of preference conflicts between the website’s privacy policy and your privacy preferences. The absence of the privacy meter means that a valid computer-readable privacy policy, known as a P3P policy, could not be located.

The CMU Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory also ran an interesting study on the impact of visible privacy information in a paper that’s worth spending some time with – The Effect of Online Privacy Information on Purchasing Behavior: An Experimental Study (pdf).

I was left with a couple of questions after reading about the projects happening in the Carnegie Mellon lab.

While the CMU group is a strong advocate for search that acknowledges the privacy policies of sites, is this a step that Google or Yahoo or Microsoft would take – to rank sites more highly because of the inclusion of a machine readable privacy policy?

How likely is it that most sites will start using a computer-readable privacy policy like the P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences Project) policies?

Phishing, Malicious Code, and Search Engines

Phishing is an effort to use false pretenses to try to gain someone’s financial or personal information. Google created a safe browsing plugin for Firefox, and has now incorporated the function into the Firefox toolbar.

Search engines are also branching out to learn about and block searchers from sites that attempt to download malicious code onto their pages. Three documents from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo explore those topics:

• The Ghost In The Browser: Analysis of Web-based Malware (pdf)
• Strider HoneyMonkeys: Active, Client-Side Honeypots for Finding Malicious Websites (pdf)
• Search Early Warning

Since the search engines are showing concern over phishing and malware in search results, perhaps the idea of delivering sites based upon privacy policies and trust isn’t a far leap, especially given the nod towards business transparency in the Adwords Quality Scores.

Conclusion

The machine readable P3P standard looks like something that the average web site owner might have problems setting up themselves. There are a number of policy generators, editors, and checkers listed on the P3P 1.0 Implementations page from the World Wide Web Consortium that may help making setting up a machine readable privacy policy easier. Some are free, and some charge a fee.

With safe browsing anti-phishing toolbars, landing quality scores based upon inclusion of a privacy policy, and the possibility of search engines ranking pages on the basis of privacy policies, it makes sense for businesses small and large to include privacy policies that reassure human visitors, and search engines too.

Bill Slawski is Director of Search Marketing at KeyRelevance, Inc., blogs at SEO by the Sea, and has been one of the Business and Marketing Forum moderators at Cre8asite Forums for the last six years. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Fortunately, the service that the site offered was one that people were interested in, and many called or sent emails to ask questions. Their questions, the language that they used to describe the service we offered, and their feedback helped the site grow.

A contact page can be one of the most important pages on the site of a small business, and is often one of the most underused.

A well written contact page can make your site more credible, help a search engine understand where your business is located, and can be optimized for a key aspect of the goods or services that you offer.

It can also help to start conversations that can provide you invaluable feedback, which can make the pages of your site easier to use, more informative, and easier to find. Listening to the language of your customers can give you insights into their perspective on what you offer, and the words that they use to describe those offerings.

What to include on a contact page

There’s really no right or wrong answer as to what you should include upon a contact page, and your preferences on how you might want to be contacted should play a role in what you do include. I’ve visited many contact pages which consisted of an email link and nothing more. But you can do more with a contact page than just include a limited means of getting in touch with you.

Optimize your contact page

An example of a business that might want to be found in search engines for the phrase “New Jersey Tomatoes” might title their contact page “Contact us about our New Jersey tomatoes,” and might include something like the following above their contact information or a contact form or both:

We’ve been growing organic New Jersey tomatoes on our Somerset, New Jersey, farm for four generations of wholesome tasty goodness. We have a long history of selling them at our local farmer’s market, and our New Jersey tomatoes can be found in local organic grocery stores throughout the region. If you have any questions about how we farm, and what the benefits of eating organically grown Jersey tomatoes might be to you, we look forward to hearing from you. Please send us an email, or give us a call. Sometimes we don’t answer the phone because we’re out in the fields or otherwise occupied, but if you leave a message, we’ll strive to get back to you within a day.

Of course, any optimization effort should be backed up with keyword research and an analysis of the competitiveness and appropriateness of terms, but a contact page can be an idea page to be found by search engines.

Include address information

Credibility

A business looks more credible if it appears to have an actual presence in the world – a mailing address, a phone number, an email address. This can be an issue sometimes, especially if the business is run by a single individual out of their home office.

While a post office box could be used, there are businesses that will provide mailboxes and street addresses at a fee. They may be worth checking out if providing a home address is an issue. Using a home phone number may also be a delicate subject for a home based business, especially if there are others in the home who use the line. Using a separate phone line for the business may be a good alternative and can provide a way to keep personal calls and business calls from mixing.

Local search and geographical relevance

If the location of your business is an important part of your business – for instance, you have a physical storefront, or you offer services to clients in a particular region – you may want to increase the likelihood that a search engine will include you in relevant local search results.

Including your street address and phone number or numbers on a contact page is one start towards helping a search engine recognize where you are located. A look at some of the local search patent applications from Google suggests that adding additional information to your pages can make it more likely that the search engine will associate your URL with the business listing in local search, as the “authority” site for that business. That additional information can include such things as hours and days of operation, parking availability information, whether or not your location is accessible to people with handicaps, payment types accepted, and other business information.

Under one patent application from Google, Propagating useful information among related web pages, such as web pages of a website, it’s possible that the search engine will specifically look for a “contact” page or a “directions” page to see if it can determine a geographic relevancy for the web site. That may result in an address and phone number being listed for your site in Web search results

Additional considerations for contact pages

Providing a range of contact information itself is a good start towards making your business more accessible to people interested in what you offer on your web site.

Giving potential callers an idea of when you are available to take a call with posted hours of business and time zone information can make it more likely that you won’t get calls in the middle of the night or early in the morning. Providing people who send emails or leave messages in a form with some expectation of how quickly you might respond to their inquiries can make visitors to the page feel more confident that they will get a response. For example: We strive to reply to all calls received within 24 hours, except on Fridays, in which case will we respond by the next Monday.

A toll free number may make it more likely that some people will call who otherwise might not have. If you would rather speak to people by phone than email, it is an option worth considering.

If you anticipate international callers, make sure to put the correct country code for your country in front of your number to make it easier for those callers.

If you want actual visitors, consider including a map or a link to a mapping service, and easy to follow directions from multiple starting points.

Make your contact page as printer friendly as possible, so that if someone decides to save the contact information for later use or to follow in going to where you are located, they have an easy to read and easy to use document.

If you are going to be closed for a holiday, the contact page may also be a good place to indicate that the business will not be open on that day.

Conclusion

An interesting, optimized, and engaging contact page can bring visitors to your site, helpful feedback and commentary, potential customers, and the chance to start conversations with people who are interested in what you have to offer. If you make it as easy and compelling as possible for people to contact you as you can, it’s more likely that they will. And those conversations can be invaluable.

Bill Slawski is Director of Search Marketing at KeyRelevance, Inc., blogs at SEO by the Sea, and has been one of the Business and Marketing Forum moderators at Cre8asite Forums for the last five years. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

I’m less than a block from Main Street, but I might as well be miles away. I have no receptionist. I have no sales counter. There’s no waiting room or window display or open sign. I’m an online business person, and my web site is the portal people use to enter my business.

I’m at the meeting because I’m interested in my community, and I’d like to volunteer my services to help the local merchants learn more about the online world, and how it can help them. But first, I have to get them to listen to me, to trust me as someone who knows what he is talking about. My business card has my URL on it, and so does my letterhead, my invoices, my emails, and anywhere else I can think of that might let people know where they can find me.

But what do they find once they visit?

A number of columns, blog posts, and articles that I’ve been reading recently have suggested that websites should block the flow of PageRank to certain pages on their site that are linked to from almost every page with the use of a nofollow value in those links. Those might be contact pages, privacy policies, or about pages. I think, in many instances, that’s a mistake.

I had visited the shops of many of these merchants and seen them behind their shop counters or their decorated storefronts, but had never met them in a setting as a peer. I knew where many of these people in the meeting worked and what their offices looked like, but they had never stepped into my online world. I hoped during the meeting that I could impress some of them enough so that they would type in the URL from my card into a browser address bar and come visit. I also hope that someone searching for the kinds of services that I offer through a search engine can find me, and step into my office to learn more about me.

An About Us page and associated pages are places where others can learn about a business, and the people and history and story behind that business. People looking might be potential clients or customers or partners, possible investors, vendors, competitors, reporters, or just folks who might be curious. What do you tell them about yourself, and why do you tell them about yourself?

Controlling Your Online Identity

There’s possibly no place on the Web where you can have more control over the impression that your business makes on people than on the pages of your own website. You can show them a brief message about your business, or you can provide a richer experience that can also fulfill a number of other needs. Your About Us page doesn’t have to be something that looks like an afterthought, added to a site because it’s felt to be required. Instead, it can be a showcase that helps you on some different levels:

Credibility – one of my favorite resources to point people towards are the Credibility Guidelines from the Stanford Persuasive Technology Labs. A number of their guidelines focus upon building trust and showing off your expertise. One of them tells us to “Show that there’s a real organization behind your site.”

There are a number of ways that you can do this that can have an impact upon a visitor, from photos of your office or employees (or yourself), to a history or timeline of the business, to descriptions of community involvement or membership in local organizations and mentions in the news. Letting people know something about the who, what, where, when, and why of your business can make them feel comfortable doing business with you. Showing signals of connectedness to the outside world such as membership in the local chamber of commerce, a better business bureau logo, mentions of partnerships with other businesses, or testimonials from satisfied customers, can augment that impression.

Findability – the section where you share About Us information can include more than one page. It can be a section that includes a page about the business, pages about employees, information about community involvement, a press release or news section, information about locations and directions for businesses that want visitors to show in person, and hiring and employment opportunities. Having these sections of the site open to search engines can broaden the ways that your business can be found.

If you let people know where you are, what you offer, what you’re near, and when you’re open, that’s a good step towards being found in local searches. If you provide interesting and well labeled pictures with informative captions and alt text, image search may lead people to your site. Videos showing people what you do, how you do it, and why you do it, or exhibiting your expertise or interests may provide a channel through video searches to your pages.

Your page or section about us provides a way for people to find you that isn’t so much about the goods or services that you offer as it is about your business, your expertise, and your place within the community and at a specific location. Use these pages to help people find you.

Likability – Make a good impression with your About Us pages. This goes beyond showing that you are credible, When you step into the waiting room of a doctor or auto mechanic or other service provider, what do you learn about them? How comfortable do they make you feel? Are there comfortable chairs to sit in, paintings on the walls, coffee to drink? Are there signs on the walls that tell you something about them? When people visit the pages of your site about you, what kind of impression do you make of them there?

After my meeting with the Main Street Association members, how many of the other attendees stopped by my website, and looked around to see if they could find out more about me? What kind of impression did I leave upon them when they visited? How likely would that lead to a positive reaction the next time we met face-to-face? When an online visitor stopped by my site from a search and wanted to know more about me, what might they learn?

Want to know more about how people might react to your About Us pages? Try asking people – your friends, your neighbors, people from online design forums. Let them go through your about pages and have them tell you what they learned and what they might have wanted to see.

Some Suggestions for About Us pages

These approaches can be combined together in one manner or another, but they are some things to think about when presenting information in pages about your business.

Journalistic Approach – This can begin by quite simply answering the questions; who, what, where, why, when, and how. It’s suggested that it be fleshed out more to show things like how the business might be socially responsible, what kinds of expertise or experience members of the organization might have, what kinds of awards or acknowledgments the company might have received, and so on.

Historical Approach – This method of presentation might best benefit individuals or companies with a long and interesting history of past achievements and changes, rather than a small business that might not have been around too long. It can feature time lines, news and photos from a company archives, and tidbits about the development and release of different products. In many ways, this is a way of “showing” people what a business and the people behind the business have accomplished instead of just telling them about it. This approach can be combined with the journalistic approach, as an added element of providing information about the business.

Tour Guide Approach – A more visual way of showing, this approach can include images, photographs, illustrations, and descriptive passages of where a company works, whom they’ve interacted with, and what kind of work they do. An architecture firm might show photos of buildings taken with their architects, a home builder might show images of homes with the build crew in front of them, a plumber might show off his van, a woodworker his workshop. Designers and developers might show screenshots and case studies of sites they’ve worked upon. Images can be powerful, and images that reflect a person in his element can be more powerful than a simple headshot.

Personal Approach – A business may have started out as a labor of love, a reaction to an event, inspired by a family member or friend or personal hero. In the appropriate settings, letting people know about the motivations and inspirations behind a business may be a beneficial way of letting them learn more about a business that they may build a relationship with, whether as a customer or partner or reporter. Narration and storytelling can be ways of leaving memorable impressions that can be shared by word of mouth.

What kind of impression do you make when you tell people about you on your web site?

Bill Slawski is Director of Search Marketing at KeyRelevance, Inc., blogs at SEO by the Sea, and has been one of the Business and Marketing Forum moderators at Cre8asite Forums for the last five years. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Three new patent applications published at the U.S. Trademark and Patent Office this week explore the intricacies of reading text in images taken from Google’s Street View project and some interesting steps beyond those. I described a number of the implications behind the patent filings in an SEO by the Sea post from last night: Google on Reading Text in Images from Street Views, Store Shelves, and Museum Interiors.

Let’s take a slightly different look.

One of the most fun blog posts of last year was a spoof titled Google Interiors – the day my house became searchable. The satire seems to have come a little closer to reality, with the publication of these three patent filings.

The patent applications involved are:

• Recognizing text in images
• Enhancing text in images
• Using extracted image text

The most sensational aspects of the documents come towards the end where we are told that robots might be used to take pictures of products on store shelves and in museums. A snippet from the filings:

In addition to street scenes, indexing can be applied to other image sets. In one implementation, a store (e.g., a grocery store or hardware store) is indexed. Images of items within the store are captured, for example, using a small motorized vehicle or robot. The aisles of the store are traversed and images of products are captured in a similar manner as discussed above. Additionally, as discussed above, location information is associated with each image. Text is extracted from the product images. In particular, extracted text can be filtered using a product name database in order to focus character recognition results on product names.

There’s a science fiction element to this world of robots running amuck in supermarkets, but there’s also a lot of science involved in the documents. The descriptions of how text might be taken from street view images describes a number of techniques that account for problems with images, such as those caused by low contrast from shadows and shading. The use of consecutive images from the Street View cameras can also enhance the reading of text that might be blurry or partially hidden from view in one or more shots.

Here’s a screenshot from the patent filings, which shows a number of places where text might be extracted from one image:

Some of the image techniques described in this document were first hinted at in the patent applications behind Google’s Book project, which I wrote about in the summer of 2006 in Patent applications provide window into Google Book Search and Gmail. Those documents discuss the use of optical character recognition to both read the text within books and to understand differences in the structural elements of that text, so that, for instance, chapter headings in books or article titles in magazines might be seen and indexed differently than body text from those documents.

These text recognition and extraction techniques will work with digital still images and with video images. A number of the techniques described work best with video, where there might be multiple images of a view from slightly different angles. If the Street View filming apparatus also included a laser distance measuring device, described in the patent filings, that may also help to eliminate false positives in recognizing text.

It’s been an old sawhorse for years that Google couldn’t recognize text that was displayed in images while indexing pages on the Web. These patent filings hint that Google may be able to do much more with images than we can imagine.

Some of the things that this technology could be used for:

• Improving local search, and showing images of the actual locations of businesses
• Providing images of other nearby businesses in a local search
• Showing alternative businesses near a location that may offer similar products or services during a local search or product search
• Picturing actual landmarks along a driving route
• Allowing for a wider range of keyword searches associated with businesses, and images of those businesses
• Enabling product searches associated with specific businesses at specific locations
• Allowing museums to be searched by keyword, or to be browsed

It’s difficult to tell if and when we might see googlebot in the grocery stores, but we probably should start wondering how well Google might be able to handle text within images on the Web these days.

A secret for those of you who are starting out with a fresh website, and something to learn about the storms ahead. There are fundamentals about conducting business online that will be helpful for you to learn, and there are a few best practices that have been well documented in some places. But a constant on the Web is that there’s always something new, always something that even the most experienced business folks and online marketers alike all face together for the first time.

Let’s take a look at some of those cresting waves approaching from the distance.

Exploring the mobile web

The web provides some big opportunities, but the mobile web may provide even more. For a small business owner, making your goods and services available to people over the mobile web may be a chance to get involved in an area that many larger businesses haven’t figured out how to navigate yet.

How well does your web design work on a handheld device? Have you looked? If not, this is a good time to start. Cameron Moll published a series of articles on designing for mobile devices in 2005 that are worth a look. He’s since published a book on the topic, which is now available through his Mobile Web Book site. The site includes a sample chapter.

Have you used mobile search? Will your audience? Mobile access to the web will grow far beyond desktop access sometime within the next few years. With the ability to provide location-based search (Video) using GPS enhanced phones and cell tower triangulation, search engines are going to be able to provide local search results based upon a user’s location.

Voice search on a phone is now a reality, with Goog-411 providing answers to spoken queries over the phone, and Microsoft providing similar capabilities at Live Search 411. There’s speculation that Yahoo’s One Search may also provide voice-based search in the future.

Unlocking the riches of social networks

One of the fastest growing sections of the Web centers around social networks, where people who hold common interests can share news, links, comments, contacts, and information with each other. There are plenty of these networks to join, such as Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, and Bebo, to name a few. It’s also possible to start your own social network using sites or software like ning or pligg.

In building profiles for yourself on different social networks, connecting with other people, and writing about your life, your business efforts, and your brand, you can start a dialog with people who may share interests with you and who may be interested in you and what you have to offer as a business person. Exploring communities and making connections through social networks can be time consuming, but it may also provide you with access to people whom you may not have met before – from around the world or around the block.

One rule about being involved in social networks is that you want to avoid being perceived as promotional and one-dimensional. Become part of a network and make friends, help build the community, and develop actual relationships with others. Building your own social network can require lots of resources, including a substantial investment in time and energy, and requires that you create something engaging enough to attract visitors, and keep them coming back.

Another social activity that many businesses have been starting to venture into is keeping a journal or a blog, where they can share information about their business and services, write about news that interests them, and have a voice on the web that discusses timely topics and issues. If done right, blogging by a business can open up communications with potential customers, present clients, and possible collaborators. Done wrong, it has the potential to make a business look insincere and clueless.

The waters run swift where there’s high bandwidth

In increasing numbers, people have begun to log into the Web with faster connections, and the use of multimedia, whether video or audio or images, has started to grow. A business no longer has to rely solely upon text and some images to present themselves to others on the web.

The Web is not solely a broadcast medium, like television, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use video as a means of talking about your business, or about the subject matter that your business specializes within. If you sell boats, fishing excursions, fishing gear, coastal vacations, or luxury destinations, a video about sailing or boating or fishing can attract attention to a subject that might be of interest to a wide audience.

The use of audio podcasts can provide another channel to bring information to people who might be searching for information or entertainment in an area related to what your business has to offer.

It can be a challenge to create audio or video that engages, entices, and gets people to associate positive feelings towards your business, but it can also be an opportunity.

No treasure maps

When it comes to incorporating the mobile web, social networks, and multimedia into your efforts to make your business more visible on the Web, there are no clear guidelines or maps leading to success in these relatively uncharted waters. Instead, there are possibilities that may not pay dividends without hard work and paying attention to what others are doing, and failing to do.

These are some of the fastest growing areas online, and there are many who are now writing about them, commenting on them, and sharing their experiences. Like any business opportunity, it can pay off doing some research, and mapping out possible directions before committing too much time and resources into any one effort. In facing these challenges, small businesses can as easily be trailblazers as large businesses.

Happy New Year, and may the challenges of 2008 help you find your own path to treasures on the Web.

Bill Slawski is Director of Search Marketing at KeyRelevance, Inc., blogs at SEO by the Sea, and has been one of the Running a Business Forum moderators at Cre8asite Forums for the last six years. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

We know this from statements about anchor text made in documents like the Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin-scribed The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, and the early PageRank patents authored by Lawrence Page – Method for node ranking in a linked database and Method for scoring documents in a linked database.

A newly granted patent from Google, Anchor tag indexing in a web crawler system, may provide a more detailed look at the mechanics of using anchor text as a relevancy signal for a page being linked to by the search engine. It also describes some other processes about using links to rank pages and about crawling websites. I’ve written a detailed breakdown of the patent at SEO by the Sea in Google Patent on Anchor Text and Different Crawling Rates.

Danny asked me if I might hit on some of the highlights of the document here.

Link Discovery and Crawling Layers

Links are at the heart of the patented process, and the discovery of links is done in at least three different ways – direct submissions of URLs, crawling of URLs, and submissions of content containing links through syndication methods like RSS.

The crawling of URLs may be done in three separate layers, based upon factors that could involve how frequently the content at those URLs may be updated, and what PageRank or page ranking they may have:

• A base layer, in which most known URLs are sectioned into segments, and those segments are crawled during a specific period such as a day, in a round robin manner until all are visited by robots programs
• A daily layer, in which a smaller group of URLs that have a higher crawl score, crawl frequency, or both, may be visited over the same period of time that segments are crawled in the base layer.
• A real time layer, in which an even smaller group of URLs which have even higher crawl scores, crawl frequencies or both, may be visited in much shorter intervals such as minutes or hours.

The patent provides some simple formulas which define crawl scores and crawl frequencies, and also a directed approach that may favor URLs in specific categories, such as news sites and pages in specific languages or in certain file formats.

Link Logs, Anchor Maps, Duplicates, and Annotations

When a crawling program visits a URL, it may collect lists of links and content from pages in a link log which can be sent back to other programs that look at page content, at duplicate content on pages, at duplicate file structures at hosts, and at text both from anchors of links and from a distance surrounding the links.

URLs that contain duplicate content may be reviewed, and one URL may be chosen as a canonical, or best, version with the possibility that the other duplicate or duplicates are then ignored.

Identifying duplicate file/linking structures at different hosts may also result in one version being identified as a version to continue being indexed, and the other or others as versions to be ignored in the future.

The patent tells us that it is possible that anchor text in links pointing to duplicate URLs may be considered as anchor text pointing to the canonical version of those URLs.

Information about changes to pages is determined at this stage, and link maps and anchor maps are made from the link logs.

The change information may impact the frequency with which specific URLs are crawled, and together with something like PageRank, may determine which of the three layers a URL may be placed within.

The link maps may be used to determine a page ranking, such as PageRank, for documents at the different URLs.

The anchor maps may be used to associate anchor text and additional “annotation” information with the URLs that they point at, and that text and annotation information may be used in conjunction with other information to determine relevancy of a page to different words and phrases.

Here’s an example from the patent that I paraphrased in my post:

For example, a link pointing to a picture of Mount Everest might read “to see a picture of Mount Everest click here.” The anchor text might be the “click here” but the additional text “to see a picture of Mount Everest” could be included in the link record.

Robots and Temporary and Permanent Redirects

A robot crawling through links found at URLs might come across redirected links, and the patent tells us that temporary (302) and permanent (301) redirects are treated differently.

Temporary redirects are identified and recorded, but will be followed by a robot.

Permanent redirects are also identified and recorded, but instead of being followed by a robot, information about them is sent back to a scheduling program that may crawl the URL being redirected to at another time.

Conclusion

It’s important to note that this is a patent written to protect Google’s intellectual property in the processes described, but may not describe the processes that Google has actually implemented, or may only describe some of the processes being used. The patent is also 4 years old at this point, and there’s a possibility that Google may be doing some things very differently now.

But the processes that are described do seem to correspond well with many observations about things such as the behavior of Google’s crawling processes and the use of anchor text as a relevancy signal, helping to determine the relevance of pages being pointed towards by those links for certain queries.

The aerospace industry uses the term “launch window” to describe the right combination of time and location for a rocket to be launched so that it will successfully go into space, and to a specific destination. The term has been adopted by the business community and changed to “window of opportunity.”

There are efforts that a small business might launch that can take advantage of windows of opportunity, and I wanted to explore a few of those within the context of internet marketing and search, specifically pointing out three areas to think about; topicality, regionality, and seasonality.

Topicality

The band Radiohead recently bucked the established music industry somewhat by offering a digital download of their latest album online and letting purchasers name their own price. A button making company in Ohio decided that $1,000 was a good price to pay, to show their support of the band’s efforts to build a music business model for the digital age. They paid for the download and for physical copies of the CDs, issued a press release, and submitted a link targeting the press release at Digg.

While many others were downloading the songs for free, or for a fairly low rate, the button makers were getting almost 7,000 visitors from Digg, coverage in the news, and mentions in a number of blogs as well as on Forbes. Regardless of whether this was a publicity stunt or show of support for the band, the button makers were definitely in the right place at the right time.

So, what makes this music sale interesting to small businesses? No board meetings, no committees formed, no marketing meetings and minutes and agendas – just quick action in response to a timely event that involved an industry that the button makers were involved with. They make it easy for bands, and other folks to design their own buttons easily online, and at affordable rates. Many within the Digg community are part of their audience.

This timeliness, or topicality, in taking an action that would probably attract attention from an audience likely to be interested in what they offer is an example of where a small business has an advantage over a large one, but there are other areas that we can look at which can apply to the ways that people search online.

Regionality

When I was growing up, we lived in a few different parts of the country, and I experienced cultural changes in language that were both interesting and confusing. Simple things became different from one place to another, like how what we called soda on the east coast was referred to as pop in the midwest and coke in the south. A hero, a hoagie, and a sub or submarine sandwich, were all roughly the same thing, but went by different names in different places. You went to a fish fry in Wisconsin, and ordered cheese steaks in Philadelphia, but would get funny or puzzled looks if you switched locations and sought cheesesteaks in Wisconsin and fish fries in Philly.

Just as there are often niches that are too small for large businesses to pursue and make money within, there are opportunities for using local and regional phrases and terms as keywords for items that larger businesses may not consider targeting. If your business targets local customers, the use of regional terms on your pages that those potential customers may use could be an opportunity to draw visitors that a large business might not attract.

A national site I know of were redesigning their pages and wanted to segment their offerings on their site by state and municipality, but were staggered by the thought of learning the local terms for what they offered in each location – and each location had their own unique sets of keywords that were appropriate. They decided to use more generic terms.

Seasonality

Related somewhat to regionality is the concept that different locations have their own traditions, their own celebrations and seasons that might be unique to where they are located. These recurring events again are something that a large business may not take the time or make the effort to learn about because the cost could be staggering, the effort immense, and the return on the effort relatively insignificant. Yet, to a smaller business with a lighter overhead and knowledge of the region, understanding seasons can be significant.

My town holds its parades for Halloween and Memorial Day usually a week earlier than the larger city a few miles to the north of us, so that the participants can take part in both. The local parades draw thousands of viewers who know that we celebrate early. We also have a couple of annual events that take place every year – a community day in the fall which may attract about 10,000 folks to town, and a block party in the middle of the summer that closes our Main Street and brings in even more people.

What periodic recurring events happen near your business, or near where your audiences are located, that you can participate with in some meaningful manner? Is there a parade, a festival that happens yearly, a unique regional holiday, or some other event that is particular to that region? Including information about these events on your web site or in Flickr photo albums, sponsoring and/or participating in them, helping to organize or create or run an event; these are all ways that can draw attention, good will, and visitors to your business and to your website.

Finding Windows of Opportunity

How do you know when an opportunity comes along? It can help to study and pay attention to news within your industry, and related industries, and the activities and interests of your audiences. Get involved with those communities, and interact in a positive manner. Learn about your region and your regional differences in language and customs. Find out about local events and get involved.

Look for ways to engage audiences that larger businesses can’t because it makes sense for them to target a much broader audience, or because they can’t react as quickly as your business can. Those windows of opportunity are out there. It’s just a matter of catching them at the right place and time.

Bill Slawski is Director of Search Marketing at KeyRelevance, Inc., blogs at SEO by the Sea, and has been one of the Business and Marketing Forum moderators at Cre8asite Forums for the last five years. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

One of the benefits is the chance for business owners to hold a conversation with potential clients, and with people who may be interested the services, or goods that the company offers as well as with people who may share similar interests. Another benefit is the opportunity to attract search engine traffic and links to your site. A third is the chance to build a positive reputation on the web.

Those reasons may sound good in theory, but do they work in practice?

One of the first sites that I added a blog to was for a client in a very small professional services organization. In the years that it has been operating, the blog has had a very positive impact upon his business:

1. Having drawn repeated mentions in local newspapers and magazines
2. Being profiled in national publications like USA Today
3. Appearing as an example in a book on blogging as a way of enhancing a professional reputation
4. Attracting business from local customers as well as national and international clients
5. Providing rankings in search engines for a wide variety of keyword phrases ahead of firms with more than 300 members
6. Engaging other practitioners in the same field to discuss and enter into consultation on a variety of topics
7. Suggesting other services that he might provide to his clients

Over those years, we’ve had many conversations about different aspects of blogging, and how to go about it. In the early days, we weren’t sure exactly where to go with the blog, and what to say. But we agreed that it should be a conversation with each reader who comes and visits, to give them a glimpse of the workings of the organization, to share news that we found interesting, to comment on the local community, and to show the human side of what he does.

One of our first conversations about blogging was to develop a set of topics to blog about, and to write those down. In time, that became an idea clearing house – a sort of blog behind the blog, where topics and ideas were shared on things to blog about. We eventually turned to an internal wiki where we could share with each other links to stories or blog posts, or a sentence or paragraph on a subject that we thought readers might find interesting. We noticed, as we went forward, that some of our interests, and the topics of things that we blogged about changed over time, and we welcomed those changes.

Another early conversation was on topics that should be avoided. These included internal company secrets, confidential materials, and information from outside parties that have been disclosed during the course of business. We agreed that if we were going to write about a specific topic that was controversial, that we would try to present sides of the controversy that we may personally disagree with, so that each reader could form their own opinions. We also tried to find and provide more than one source of information on subjects if possible, to show that we were responsible with our research.

We decided when beginning the blog that we would enable comments and try to be as responsive as possible to people who might leave a remark on a post. The interactions that developed lead in time to relationships with other bloggers in the same and related industries, and to long term friendships with people who were interested in the subject matter of the blog.

I’ve seen many blogs from businesses that don’t include blogrolls, and I think that may be a mistake. In the earliest incarnation of this business blog, we included a list of reference resources that we thought would appeal to the readers that we thought we could attract to the blog, and a handful of blogs that we had been following that we found interesting and helped us in the decision to start blogging in the beginning. When we found other blogs that we thought were interesting and might interest the readers of the blog, we took a number of steps. We read through their archives, left some comments, and even blogged about their posts. In other words, we courted them, to see if there might be the possibility of a positive relationship. If we felt like we could trust our visitors to their blogs, we added them to the blogroll.

An early challenge that we faced was that many of the topics that we wanted to discuss on the blog were often written about by others in complex language and jargon particular to the industry. Sometimes those words seemed to be the best ones to use because their meanings were precise and easily understandable by practitioners. But the audience that we wanted to reach included many people who would be unfamiliar with what those words meant. I suggested that a good tone of voice to use might be the one where a client was first introduced to what the business provided, and explained in simple layman’s terms. A benefit of this approach was that those words and phrases happened to be the ones that those audience members would often use to search with when trying to find a service like the one this business offered.

The business grew larger over time, and other voices appeared on the blog. The idea bank that we developed enabled us to share the responsibility of deciding about who blogged on which topic, and to provide input on prospective posts before they were made. We developed a competition, so that people could take turns in blogging, and try to outdo each other with what they posted. Our conversations about what topics to cover and what topics to avoid took shape into a rough set of guidelines, so that everyone was on the same wavelength when it came time to decide what to post, and how to present topics.

Comments and emails from customers were considered carefully in replying to people who took the time to share their thoughts, and sometimes those turned into posts, too. They also provided ideas for growth of the business.

As I noted above, we found that some of the things that we originally were interested in changed over time. Interestingly, some of the services that the business offered changed over time with them. We found that by following news and opinions in the industry closely with the blog, we were educating ourselves on where the industry was headed, what potential and present clients were concerned about, and what trends were developing.

By engaging people in a conversation through a blog and listening to them, we were better able to meet their needs.

Bill Slawski is Director of Search Marketing at KeyRelevance, Inc., blogs at SEO by the Sea, and has been one of the Business and Marketing Forum moderators at Cre8asite Forums for the last five years. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.