If you are running the SEM for a small business, you probably have the staff on a weekly or monthly blogging schedule, depending on the size of your staff and the frequency of your updates. An age-old problem is, however, blogging yourself out.

That happens here, at SourceTOAD, to be sure. Once in a while, I find myself beating my head against the wall, trying to make a great blogging idea splat itself against the brick of our office partitions. This isn't really effective, however, at much more than creating a really neat blood-spatter design above my desk.

What I should do, instead of resorting to self-mutilation, is pull out my old keyphrase list that was put together before we started our whole SEM campaign. From there, I can take a bunch of related and applicable keywords and phrases and write my blog around them.

Now, that's not to say that it should be a list of keyphrases with 'and' and 'also' sprinkled in. You should still focus on keeping it interesting and informative to your reader. Blogging for your business is about more than search engine ranking; you may also gain clients based on your insight, knowledge, and understanding of your chosen profession.

Many of our clients here at SourceTOAD accept payments or other sensitive information through their sites. To prevent unseemly people from trying to intercept this information as it travels over the Internet, we encrypt it via a Secure Socket Layer (SSL). SSL is open source software that is completely free to use, so clients are often surprised when they have to pay extra money for an SSL certificate for their site. In fact, purchased SSL certificates are not technically necessary for SSL encryption to occur and be completely safe from prying eyes. However, for all intents and purposes, a secure Internet site used by the general public cannot be run without one.

In VirtueMart we were having some trouble removing the product availability for a client who wanted his inventory kept secret. After poking around the code for a little bit, we discovered that the key to its removal lies in the following two files:

public_html/components/com_virtuemart/themes/default/templates/product_details/flypage_images.tpl.php
and
public_html/components/com_virtuemart/themes/default/templates/product_details/flypage.tpl.php

On about line 56 there are the lines:

<?php  
   if( $this->get_cfg( 'showAvailability' ))
   echo $product_availability; }
?>

Delete them, and your problems are solved.

Sourcetoad is mainly a custom software and web app company, but that still means that our finished products need website names. When your website is out of the oven and you want to take it from our testing server to the whole wide Internet, you need to make sure that people can get to it. Websites live on computers that are hooked up to the Internet all day long and are never turned off. They run a special piece of software that listens for it's name to be called, and then when it hears it, it's name, it serves up a webpage. It's not really any different from the computer you're reading this on in fact, but we call it a "Server" anyway and it sounds really impressive.

Congratulations on choosing Alfresco as your document management software. The Alfresco system is a very robust piece of software that contains many powerful features. This guide will serve as a very basic primer into the way Alfresco works. For further learning, it is highly suggested you check out the “Demonstration, Feature Tour and Help” section of the “My Alfresco” homepage.

In the most basic sense, Alfresco contains spaces to segregate content and users to access this content. Each space is a sort of “top-level” directory for document storage within your organization. Its really up to you how you choose to separate out the spaces. A web development firm might have a space for each major client, but it might also have spaces based upon organizational units (such as design, development, etc). However they are setup, spaces will allow you to restrict access on a user-level. In other words, only users assigned to a space will be able to see or edit data within that space.

In maintaining your own SEO for your website, be sure not to fall into these five pitfalls of the SEO world.

Using the Wrong Keywords
Probably the biggest mistake that people make with their site's SEO is using incorrect keywords. The keywords you choose cannot just be pulled out of a hat. They cannot be the words you think people might type to find your site. You need to do a bit of research on which keywords to use. A website keyword suggestion tool is a great starting point.

In this blog, I’m going to discuss what a CRM is, why you need one, and which one is right for you. You’re not going to find an analysis of the big commercial systems out there, because if you really want to spend that much money on something when a free alternative is out there, I have a bridge to sell you.

What is a CRM?

CRMs, or Customer Relationship Managers, are fancy address books on the surface. They handle all the day-to-day information sheet type duties that a Rolodex would have performed twenty years ago. Most of them, these days, also include all the functionality of a calendaring system, to-do lists, and even some billing/inventory control features. Most importantly, they are marketing tools.  A good CRM will split your customers into one of the positions through the sales pipe. You’ll then be able to monitor the flow of a customer’s progress from initial lead, all the way through to the final sales process and even into customer support.

It still boggles my mind (no offense) whenever someone tells me they’re using Internet Explorer, especially version 6, as their web browser. The reason being is that for many, many years we’ve had much better alternatives freely available to us. With options like, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, all equipped with better features, security, and stability, there’s no good reason to still use IE, but I’ll give you five reasons you should stop.

When selecting a web-hosting package, SourceTOAD clients often ask us which type of hosting they should choose, Dedicated or Shared. In this week’s blog, I will outline the important considerations one must make when coming to this decision.

One must first understand the difference between Shared and Dedicated Hosting. Simply put, when a person has a dedicated web server, his, and only his, website will reside upon that server. He might have other applications related to his business—such as e-mail—running on that same server, but no other users will have access to that box. Shared hosting is anything else. This can include standard Shared hosting where a person has limited capacity to manage the way the server works all the way to Virtual or Cloud Servers where hosting is fully customizable, even appearing as though it is an independent computer. However, no matter how a Virtual Server might appear, a person will still be sharing resources with other users on the same machine.

Here at SourceTOAD, we cater to many different size businesses. Big and small, local and national. But our bread and butter (and my favorite type of client) is the small business client. We love watching a budding business blossom and grow, and I like to think that some of our SEO advice has helped some of them. The most helpful piece of advice, it seems, has been reminding them to "think small."

Many times, when a business gets a shiny new website, they want the world to see it. They want everyone from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon to be aware of their existence, it seems, and want to do their SEO in this manner. To this we say, "Stop!" If your business is some sort of service or product that is super-localized, please, embrace that fact.