Why is search engine optimization so important for your website?

1. Without even the most basic SEO your site is invisible to the search engines and the world, which means you are missing out on the chance for people to find you when they search online.

2. SEO optimization can transform your site from a stodgy online brochure, into a powerful self-promoting marketing system which works for you globally 24/7, even while you sleep.

3. Using SEO can help you target your services or products to exactly the right kind of buyers in your market.

4. Adopting proper SEO practices helps you improve the clarity, content and navigation of your website.

5. Professional search engine optimization helps to pinpoint your site's purpose and subject matter, making your site a valuable part of the search engine's results page.

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If you're one of the thousands of people currently out there thinking about setting up your own small business, you might want to brew a cup of tea and spend a few minutes reading through the tips contained in this article. 5 Tips To Get Your Small Business Online offers a goodly amount of sensible advice, mostly geared around optimizing your web presence to take advantage of the surge in online commerce.

Much of it is common sense (e.g.you will need a domain name and web host!) but there's also some valuable advice on how to maximise your website without getting caught up in things you probably don't need (hint: you probably don't need a mobile website right now, unless a large amount of your business comes from people on the move).

Taka a read, and don't forget, our job here at Panda Site Builder is to help remove a lot of the drudge from setting up a site or online store, so you can focus on building your business. We're hoping that you will use us as a one-stop shop for all your online needs and questions, from domain names to traffic generation and copy writing. If you haven't done so already sign up to our irregular newsletter which will keep you up to date with all the Panda Site Builder News as it happens.

The BBC today asks - 'Should We Give Up Trying To Save The Panda?' We say absolutely NOT. That is all.

html { background: #111; color: #eee; }
h1, h2, h3 { color: #eee; }
body { color: #eee; }

More of our customers are starting to use those clever CSS Snippets to tweak the design of their site, so we're going to try and put together a CSS Snippet gallery as soon as we can, in order to help people 'cheat' a little and give their site design a little instant edge. Hopefully it won't take too long to do, but the To-Do list is long and the winter months are brutal. Or something like that.

In the meantime, here's an example of that you can do to the Discovery Theme with a tiny snippet and some imagination. Simple but effective.

Starting and running a small business can be challenging at any time, let alone during a downturn, so it was interesting to read this piece titled What Helps Small Business To Prosper?. Of course there are a huge number of factors which go towards success, including the scarily random confluence of luck, planning and execution, but in general the thing that seems to stand out from all these reports is a relentless focus on delivering as much customer satisfaction as you can.

Nowadays of course a lot of this focus involves implementing great customer communication, which of course is where having a decent website comes in. But it's not just the website is it? It's the whole tapestry of communication, from your help desk to your order processing and follow up emails. The companies which seem to 'get it', use all the tools they can find to ensure that they're both talking and listening to their clients and customers. We're trying to do it, and we know that a huge percentage of web startups are shooting for this goal as well.

I guess the message of this post is to remember that the Web changes everything. To grab success now, you're expected to open up your processes, discussions and decisions to the whole world, and not just impose them on your customers from high ground. Sounds easy, doesn't it?

Here's a fun tip for those of you with access to the CSS editor on Panda Site Builder's paid plans. Pop this snippet of CSS into your CSS editor box (you'll find it under the Styles tab) and watch these cute drop caps appear at the beginning of your paragraphs. You can change the colour of the letters by replacing the existing 'color' code (starting with a #) with something more to your taste. Have fun!

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    p:first-letter {
        display:block;
        margin:5px 0 0 5px;
        float:left;
        color:#FF3366;
        font-size:60px;
        font-family:Georgia;
    }

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Before you feel the urge to rush out and employ specialist search engine optimisation (SEO) experts to help your site rise up in the Google search engine results, you may want to just make a quick cup of tea and pop on over to the Google SEO Starter Guide. This absolutely free 32 page guide is chock full of superb information delivered by the masters themselves.

It's really well written, provides advice for complete beginners as well as more advanced stuff, and most importantly points out some of the traps which you might fall into as you try to make your site more visible. The bottom line is that original good quality content is a must, no matter what other techniques you use to improve your search rankings.

We've just posted a guide to getting your new site noticed by Google and the other major search services in our knowledgebase. It's not an exhaustive list, but it should be a pretty good starting point. We'll revisit the topic again later as we add more cool SEO features to Panda Site Builder. Hope you get some use out of it!

Many people are unaware that sending out a local or niche PR release can be as effective as conventional search engine optimisation in getting your website noticed by the search giants like Google. This is because nowadays most of the newswire services that you can use have hooks into the major search engines, so your release becomes immediately indexable for the web. This makes it a worthwhile exercise.

Here are the steps you need to take to craft a useful press release.

A. Prepare
Before you do anything, pull together a list of the thing/s you want to talk about. Above all keep it simple, too much information is confusing, and muddies your main message. So is it a press release to just mention the new website, is it to show off the new products you are selling, or to demonstrate on your site that you are offering a new service? Pick a main topic and stick to it.

You'll also ideally need to come up with some context, so look around your market and see how your product or service fits in, what makes it different, what are the cool things you do that others do not?

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Welcome to the first post on the Panda Site Builder blog. We will be using it to communicate new product news and status updates, as well as more general thoughts and hopes from the startup business front line. We will also be including a selection of hints and tips to help people get the best out of the website creation process.

It's interesting as you approach launch time how focused the conversation gets. Instead of vague generalities you focus with laser like intensity on issues that will affect not just the technology, but the business as a whole. In effect your interaction moves away from being feature led, to strategic. It's easy to see how your teams can end up pushing insane hours trying to keep it all real. Interesting.