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5 ways to grow your small business this year

The New Year is a great time to step back and evaluate your small business. Are you happy with your business, or is it time to expand? If you are looking to grow, consider these business-building ideas that could take your company to the next level.

Embrace the Internet: Create a Web site
In today's digital age, having a Web site and e-mail address is expected of a business, and can make a critical difference in building name recognition and attracting new customers. A Web site is a 24/7 portal to your customers where you can provide information about your company and advertise your services--and it does not have to break your bank account. There are numerous companies that offer reasonably priced Web hosting rates and services, and there is a wide variety of software available to design and maintain a site yourself if you choose not to outsource it.

Expand Your Niche
If your company currently takes aim at a certain niche market, consider whether you could expand that market to offer new products or services, expanding your reach and appeal. If you sell camera supplies and equipment, consider branching out and offering photography classes. If you run a public relations firm, think about expanding to offer marketing consulting or Web design.

Be cautious when targeting a new or broadened niche, though, and do your research. Start small, offering your new product or service on a small scale, in case it does not go over as well as hoped. Stick with what you know and sell your new products to existing customers to expand with less risk.

Hire Support Staff
While it's important to be involved in all aspects of your business, there comes a point where delegating tasks becomes necessary. If you find yourself unable to focus on your clients' needs because you're buried in bills or payroll every week, hire an administrative assistant to take the load off. Does your office have several networked computers, a sophisticated phone system and a Web site? Hire an IT specialist to maintain your systems and keep your office up and running. Even if you can only afford a part-time support staff, that's a couple days more a week you can focus solely on your area of expertise--bringing the best product or service to your customers.

Open Another Location
Entrepreneurs who have found their business growing steadily over the years might benefit from opening another location. Before jumping in, though, experts recommend you create a business plan for the new location and ensure it will have top-notch management and support staff to get it on its feet. Opening a new location is risky but the rewards can be great if you do your homework.

If you run your business out of your home and are bursting at the seams with boxes and paperwork, it might be time to rent office or warehouse space. If you find your productivity--or sanity--waning due to clutter and cramped space, money spent on a dedicated work site could be well worth it. An even bigger reason to consider moving out of the house is if you'd like to host client meetings. Discussing business while your dogs wrestle on the floor can be a little distracting for both parties, not to mention unprofessional.

Secure a Government Contract
Thanks to extensive work by NFIB, small businesses now compete on a level playing field with Federal Prison Industries when seeking federal contracts. While a government contract might sound like a sure way to increase revenue, it's vital to make sure the job is the right fit for your small business before bidding. Be sure you understand exactly what will be expected of you before submitting your proposal, and that you will be able to meet the government's demands and comply with regulations. And do your homework to determine your costs. Don't low-bid a project if it will hurt your bottom line or jeopardize your company.

NFIB has several resources to help you grow your small business. To find out more, visit the Tools & Tips section on NFIB.com.

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Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) And SEO

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Indexing has always been considered a highly targeted science. Enter a search query into Google search and the pages that are displayed are generally optimized towards that exact word or term. However, in their continual battle to server the most relevant but most natural pages with genuinely useful information Google has injected latent semantic indexing (LSI) into its algorithms.

What Is LSI?

LSI is a unique indexing method that potentially takes Google search one step closer to becoming human in its way of thinking. If we were to manually search through web pages to find information related to a given search term we would be likely to generate our own results based on the theme of the site, rather than whether a word exists or doesn't exist on the page.

Why Search Engines Might Adopt Latent Semantic Indexing

The extremely rigid form of "keyword indexing" also meant that black hat SEO techniques were easier to implement. Search engines could be manipulated into ranking a site highly by using set formula. Originally, cramming a page with a particular keyword or set of keywords meant a site would rank highly for that search term. The proceeding set of algorithms ensured that your link profile played more of an important part than your keyword density. Reciprocal linking soon followed once again making it possible to manipulate the search engine spiders by exchanging links with tens, hundreds, or thousands of websites.

Reciprocal linking was soon beaten as Google and to a lesser extent Yahoo and MSN gave less credence to a reciprocal link as they did to a one-way inbound link. Latent Semantic Indexing is another, particularly powerful, method to try and make their result pages appear more natural with natural pages filled with natural content.

The Effects

The introduction of LSI has seen some dramatic changes in the search engine result pages already. Sites that had previously performed well because of an impressive link profile based on a single keyword have found their pages slip in the rankings. Other pages with a more diverse portfolio of inbound links are taking the lead with search terms for which they had not previously performed.

SEO is far from dead because of LSI, in fact if anything, it has probably increased the need for professional white-hat SEO on your website. The field of SEO, though, has almost certainly changed. Website content copywriting for Google's benefit is not merely made up of keyword density and keyword placement as it once was and link-building techniques will need to change to incorporate LSI algorithms but it can be done.

Writing Content For LSI

If optimizing solely for Google then a web page can, theoretically, be naturally written and naturally worded. When we write we instinctively include the appropriate keyword in our text. In order to avoid repetition (or keyword optimization, as it was once called) we would often alter some instances of these keywords for other words with the same or very similar meaning. We naturally include the plural or singular form of a keyword as well as different tenses and a number of different stems of that keyword. In the eyes of LSI algorithms this is all good news.

Looking At Your Link Profile

A link profile should no longer consist of thousands of links with the same anchor text (that of your primary keyword). There's no reason to panic if you already have this kind of profile. Instead you should look at relevant and similar terms and improve your link profile by gaining links using these as your anchor text.

What It Offers Web Searchers

From the point of view of web searchers, LSI offers some distinct advantages over its earlier form of indexing. For example, LSI recognizes that the word "engine" in "search engine optimization" is not related to searches for terms like "steam engine" or "locomotive engine" and is instead related to Internet marketing topics. In theory, LSI results give a much more accurate page of results as well as providing a broader range of pages still geared towards a particular topic.

Where Google Leads, Others Generally Follow

It is widely acknowledged that Google is the search engine at the forefront of latent semantic indexing. On the whole they try to generate results pages that are literally filled with genuine, useful results and LSI certainly provides another string in their bow. Yahoo and MSN, for now, seem more than happy to go along with keyword specific indexing although Yahoo are known to look at singular and plural keyword variations as well as keyword stemming when judging keyword density.

The Effect On Your Website

How it affects the individual Webmaster is dependent on how they go about promoting their site already. If the pages are filled with natural content including keywords and keyword alternatives, and the link profile is similarly diversified for a number of related keywords then the fact is it won't change very much. However, if all of your efforts have been concentrated, either on-page or off-page, with a single keyword then it's time to readdress the balance.

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About the Author: Matt Jackson is a homepage content author for WebWiseWords. WebWiseWords specializes in natural web content writing that appeals to search engine spiders and to human visitors.

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