Business owners often struggle with the question of whether or not their employees should be using social media in the workplace. There are obvious reasons why they shouldn’t, but there are certainly potential benefits as well, and unfortunately not a lot of clarity to the matter. So let’s look at this from several different angles.

Stats

Security company FaceTime Communications has released results from a survey in which it asked over 500 IT managers and employees about their Internet and social media habits at work. The survey revealed that:

To make your web site really pay off, it has to get good web traffic, which means simply that a lot of people are coming to your web site. By checking your web stats you can quickly observe how many visitors your web site is getting and even how many people stay long enough to browse the website.

Programs such as Awstats, a web analyzing program found on most Linux based servers will reveal how those web visitors came to you. Did they click through from a search engine? If so, what keyword brought them to you? Or, did they come from a particular website that links to yours? Your stats will reveal all.

Since the new year is right around the corner, bloggers and marketers alike are posting their predictions as if a psychics convention has come to town.

So in keeping with that tradition, I’d like to post a few of my own. But unlike those who post their predictions in point form, I won’t make a specific líst but rather share with you some of my thoughts.

(Near the end, however, this post will culminate in what I believe will be three major trends to watch out for and dive into, if you want to make some serious money in 2008 and beyond.)

Are you launching a new website? There’s no better time to think about search engine optimization than prior to launching a new site. By giving consideration to your on-page optimization factors, you can increase your chances of achieving top organic search results.

To prepare your site for easy indexing, be sure to follow these basis guidelines:

1. Design your site in html or similar format that minimizes the use of java script and flash. The more complex you make your code, the more difficult it becomes for the search engine spiders to read your content and prescribe the appropriate Google PR to your web page.

In a world where more and more households are connected to the internet, bandwidth is becoming an issue and brownouts have been predicted to occur in the next few years. With the strain on the infrastructure of the internet this makes having an efficient, fast loading website all that much more important.

The bottom line for most site owners though, is not the efficiency of the internet as a whole, but rather the financial sustainability of their websites. While there are many ways to make a site perform better in terms of converting visitors, one of the simplest, and probably most important aspects is simply to reduce the load time of your website.

Before you start fiddling around with HTML editors, FTP clients, and Domain registrations, it’s important to have at least a basic understanding of how all this works. This Website creation overview gives you an easy to understand look at what the process of building your own Website really involves.

A website is a collection of files that work together to form a unified whole. These various files, from images to HTML documents and PHP scripts, or instructional software, are organized by a Web browser and displayed appropriately on a computer monitor.

Until fairly recently, writing marketing copy was a strange and mysterious undertaking to me.

It’s funny because when I was doing advertising research, I often worked closely with copywriters. I would interview customers to learn how they responded to different messages and report back to the creative team. Sometimes the copywriter or art director would have questions they wanted me to ask my focus groups. So I got to know the writers and their work pretty well.

Yet, when they went back to their desk to actually create the message, I had no idea how they came up with the words that moved customers to action.

A survey from George S. May International shows some quite interesting statistics about how small business owners intend to vote ihe upcoming U.S. presidential elections. The most intriguing one is that 62% of small business owners say they would cross party lines this year to vote for the candidate that they fell will do the most to help their business.

The survey polled 850 small business owners around the country, and about half of them say that they feel like their business is in jeopardy. The survey highlights the following stats as reasons for this:

- 56% say the current credit crunch has adversely impacted their business

Internet marketing is still a complete mystery to a large majority of Internet users. For many users, internet marketing is seen as some foreign area of the web, populated with silly get-rich-quick schemes and unsavory characters ready to rip off the innocent and uninformed consumer at the click of a mouse.

In reality, Internet marketing is populated mainly with hard working professionals promoting and selling high quality brand products by many of the world’s Top 500 companies.

One of the most problematic and confusing issues most webmasters have with Google concerns linking. How your links are ranked? How you should link out? How you should construct your internal links? How you should get more inbound links? How many links should you have on a page? And the líst of questions goes on…

Perhaps, the most annoying aspect for the struggling webmaster, has been Google’s secrecy in how it actually ranks links and pages. Google’s whole PageRank and Ranking Algorithm is so complex that no one can fully boast they understand how the whole system works.