One of the most common questions about website development comes from business owners asking whether their business should be online. The short and sweet answer is YES, if you have a business and you provide a product or service than you should have a business website. Absolutely. Without a doubt. Period.

In today’s market there’s simply not much that can’t be presented online. Whether your business sells products or services your business partners, potential employees, customers and perhaps even investors should be able to quickly locate you and the products and services you sell, and the most effective way for them to do that is by accessing the world wide web’s database. The truth is that NOT having a business website these days can be more costly to your business than investing in having an online presence. In our immediate economy consumers of all ages and types virtually see the World Wide Web as a credibility factor. When they can’t find you online, then you might as well not exist.

That being said, it is also not enough to just have a website. Because your image and the value of your product or service will be determined by the presentation of your website, you want to strongly evaluate what type of presence you want to create and then invest in your project accordingly in order to make a good impression.

Last note—don’t forget that the World Wide Web levels the playing field for all products and services. Now you’re not just competing for traffic and business locally but you’ve entered a pool that is literally boundless. This shouldn’t scare you, it should excite you and entice you too think all the more about how you can make your online presence unique, professional, enticing and trust worthy.

Your website will be an extension of your business, so treat it as the important “X” factor that it can be!

To blog or not to blog? That is a question that many businesses ask themselves. Well, here’s the thing: as a business, you need to reach out to your target audience with a blog. It has been proven that a blog can definitely increase sales and profits.

Here are 13 reasons why your business isn’t complete without its very own blog.

1. Attract potential customers
Use a blog to attract an audience. No business can survive without traffic, whether the traffic is physical or virtual. A decent blog will generate plenty of traffic, and retain it as well.

2. Interact with your audience — and learn from them
Blogs are interactive tools that can be used to reach out to your audience. But you can also interact with your audience by informing them of new products and services, and in turn you can learn from them. Educate and inform your visitors and watch them morph into loyal customers that are confident in what you have to offer. With more people turning to the internet to research before they commit to a purchase, it makes sense to turn your company blog into a go-to resource that provides the information they’re looking for. In turn, you will be able to gain valuable insight and find out just what your customers want and need. Use blog comments, polls and surveys and feedback forms to keep the market research and conversation flowing.

3. Keep a hold of that audience
Advertising and attention-seeking stunts can momentarily grab the attention of an audience, but if you want to retain your audience, you’ll need a blog. Hold a prospect’s interest for a longer period of time, win over customers and bring them back to you long after that initial contact.

4. Spark some energy within your audience
Your blog can help generate an audience that is ever-growing and continuously loyal, while at the same time motivating them to actually do things that relate to your business.

5. Recruit contacts, employees and other help
The internet is all about advertisement, but who says you have to pay for special marketing gigs? Use your blog as a call to arms, and watch your blog’s audience provide you with the networking contacts and employees that you need.

6. Respond to customer feedback
Good customer service and transparent public relations have never been more important these days. Use your blog as a responsive outlet if you need to respond to any type of hype about your business.

7. Direct traffic links
Confident and authoritative content will no doubt attract attention from other websites. Leads and links will not only bring in visitors, but boost your SEO potential as well. Expect links to come from other blogs, from forums and discussion lists, and from a whole slew of social networks.

8. SEO potential
Links bring in visitors via direct traffic, but they’re also useful in bringing in visitors who have come from search engines. The more linkable your website is, the better your search engine ranking will be. Blogs are almost always built to be SEO-friendly, which means that the search engines — and human visitors — should be able to find you.

9. Build familiarity and trust
Allow your customers and prospects to become familiar with you by maintaining a blog. Build trust in your company, since it is vital for that ultimate sale. Encourage visitors to opt into your lead-generation process by providing compelling information and resources, and constant communication. Over time, you’ll create trust, which leads to a higher conversion rate and sales.

10. Branding
Create a strong, better, long-lasting brand by generating positive attention via your blog. As your blog reaches more people and is mentioned on an increasing number of other blogs, forums and social networks, you can expect word-of-mouth advertising to kick in, and sales to rise.

11. Grow your own community
Through your interactive blog, discussion and comments will help to create a sense of community, which can lead to familiarity and an increase in trust.

12. Provide better service
Beat out the competition by providing better service to your prospects and customers. Having a blog shows that you’re both human and approachable, which may put many visitors at ease.

13. Initiate more sales and better profits
All of the steps outlined here will add up to increase your sales and web presence.

Well, Well… look at Mr and Ms Google arent they being nice, letting bloggers have a spot in the webmaster tools world and more! – This is good and this is bad :)

Google Help › Webmasters/Site owners Help › My site and Google › Creating a Google-friendly site: Best practices › For bloggers

So just what is Twitter? I have been asked that, but I have a hard time coming up with an explanation. It’s like mini-blogging, with constant interaction with other Twitter users via the real time updates on the website.

Twitter is social networking, but on a bare bones level. When you sign up for Twitter, you can add information to a basic profile, which includes your username, name, location, one line bio, and a website address, if you have one. When you’re ready to go, you can update Twitter with whatever is going on in your life. Your updates will be archived and display on your own Twitter page, which is http://www.twitter.com/your_user_name. You can choose to make your updates public or protected.

Public: anyone can see what you’re Twittering.
Protected: only those on your friends list (on Twitter this is known as your followers list) can see what you’re Twittering.

Please note that it’s an all or nothing thing with public vs. protected. Everything is public, or everything is protected. There is no in between.

You can update Twitter from the website, from many Firefox extensions, from desktop applications, from your cell phone by sending text messages to 40404, and from your cell phone with the use of mobile applications .

“How does this tie into blogging?” I’ll tell you how. You can use an active Twitter account to generate more traffic to your blog by posting updates of blog entries to it. You can do this manually, and also with the use of blog posting plugins that are available for many blogging platforms (including WordPress).