Forest Software
Web, SEO and IT & Business Advice for the Smaller Business
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Last updated on October 13th, 2010 at 01:34 pm
As a small business owner I thought I’d share with you a story illustrating the penalties of not listening to your customers. This is a true story that has happened to me today.
My cars’ MOT is due on the 1st October every year and having had the brakes worked on a few weeks ago I knew that the rear tyres would need replacing before the MOT at they were on the legal limit.
Having used the Formula One Autocentre in Peterborough several times in the past for tyres and brakes (in fact it was them that told me about the tyres a few weeks ago) I thought that I would go to them for the MOT. Ringing them on Tuesday to make the appointment for the MOT I told the chap that answered the phone that I would need two tyres and that I wanted these placed on the front with the current front tyres moved to the rear so that I had the best tyres on the front. “That’s not a problem was the response” so the MOT was booked for 1pm.
Today I arrived at Formula One before 12:30 to give them time to change the tyres and I told the guy behind the reception exactly what I wanted – two new tyres and the front ones moved to the back. This time I was told that they would put it though the MOT first to see what needed doing, so I repeated that I had been told by one of their mechanics that the tyres would need replacing within 2 months or so and I had already told them this over the phone, at which point I was directed to the waiting area.
Now bearing in mind that the MOT bay was empty and that the car had been booked in for 1pm I was a little surprised when it was 1:15 before the MOT was started, but decided not to worry about saying anything.
Finally the MOT finished and yes, you may well have guessed the story by now – the car failed as one of the two rear tyres was worn! When I said that I knew that was going to happen the receptionist calmly told me that they had the tyres in stock and could fit them (although first of all they quoted the wrong tyre size). Although feeling a little annoyed at the turn of events I agreed and then asked how long it would be. “An hour” I was told.
This means that a simple tyre replacement and MOT ended up taking over 3 hours, time that could have been reduced if Formula One Autocentre has just listened to what their customer wanted at the start.
I can hear you thinking to yourself – well, it was fixed in the end so what is the penalty to the company? My answer is simple, they have lost a repeat customer (remember that this was not the first time that I have used them), I have told others about the service I got – so that’s more prospective customers lost and you are reading this example of poor customer service leading. It’s very true what they say about the Internet, upset a customer and news of the poor service can spread much further than you could possible realise at the start.
*Edit* By 11:15 the following day I had received a comment on this blog post (see below) and was talking to the customer care team shortly afterwards. The complaint has been passed to the regional manager and I have been advised to expect a phone call from them later today.
*Further edit* The regional manager rang at approx 12:15 and apologised but it still seems that if you want tyres done before an MOT your best option is to take the car to Formula One the day before to get the tyres changed and then take it back the following day for the MOT, which means two trips. Even if you ask for the tyres do be done first it looks like it is their policy to do the MOT first, so they do not really listen to their customers on the “shop floor”.
*Yet another edit* Within 9 days of the new tyres being fitted one of them suffered a puncture while I was driving at 70 mph in Peterborough. The Green Flag mechanic could see nothing wrong with the tyre apart from the damage caused to the sidewall while I was driving on the burst tyre to get to the side of the road and come to a halt. The tyre was taken back to Formula One in Peterborough where I told them what had happened – they did not seem interested and charged me £45 for a replacement tyre. Needless to say this is the last time I will ever go near one of their depots !
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Why it is Important to Have a Pension Plan in Place if you are a Small Business Owner
When the Pensions Act of 2008 came into force, it contained provisions for subsequent changes to the UK’s pension system which are likely to have significant implications for small- and medium sized enterprises. The basic idea behind the new provisions is to encourage as many people as possible to lay financial foundations for their retirement above and beyond the statutory state pension: people are living longer, and funding a comfortable retirement will require savings now, not tomorrow.
The reforms are due to come into effect in 2012, and some groups such as the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) immediately raised concerns that small businesses would be adversely affected by increased costs and administration. Others, such as the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), have argued that the reforms, which require employers to automatically enrol all staff into a pensions scheme, should not affect sole traders and individual freelancers who work through their own limited companies. The FSB believes that these ‘micro firms’ may be exempt from the 2012 reforms.
Nevertheless, it’s as well to assume that if you employ other people in your company, you’ll be required to enrol all eligible staff into a qualifying pension scheme and to make employer contributions to it from 2012. It’s as well to have a little foreknowledge about the kinds of pension schemes which are suited to small businesses in particular.
If you employ more than five people who are over the age of 18 and who earn above the National Insurance lower earnings limit (presently £90 per week), you’re obliged by law to arrange access to a stakeholder pension scheme for them. These are low cost schemes with a minimum amount to pay of as little as £20 per month. To qualify, employees must have worked for you for at least three consecutive months, and you can choose which stakeholder scheme from a wide range of banks, financial services providers and pension providers. It’s advisable to check that the scheme is registered with the Pensions Regulator, that you’ve selected it from a reputable and well-established pensions provider, and that it’s open to all employees (some are limited to certain trades). The relationship in a stakeholder pension is between the employee and the pension provider. Your role is limited to providing reasonable access to scheme promoters at your premises, arranging for employee deductions to be made through bankroll and funding your employer contributions (if indeed there are any).
If you decide to opt instead for an employer contribution scheme, you may well be entitled to significant tax relief if the scheme is registered with HM Revenue and Customs. Employer contribution schemes take several forms. Final-salary schemes are based on the employee’s final salary (as well as the length of time he or she has made contributions). These tend to be offered by larger companies because employers may be required to make additional top-up payments if the funding falls short of the required amount. Pensions paid from money-purchase schemes are determined by the value of the savings at retirement age. Employers usually contribute 5.8 per cent of basic salary, but if the scheme underperforms, the risk lies with the employee, not the employer.
There are numerous schemes available, and it’s advisable to take advice and guidance from reputable experts such as the Pensions Advisory Scheme, the Society of Pensions Consultants, and the Association of Independent Financial Advisers.
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Last updated on October 8th, 2010 at 06:31 pm
What is a blog?
Simply put, a blog (originally called a weblog) is an online diary. It’s just another way to publish information. It’s a space where the author (often called a ‘blogger’) can easily publish a wide variety of content to the web. Entries are typically short and informal and are often posted daily although this varies between several times a day though to once a week or even less often.
Having said that a blog is an online diary there are many business sites that use the blogging system as part of their website (this article for example is published using the Forest Software blog). There are several reasons for using a blog on your business website, these include ease of use, speed of updating, automatic cross linking of posts although there are some drawbacks such as not being easy to maintain things like the meta information without “plug-ins” to the blog system.
How can I use a blog as a marketing tool?
The main reasons that many business people use the Internet are researching information, finding answers and making contacts. A blog can aid this process by containing fresh information about your business and increasing your online networking opportunities. Having a business blog can also be a good way for your customers to communicate with you, as well as between themselves, using comments to your posts.
Although blogging can be fast, low cost and offers a highly effective publishing, marketing and content management tool before adding ‘blogging’ to the marketing mix, you should be sure you are clear why you’re blogging and what you want to get out of it. For example :-
- Do you want to be able to publish news articles quickly to let customers know about trends or new products?
- Do you want your customer’s views about certain matters?
- Do you want to encourage communication between customers and your business?
- Do you want to encourage communication between your customers? Remember that this may not always be a good thing as it gives customers that have a problem (real or imagined) a channel to publish their views that can be read and commented on by other customers and prospects. The author has read many blogs where news is announced only for the business to be ripped apart by comments saying how poor the service is.
- Do you want other bloggers to be quoting your blog and spreading the news about your company?
Once you have decided to include blogging in your marketing mix there are two further things to consider.
Will you have the time to publish posts on a regular basis – there is nothing worse than looking at a business blog that had its last entry several months ago. Personally I would aim to make a posting at least once every couple of weeks and if you can manage more often than that all the better. The author or this article tries to publish something once a week although some weeks there are two or three posts and other weeks there are none.
Where will the blog be hosted? There are two main options here, you can self host the blog (like the Forest Software one you are reading) or you can sign up for a free account with someone like WordPress, Blogger or one of the other sites that hosts the blog for you. There are advantages and disadvantages to both of these options (both from the marketing and SEO point of view) and these will be examined in a further article that we have published titled “Self Hosted V Off Site Blogs“.
Remember, it is not only large companies that can benefit from a blog. Companies of all sizes can find that blogs are a useful tool. The key to success when blogging for your business is to pick the areas in your business where blogs can solve communication problems, be it communicating with new prospects or existing clients. With many blogs reaching hundreds, if not thousands, of people daily it is time for blogging to be taken seriously in the marketing mix.
Reading Time: 4 minutes
Last updated on September 5th, 2010 at 06:04 pm
When you build your small business website you want to get high rankings in the search engines for your key-phrases. As we have already discussed there are lots of ways to do this and equally there are lots of ways to not to do it.
I have listed below 11 things you should avoid if you want to not get your website banned from the search engines and stand a chance of getting some good results.
1. Duplicate Content/Sites – Do not set up multiple sites or site pages using basically the same content, even if the pages are slightly different and have a few different key-phrases spread around. This does not fool the search engines. I recently came across a client that had four copies of their site, all with the same content, under four different domains – the engines had read some of each of the four sites and could not work out which was the main site that had to be displayed so it down-graded all of them.
2. Cloaking – Cloaking is when a website or web page is set up to show different content for a search engine spider than the human visitors. This is often done using server code such as PHP or ASP and usually detects that the visitor is a spider so gives them a page that is stuffed with keywords in an attempt to get higher rankings. The human visitor sees a different page which is often much more readable. The problem is that this technique can get you banned from the results.
3. Doorway Pages – Doorway or gateway pages are similar to cloaking pages in that they are pages that are set-up for one keyword topic but then they take you to different content (usually some sort of sales page). These pages usually have little value in the way of content and have little to do with the rest of the site.
4. Redirect Pages – Another form of cloaking or doorway page, redirect pages are set up to rank high in the search engines but when you click on the page, it will take you to another page which is usually a sales page for a product or service. So, what you see isn’t what you get!
5. Linking to Bad Neighborhoods – Be careful who you link to because you can be found guilty by association. Unless you are an adult or gambling site do not link to adult sites, gambling sites and you should think very carefully about linking to “link farms” where the only purpose of the link farm is to present lists of links. You should also be careful not to link to sites that use any of the bad SEO methods talked about in this article.
6. Getting Links – Do not try to get too many links too quickly, this can trigger a flag at the search engines that you are trying to “game” the search engines. Personally I would stay away from firms that offer to get you 100 links in the next 24 hours (or 1,000 links in the next 7 days), unless your page is exceptional it would be unlikely to get that number of links in such a short timescale.
7. Title Stacking – This is not used very often but is simply trying to give each page more than one title tag so you can use more titles and keywords to get higher rankings. Apart from anything else this can confuse the search engines and not give you the results that you are expecting in the search engine results.
8. Keyword Stuffing Meta Information – There are some SEO companies that will attempt to optimise a website by repeating a list of keywords in the page title, meta description and a comment field in the header section of the page. This is not a good idea as if you are found to be doing this it could lead to the page being penalised or the entire site being banned.
9. Keyword Stuffing – Keyword stuffing or spamming is simply being too repetitive with your keywords as to the extent of your content not being sensible. For example if your keywords are dog food and your text reads something like this:
When your dog gets hungry be sure to feed them this delicious dog food because your dog will like this dog food. This dog food comes in an easy to open dog food can and contains lamb, rice, gravy and healthy ingredients that all the best dog food should have. So, when your dog is hungry for dog food, give them this dog food because this dog food is the best dog food to keep your dog happy and healthy.
You can easily see why this kind of keyword stuffing should not be used, although it is obviously about dog food no one in their right mind would write a sentence like that and anyone reading the wording above would immediately go to another site.
10. Invisible Text – This is when you hide text, it can be done using several methods from using the same color text and background; making the text so small that it can not be read; hiding it behind an image; or using CSS to make it invisible or move it off the page . The invisible text is meant for the search engines and not for human visitors. This is done so you can stuff a lot more keywords on your page without wrecking your content. The search engines will discover this and they are likely to penalise you!
11. Automated Submission Services – Do not use automated submission services. They are against Google’s TOS and can get you banned (in fact if you can get links to your site in a natural manner there should be no need to submit your site to the search engines at all). In a similar vein you should not use automated tools to check your websites positions in the search engines.
A fuller list of guidelines for Google is at this page should you want to read them.
By being careful not to use these Black Hat SEO methods and being careful as well if you hire an SEO person to work on your site (because some of these things could be done without your knowledge) you reduce the risk of your website being banned or penalised by the search engines.