In business today, the internet must be a part of your strategy. Where do you start?

First, get your website in order. Your website is the cornerstone of your internet strategy, it’s the place that you want people to go to, and it should be designed to make it easy for people to find, and easy for them to achieve their (your) goals.

You want people to go to your website because that’s where your message is, and that’s where you educate people about your products and services and prompt them into action, whether it be making a purchase or enquiry, or just signing up for your email newsletter, allowing you to market to them later.

You want people to end up at your website, but they won’t necessarily start there. They may start at Google, or an online business directory. The more places your presence can be found on the internet, the easier it will be to find, or stumble across, your business.

Consider a twitter account. Twitter allows you to ‘tweet’ about what your business is doing; new products, announcements etc., and link back to your website. People will find your tweets and click through to your website to read more.

Are you passionate and knowledgeable enough about your business that you can write about it? On the internet, information is gold. Start a blog and write about things that your business does. Write regularly. People will find what you are writing about when they search or browse the internet.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that watching a video online was a painful experience. Often it wouldn’t work at all, and when it did the picture was tiny and distorted.

Now, thanks to new technology and fast broadband, online video use has exploded. And with popular websites like YouTube, videos get shared amongst social networks and become viral, creating a buzz.

The future trend is for much more video on websites, including small business websites. You can use video to tell your story, make a sales pitch, and create a buzz around your product or service.

With the upcoming rollout of a national broadband network, internet television, or IPTV as it is known, will start to replace regular TV. Unlimited online channels, including many in high definition, will be the new standard.

Get ready for the new frontier of online video!

One of the recent developments that have come with faster broadband connections is an increasing prevalence of software that runs over the internet, rather than being installed on your computer.

Non Cloud – Most people have used Microsoft Word or other similar office software products. You create documents on your computer and save them on your computer.

Cloud – With Google Docs, the software is installed on Google’s computers, and the files are saved on Google’s computers. You log in using your browser (internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari) to create and edit documents.

Also known as ‘Software as a Service’, the term ‘cloud computing’ comes from schematic diagrams of computer networks, where the internet is drawn as a cloud.

Some advantages of cloud computing are:

• Low cost – the software is generally free to use
• No upgrades are required – the software always up to date
• Automated backup – if your computer crashes, the files are accessible online
• Collaboration – many users can work on the same document, no need to email back and forth.
• Flexibility – You can work on the document from any location with Internet access, even your phone

Word processing is one example of cloud computing that you can start using immediately. But you can do almost all your computing in the cloud – email, accounting, customer relationship management, ecommerce, project management etc.

There are more than 3 billion mobile phone users in the world, around 50% of the global population. This is forecast to grow to 70% by the end of 2010.

What’s that got to do with websites? The latest phones are mini computers that connect to the internet, so you can visit websites from anywhere. People use the internet to search for everything these days, and local search is the next trend, partly due to the mobility of the searchers.

Online applications such as maps and satellite navigation will retrieve data from your website and include it in search results. So if you’re in a new town a search on your phone for nearby restaurants, you not only get a list of restaurants, but locations, opening times and website links.

Trends such as this make it an imperative for most businesses to have a search engine friendly website.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a critical component of most websites, as just about everybody who uses the internet to search for something will use a search engine.

Search engines run software programs (called ‘bots’) that effectively download most of the websites on the internet. From there they will be classified by complex algorithms to determine what, if any, search results they will appear in.

Basic SEO simply involves making sure your website can be indexed effectively by the search bots. I often see websites built by professionals that offer nothing to the search bot, and sometimes even block its progress, ensuring no presence on the search engine results pages.

So the first step is to ensure your website is search engine friendly. After that, you can go further and target specific key words and key phrases in your website, and try to appear in the results pages for those. This is where SEO becomes and art and a science.

The website development industry is composed of many small players. Professional website design firms are rarely larger than ten people, and many are just one person.

Why are there no big website design companies? Big companies offer website services along with their phone connection and internet services, but they are too big to offer the flexibility that small business requires, so they haven’t been very successful at it. It’s not like providing a telephone or internet connection where a handful of packages will cater to the majority of customers.

Websites are different; there is no one size fits all approach. To understand the unique needs of a small business, it helps if you are also a small business, with enough flexibility to be able to adapt to your customers unique requirements.