Tear down the wild mouse. The wild mouse just runs around, looking for the next bit of cheese. It has a simple observation system in place: a nose that smells cheese. It has an equally simple action-taking system: run towards the smell of cheese.

If your organization feels like riding on the back of a wild mouse, maybe you can use the three kinds of measurement mentioned in this presentation to understand the past, prepare for the present and innovate into the future.

All by itself this probably doesn’t make much sense.

Here are the notes:

Three Ways to Measure, Three Ways to Improve

So there are a lot of different ways and reasons to measure. But this presentation focuses on three broad strokes–measuring for ROI, measuring as research, and the relationship between measurement and innovation.

Ultimately, the act of measuring alone won’t make your organization operate any better. You’ll want to take actions based on what you measure. Deciding what kind of measuring you’re doing up front will help everyone take the right actions based on the data. For example, if some of your team thinks you’re measuring for improved motivation while you think you’re measuring for ROI, you’re likely to experience unnecessary tension.

Measuring for ROI: Preventing Insanity

Return-on-investment is often a starting ground for measuring in most organizations. The way this works is that you do something (that’s the “investment” part of ROI) and then you see what happens (that’s the “return” part of ROI). You need to measure both your investment and your return for this to work out.

Sometimes people just measure the return, say it isn’t worth doing and call it quits. If someone’s not measuring the investment side of ROI then they’re not really doing this all the way. Chances are good that they have some other reason for preventing action. This is an organizational cultural issue and not a measurement issue, though.

When done well, ROI measurements prevent you from doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. Measuring for ROI is a way to prevent insanity. Online, you can measure marketing initiatives, for example, using URL campaign tagging to see what sort of return you get on various marketing activities. Or you could use time-based or location-based correlation to measure the impact of a traditional, non-trackable campaign.

Measuring for ROI is primarily a past-focused activity. You can only measure it properly once it’s been done. If you have activities where past performance is likely to predict future success then ROI measurement can be useful. Otherwise, you might want to use one of the other ways to measure.

Measuring as Research: Making Your Plans Work Better

If you’re planning to do something in the future, you might be able to use measurement to improve your chances for success. For example, if you’re planning an advertising campaign, you might want to research what sorts of phrases people are likely to click on or take some kind of action on. This is where you can do some focused digging into your web analytics: what pages do people visit second (i.e. what pages to people consciously click to read), what are people searching for and where do they land on your site, and so on.

Measuring what people are doing with your content right now is a great way to help inform future plans and actions. You can use the data you gather to make things better for your future plan.

Measuring for Understanding: Observation and Innovation

My favorite kind of measurement: looking at the data to see what narratives present themselves. When you’re just observing the data and not looking for anything in particular (not calculating ROI or planning for a specific objective in the future) sometimes you’ll find patterns. These patterns might let you know what sort of problems you can solve for other people. Or maybe the patterns will suggest ways you can improve your website or service or product or entire industry.

This is one of those fuzzy kinds of measurement that makes the ROI-focused people crazy. But it can really drive innovation and provide a fertile ground to improve your abilities of pattern recognition.

Tear down the wild mouse.

When looking at measurement and observation, there are different reasons and ways to do it. I hope these slides from an introductory presentation I did on three different ways to measure and why you might want to measure in the first place were helpful.

As you add measurement to the core tasks of your organization, decide how you want to measure.

Jeremiah Owyang, in his blog post about his 2010 goals, mentions organizational social readiness. He says “80% of a companies success is getting their organization ready through the right roles, processes, policies, measurement.”

In a lot of ways this isn’t any different than non-social organizational readiness. The aspects listed are the core of what an organization does to stay functional, regardless of whether or not they engage with social media.

Social media, however, provides a distraction from these core tasks. Owyang notes this, crediting  tools with only 20% of an organization’s success. It’s the whole reality of knowing that a hammer doesn’t come with a pre-built house–you need to know how and when to use it.

Let’s take a look at each of four core activities Jeremiah Owyang credits for the bulk of business success:

Determining roles for social media

Who is going to run your social media operations? What sort of skills will be valuable in that person? These are the questions that business owners and marketing managers should be getting answers to, moreso than what social network generates the most buzz.

Companies need to know who is going to do what. In many medium and even larger organizations social media is still being determined based on age (“College kids use Facebook right?”) or other criteria that aren’t related to business success.

Using social media takes time, like any other marketing or customer service task. If the job of dealing with it is being handed off to someone who is already full-time employed then there’s going to be some tension somewhere.

Determining roles based on the skills and thinking of your staff is likely to be more effective than choosing roles based only on ability with a particular tool du jour.

Establishing processes for efficient social media use

Can you draw a flow chart that starts with the creation of content or social media engagement and ends with desired outcomes for your business?

Social media takes time. There are some tools which can make it take a little less time. But having a clear process saves a lot more time.

It’s a little bit like preparing artwork in animation. When you’re making an animated cartoon one of the end results is, obviously, the cartoon. But another of the end results might be artwork that goes on products.

If you prepare the art as if it were all going onto products, then it’s fairly easy to convert them for the animation. It’s impossible to upscale animation art for products–meaning that your effort needs to be duplicated if your process doesn’t take into account your ultimate goals.

You want your social media process to be clear enough that you can reduce duplicated effort and distribute the relevant content quickly and easily. Social media tools won’t do this for you because social media tools don’t know your goals or what’s good for your business.

Clear social media policies

When something happens that wasn’t planned, what will your organization do and how will it respond? Does it look like a flowchart or checklist? Could you follow it if you were panicked about losing your job?

The thing about social media is that it’s outside the control of the organization. There isn’t a newspaper publisher to call and get mad at when someone posts something you don’t like online. Having a clear policy that explains how your organization will respond to unplanned positive and negative events in social media will help a lot of people stay calm in tense moments.

Measuring social media

Do you know how your social media measurement key performance indicators relate to your business goals?

Once you’ve determined what you’re doing with social media, who’s doing it, how they’re going to do it, and what everybody will be doing if things get janky, then you can start thinking about measurement and tracking.

If you’re initiating a social media plan having a solid, useful measurement system in place will be critical to avoiding unpleasant surprises later. But even here, it’s not as much about tools as it is determining that you’re measuring the right things. Your follower count, for what it’s worth, is probably not the right thing to be measuring.

Related articles:

• Join the Social CRM Pioneers! (cloudave.com)
• Nestle Finding That Social Media’s Not So Sweet (marketingpilgrim.com)

In a hurry? The ten steps for scaling social media are in list-format at the bottom of this post.

One of the common laments of companies trying to leverage social media is that it can take a lot of time and resources. If you or your employees are on Twitter and Facebook all day then who’s getting the work done? Common wisdom says that “social media doesn’t scale” or that “engagement doesn’t scale.”

“Doesn’t scale” is true if all of your engagement is one-to-one in real-time and you can’t hire on more people. Absolutely true. But the truth is that many customers will realize that your company is made up of humans and understand that you can’t be one-to-one in real-time all the time. They might not want to realize it if something is going dreadfully wrong. But that’s a special case for another article. This post is about scaling social media in a sane and responsible manner.

There are three areas where scaling is going to cause the hurt: decision-making, receiving information from customers (inputs) and expending effort on behalf of customers (outputs). Let’s tackle them in order of hurtitude.

Decision-making for social media

Social media conversations tend to move very very quickly. What was very new in the morning could be old hat by mid-afternoon. Being forced to make decisions rapidly can cause paralysis in some organizations.

In order to minimize the pain of having to make spot-decisions all the time try setting out a general principles. This is not the same as making 10,000 contingency plans. Setting out your general principles means being clear with everyone in the organization about these two things:

1. Be clear about who you are and what you’re doing with social media.
2. Be honest about your commitment to social media or a specific network.

Make it as simple and obvious as possible so that anyone who may be faced with a situation can refer to the principles you come up with and feel confident that they will make the best choice available to them. Ideally, the “what you’re doing with social media” part will resolve into a set of measurable goals and objectives.

Developing clarity about who you are and what you’re doing can take time. But taking this time is worth it because then other actions will flow much more smoothly. Being honest about your commitment to social media or a specific network means that you know whether you’re going have a token profile or whether you’re really going to work a particular network: and you’re ok with it.

Once your organization has come up with the answers for these two questions, then you will save a lot of time and meetings and general conversation about social media. Someone will say “We should really have a Blahblah Page on Blitzo Network.” Then you can say “You’re right, having a Blahblah page will relate directly to what we’re doing online with social media. Let’s test it.”

Revisit your purpose and your commitments as you gain experience in the medium.

Using social media to receive information from customers: managing inputs

Social media opens a floodgate of data and information from you customers. Managing this can absorb massive amounts of time. Monitoring Twitter all day, and Facebook and then some reputation management and Google Alerts… it doesn’t end.

The thing is, though, that you don’t have to watch all of the information. And you don’t have to watch all of it all of the time. Your purpose and commitment will suggest how frequently you need to be engaged in social media. If they don’t, then you may have made unrealistic decisions about your social media involvement—revisit and be more honest this time.

Here are some specific strategies to pare-back the amount of information you are trying to absorb via social media without sacrificing online goals and objectives.

Identify social media and networks which are most beneficial to your business.

Use your web analytics traffic reports to identify which sites are currently sending you traffic—and which sites are sending you the best quality traffic. Those are the ones where you already have some sort of traction, let these be your core areas of listening.

Go ahead and explore others, but consider non-performing networks to be experimental and don’t be shy about pruning back your involvement with them. If your Twitter traffic is junk, then don’t be shy about scaling back your commitment to Twitter. Same for Facebook or any other social media network.

Identify social media and networks where you have influence.

If you are currently involved in social media, identify the networks where you have the greatest influence. When you share something, does the audience respond? You can track this for links to your own site via campaign-tagging, but for other links to sites you don’t own, link shorteners like Bit.ly will help you out.

If you no one is being influenced by your messaging, then review your commitment to the network or social media site and determine whether you can just have a token profile there or whether you’ll want to step up your game. Be brutally honest. If you don’t have it in you to get better at it, then there’s no shame in backing off. Better to focus efforts where you already have influence.

Hold on… doesn’t all that analytics stuff add more work?

No. Here’s why. Remember back in the day when people did traditional advertising and the joke was always “50% of my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” Well, using analytics you get to find out which half.

If you spend more time generating reports than the time you save on sending out links and messages that no one hears or no one cares about, then it’s true. You’ve added time. But you’re not going to do that because it’s tremendously easy to configure and read those reports and see what’s working.

If you don’t read the reports, it’s tremendously easy to spend months coming up with catchy link titles to give to an audience that is non-existent or apathetic.

Sending links and ideas to nobody is a bigger waste of time than reading the reports.

A non-web analytics way to lighten your social networking load:

Ask your current best customers what social networks they’re on. Also ask them which ones they think would be a good place to find you and your messages. Chances are good they’ll tell you. This doesn’t involve any scary ol’ web analytics and does involve some data: customer recommendations. This is also a great way to get started even if you are going to use web analytics to help improve your messaging later.

Simplify your inbox.

This is getting more into the personal time-management stuff, but it matters once you open yourself up to taking messages in a variety of formats. Simplifying your inbox means that trying to get the number of places where you check for activity down to one. Probably won’t be able to get to one, but at least try. Here are some ideas:

• Invest time up front making a hand-rolled solution with RSS and Yahoo Pipes.
• Invest money in a solution like Radian6.
• Route all of your social media and networking alerts and communications to a single email address that is reserved for social media stuff.

Once you’ve got the inboxes whittled down to as few as you can, then re-examine your purpose and commitment to social media and come up with the frequency you will check that inbox. Yes I know that Twitter is a real-time environment. But it’s still ok to check the messages when you have time to respond to them.

If you let more than a day go in between questions and responses, remind your audience what you are responding to (they may have forgotten they even asked a question—which should give you an idea as to how important the question was).

Managing social media inputs:

Here it is in a bullet list:

• Eliminate active commitment to non-performing social media networks—scale back to just a profile.
• Eliminate active commitment to social media networks where you lack influence—scale back to just a profile.
• Ask your best customers where they think you would do well, start there.
• Whittle down your inboxes to as few as you can handle. Only check them according to when you can devote time to respond.

Expending effort on behalf of customers: managing social media outputs

If you’ve effectively whittled down your major social media commitments using the techniques above, then you’re halfway to making your existing social media work more efficiently. If you have a clear purpose and commitment and have identified the networks that are most likely to resonate, you’re ready to begin getting social.

Tag Team: Multi-user social media

If you have more than one person who can work on social media goals and objectives, share the load. Use technology like CoTweet and a company account to focus customer responses. That way, while one person is getting non-social-media work done, the other can work the social media.

Go ahead and be frank and honest with your audience that you have multiple people working the account. Also, take good notes on interactions so that anyone from your company can be helpful. That’s just usual CRM stuff.

Shift time

Sure social media is all real-time and all. But not everything you have to share needs to be shared exactly at that moment. Just as you might bank a blog post to publish while you’re on vacation, feel free to pre-publish Twitter posts that aren’t time-sensitive. This helps keep you active in the channel without you needing to actually be there all the time.

Yes, people will respond and you won’t be there right away. But you can respond to them the next time you are active. Shifting time has the added benefit of helping you discover the best time to be online for various markets, industries and topics. Use this for data gathering about influence and activity.

Schedule active use of social media

Go ahead and schedule dedicated time to be using social networks. Setting up a block of time to work a particular network puts you back in charge of your time. You no longer have to respond to everything right now in real-time. You can choose to push non-urgent business off until your next regularly scheduled block of time.

If you are using the time-shifting technique above and also using the tracking recommended in the “Managing social media inputs” section, then you can use that information to find out when is the best time to schedule your social media time in terms of being able to wield the most influence in relation to your online goals. Pretty clever, eh?

Scaling social media: in a nutshell.

So here’s how it all works, for the list-inclined:

1. Determine why you’re using social media (this will take time but better to do this before you blow hours making your Facebook page, right?)
2. Determine your level of acceptable commitment to each channel you’re in.
3. Measure which social media sites and networks naturally send you traffic.
4. Measure which social media sites and networks resonate most with your messages.
5. Ruthlessly prune back to just a profile presence on sites which don’t pass the previous two steps.
6. Set up a single inbox for all social media activity.
7. Tag-team social media responses (requires good internal notes but you are already doing this for CRM).
8. Time-shift posts whenever possible.
9. Schedule your active social media time so you remain in control of your time.
10. Laugh at the suckers who have to check Twitter every 3 minutes.

Note: If you already know a lot about your customers, your corporate design sense, your product and your broader marketplace this article is obviously not for you. If, on the other hand, you’re just starting a business and want to get going on the right foot but aren’t sure how to do it without spending all your startup capital on a website, please enjoy this post (and ask questions).

I often speak at small business groups or startup classes and I teach a beginning class on HTML/web design for continuing ed here in Burlington, VT. It’s awesome to see people get excited about starting something new and working on their thing.

Inevitably, after doing one of these events I get a few calls from people wondering what it costs for me to make a “starter” website. Usually my number is bit larger than they were hoping it would be.

Here’s what I say to people trying to make decisions about getting started with a website if you’re bootstrapping your business into existence.

Start at the beginning: why do you want a website anyway?

Make sure you know what your website is going to do for your business. If you can’t answer this question then you really shouldn’t be spending much money on it anyway. Here are some common reasons people want websites:

• You have a product you can sell online (you’re considering doing some e-commerce).
• You have a service and want people to call or contact you (you’re going to make a lead-generation site, like this one).
• You’re going to sell advertising around your content.
• You’re a non-profit or other organization looking to get donations.

If none of the above describes you, broadly, then you might be better off with just a single page that describes your business, hours of operation and contact info. Save your money and time for working on other aspects of your business for now.

Skip the web design and go with a nice template.

The argument for getting custom web design usually goes along the lines of “you never get a second chance to make a first impression.” My reason for recommending that people just starting out go with a template is, oddly enough exactly that same phrase.

While you’re busy going back and forth with your designer and code vendor, the people you want to be making an impression with are going somewhere else–unaware that you even exist. You don’t get a second chance to work with people who are finding their solutions elsewhere as you spend time on your custom web design.

You see, making a custom web design takes time. It takes time for the designer to understand your vision. It takes time for the web designer to translate your vision into something visual. Then it takes time to go back and forth while you both iron out the details. Once that’s done, it takes time to implement the visual graphic design of the website into functioning web code.

Also, since a startup may not have a lot of data about their customers, that design process is happening in a vacuum. It’s a matter of personal preferences of the design team and the client without much input from the real target: potential customers.

A better strategy for a startup is to get up and running with a nice template for the purpose of gathering data about what your audience is doing on your website. Then, after you have that information, you can start talking about custom design. You’ll know more about your customers and your design choices can reflect that improved observation.

So how do you pick a template for your first website?

Start by settling on a content management system. I’m going to recommend Wordpress and so is pretty much everyone else. It’s fairly easy to use, has a lot of plugins to add functionality, and there are lots of attractive free templates to choose from.

Here are some things to do when picking out a free template:

• Run the demo version of the template through the W3C validator. If it passes or only has a few errors, then that’s a good sign that the code was well-written. You’ll want that for search engine optimization reasons.
• Pick a design that you can live with. Since it isn’t custom, it probably won’t be exactly what you’re looking for. But pick something that doesn’t require a ton of customizations (otherwise you might as well go with a custom designed website).
• Make sure the site architecture supports what you want to do with the site. Imagine your own headlines and navigation bar items. Will they fit? Will your business make use of lots of images or movies? Will they fit?
• Where will the money-making thing go? Remember the reason why you’re making the site and know up-front how it will fit into the template theme design.

Once you’ve made it through all that, then you can contact a designer to maybe make a few nips and tucks to the theme to get it lightly customized for your needs. Remember you don’t want to totally re-hash the theme–you won’t save money by trying to do a custom design disguised as a theme makeover. Do small things like adding your logo into the header.

And remember, keep it simple. A few web pages, straightforward navigation, and a money-making thing on your website will serve you well to get started.

Start with the mission-critical plugins.

There are tons of Wordpress plugins you’ll encounter as you get started. Here are the three to get started:

• Backup. You can configure this to email you the content of your website on a regular basis. Do this so you can sleep at night knowing you have some ability to recover if something goes wrong.
• Google Analytics. The point of getting started right away with a template is so that you can start learning about your customers. If you don’t get your web analytics installed then you’re not making the best use of this time.
• Contact-Form-7. You’re going to want to have some sort of contact form on your website. This is a great tool for making forms.

You’ve launched your website. Now what?

The strategy of going ahead with a template design is best suited to achieve the objective of learning how to operate your website early on and to learn about your customers. It’s what I call the “launch early and launch often” web strategy. So start learning about your audience. Here are some things to make the most of your time.

• Learn to use Google Analytics to make decisions about your business.
• Learn to use Website Optimizer to make improvements to your website.
• Discover other analytics tools like 4q and CrazyEgg to help you make improvements to your site.
• Make content for your site and see what people tend to like.
• Start promoting your website in print, online and in social media.
• Learn about campaign-tagging to track the success of online initiatives.

The time you spend learning these things will be much more beneficial for the long-term health of your business than going back and forth with your designer about the background color or the size of the type on your custom website.

Also, when it’s time to get that custom designed website you’ve always wanted, you’ll be better prepared. Since you’ll have more experience operating a website you’ll know more about what features and functionality you need. Since you’ll have more experience understanding your audience via web analytics you’ll know more about what things they like on your website.

Here’s a small list of free Wordpress themes that pass the W3C validator (or have very few errors), just to get you started:

• One Room
• WP-Coda
• DailyPress
• GridFocus
• AutoFocus

Here’s a couple more free Wordpress themes that have some W3C validation issues, but wouldn’t be too tough to fix up:

• Sand Dollar
• My Web Blog

Good luck and get started!

Gahlord Dewald, President/Janitor at Thoughtfaucet, has been asked to be one of the judges for the prestigious Mobius Awards. The categories Dewald will be involved in judging are Social Networking/Blogging, Mixed Media Campaigns, and Flash Websites. “I’m especially looking forward to reviewing the entries and seeing how they make use of technology and understanding human behavior to create worthwhile and lasting customer relationships.”

“I’m psyched Gahlord is judging in this year’s Mobius Awards, especially since we’ll be judging some new categories including social media” says Rich Nadworny of  Burlington VT based, Digalicious. “Gahlord’s experience with Web design and development, social media and branded content gives him a unique perspective on digital marketing.”

Established in 1971, Mobius Awards is the oldest, independent, international advertising awards competition. Entries are judged by an international jury on their effectiveness and creativity. Mobius Awards reflects the most current trends in the advertising industry by updating the competition regularly, such as adding new media types and categories.

Google has a grant program available to non-profits that gives the non-profit free advertising via the Google Adwords program. There are some requirements:

• 501(c)3 status
• all the other stuff associated with normal Adwords accounts.
• active participation with your Adwords campaigns

501(c)3 status is pretty straightforward. You’ve either got it or your don’t. The stuff normally associated with an Adwords  is also straightforward (no bait-and-switch etc).

But what if you’ve never done an Adwords program before? How do you handle the “active participation” requirement? That’s where Thoughtfaucet would like to help.

Thoughtfaucet wants to help non-profits take advantage of Google Adwords Grants

This is a great opportunity for non-profits to extend their reach and improve their website marketing campaigns. Thoughtfaucet wants to help. We’ll donate time each month to any non-profit that is participating in the program for any of the following services:

• Developing an Adwords strategy that matches your organization’s goals.
• Assisting with creative development of Adwords campaigns.
• Configuring Adwords accounts and campaigns.
• Training your non-profit staff to make the most use of Adwords.

These donated services will help your non-profit fulfill the “active participation” requirement of the grant. Your organization’s staff will also add useful new skills in using the web to achieve your goals.

Thoughtfaucet is available to help any non-profit with the Google Adwords grants, but preference will be given to organizations with the following topics (in no particular order):

• Vermont
• Burlington or Chittenden County
• Energy/Efficiency
• Environment
• Education
• Music or other arts
• Substance abuse

If you work for a non-profit, feel free to contact Thoughtfaucet about assistance using your Google Adwords Grant.

For more information about the Google Grant program, click here.

This weekend a friend here in Burlington, Vermont emailed and described a situation involving SEO woes. Perhaps it’s a situation that sounds familiar: A brand new website has been created in anticipation of an important event and the site isn’t ranking or even showing up in Google. The event is less than a month away. The keyword isn’t especially competitive but the few competitors are well-trusted media and e-commerce sites.

I’m fond of saying that search engine optimization is an endurance sport. It’s pretty difficult/lucky to get a site ranking on search engines quickly. I took a quick look at the site. It was gorgeously designed but lacked many of the important features of search engine optimization; basic and rudimentary features. Like headlines in the code. The poor coding of the site had a lot to do with the situation. But what to do now that the site was up and the event looming?

My friend isn’t a computer techy so I tried to focus on things that don’t involve code except where it would really make the big differences. Here’s what I told my friend:

SEO Nineball: social media profiles

This recommendation won’t really help much with getting my friend’s site to show up in search engines. But it will help with the main objective: being findable on short notice via search engines. Given that my friend had an event that was very soon and their keyword included their name, getting a social media profile up would help get visitors to the site.

This is sort of like the SEO version of nine ball. In the billiards game nine ball whoever sinks the nine ball wins. The cue (the white ball) has to hit the lowest numbered ball first. So to win, someone could hit the one ball and then the one ball could hit the nine ball and sink it. To win at nine ball you need to keep in mind that balls one through eight are merely a means to an end. Keep your mind on the nine ball.

Social media sites are often considered more trustworthy to search engines than random websites and so they may rank quicker than your run-of-the-mill hand-coded site. If you put a link to your site in your social media profile (the one ball) then visitors who find that profile will have a way to your site (the nine ball). Remember that the social media site will need to have public profiles to be the most useful. I find LinkedIn to be a great resource here. Facebook, not so much.

SEO Nineball: hosted blogging

This one admittedly requires some work. But even with two weeks to go, if my friend had the time to put up a short blog post each day about the event or the work leading up to the event, this would help.

Blogging is another form of SEO nineball: the blog ranks well because blogs tend to rank well and the blog includes a link to the main site. The blog is the one ball. The site linked to is the nine ball.

Include headlines (h1, h2 etc) to let search engines know what your pages are about.

My friend’s website didn’t even have main headline tags (they are coded with an “h1″). Google and other search engines are just a bit of math, they don’t really look at the design of the page at all. They look at the code structure. If the code structure doesn’t include headlines, it’s like looking at the Wall Street Journal or the Burlington Free Press or any other newspaper but without any headlines. Hard to tell what it’s about.

You can find out if your own site has main headline tags by using the “view source” option in your favorite browser and searching for <h1> in the code. You should find exactly one of these per page. You can have as many <h2> (subheads) and <h3> (subsubheads) as you wish.

This is a fix that involves a little bit of coding, not much time at all really. But it does involve technical knowledge of how to edit HTML and upload it to your server. If you have special styling for your headlines then a little knowledge of CSS to clean it up for viewers is good (though the search engines don’t care much about that part).

The site in question had many more code deficiencies but if I had to pick just one thing to do this would be it. As my friend said “The site looks great but if no one can find it then it doesn’t count, does it.” It’s also worth noting that making a site search engine friendly does not mean it has to be ugly.

Install Google Webmaster Tools

Installing and configuring webmaster tools is a great way to quickly let Google know your site exists. This is another one of those code things that I’d highly recommend if showing up on Google is important. You can let Google know what pages there are and so on via the interface. This won’t be a pleasant experience for someone who doesn’t enjoy working with computers and web technology. But it’s something you probably won’t have to do too often unless you’re getting very serious about your web development anyway.

Just wait it out

Sooner or later Google will find the site and update its cache. Could be a week, could be a few months. If your budget is already spent (the site sure looks great) and you’ve already done all the writing you’re going to do on a site, then maybe search engine optimization isn’t as important to your success as you thought. If it were, you would’ve included it in an earlier stage of web development.

Sometimes it’s ok to just chalk it up to a learning experience: Some aspects of search engine optimization are technical and require action at the coding level. In the future, include SEO as part of the initial conversation in web development.

This is one of those “business decisions.” If any of the above ideas sound too time-consuming or expensive for the gain to be had from SEO then let it go–use the resources for some other important aspect of your business.