Scary stuff for employers and crippling to our nation’s economy! The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would mean the most aggressive, sweeping changes to the U.S. labor rules since the National Labor Relations Act was passed more than 70 years ago. 

Many observers predicted that the current economic crisis would force Congress to delay action on this bill, but that’s starting to look like wishful thinking. Union officials have released statements from Nobel-winning economists and other experts supporting EFCA; however, there is near certainty that these individuals stand to benefit from such a position politically, and they’re ready to spend millions of dollars and volunteer hours this spring pressuring Congress to pass the legislation.  And, of course, President Obama is clearly behind the bill. 

Why should you worry? For employers small to large, EFCA is very bad news and will, in all likelihood, destroy the capitalism that has made this country so great: 

• It paves the way for union organizers to expand quickly into new workplaces by collecting signed cards without the business owner’s knowledge…instead of holding a formal secret-ballot election. 

• If 50 percent or more of your workers sign those cards, BANG YOU’RE UNIONIZED. No more campaigns, no more voting, signatures alone will be enough to get the job done.  In case you missed the first point…this means you can be completely unaware of the union coercion tactics taking place on your valued employees until you get notice that your unionized. 

• EFCA also gives federal arbitrators the brand-new authority to impose labor contracts in your workplace if you fail to reach agreement with union locals within 120 days of the union’s formation.  This means that no matter how unreasonable union demands may be, your businesses future will be left in the hands of the same current federal arbitrators who get campaign contributions from union lobbyists.

Attention entrepreneurs, small and medium sized businesses…it’s time you start having a practical discussion about the EFCA and the dangers it poses for your workplace.  If you want to learn what you can, and cannot do, to protect your organization, then it’s imperative you get over your slobbering love affair with the man Barack Obama.  Take a deep breath and logically evaluate the long term consequences of the President’s irrational policies and agenda for small business. 

You must be proactive and learn:

• How EFCA promises to eliminate traditional union organizing campaigns and secret-ballot elections if it becomes law

• Why President Obama’s recent pledges to union leaders and other Capitol Hill developments have greatly increased the bill’s chances of passage this year

• The current legal do’s and don’ts of resisting union organizing drives – and how this new legislation would change those rules

• Your options under EFCA if union organizers succeed in gathering signatures from at least half of your workers, including whether you’d still be able to force a secret ballot after the signatures are collected

• Other troubling provisions within EFCA that threaten employers – for example, the use of federal arbitration boards to dictate terms if you can’t agree on a contract with the leaders of your new union

• The steps you can lawfully take right now to teach your workers about the dangers of unions, without violating NLRB rules in the process

So where’s the free choice in the Employee Free Choice Act?  Hint – there is none, except for the words in the title that cleverly mislead and manipulate the overwhelmingly uninformed American population.  For those of you still affected by Obama Derangement Syndrome let me explain it to you like an 8 year old. 

Imagine standing there in the lunch line at school, your hands trembling as you anticipate the kids, who’ve bullied you all week, to return again.  When, all of a sudden you realize their looking over your shoulder, cracking their knuckles, beating their hands with fists and threatening that if you don’t give up your lunch money a certain beating will follow.  Realistically, 9 out of 10 of you would hand over every cent out of fear, no matter how hungry and affected you may be. 

Now, imagine that scenario to both lesser and greater degrees in every workplace across America where union leaders have historically been thwarted by free choice.   Before you realize it, every business that’s managed to survive this administrations policies will be paying $70 per hour for employees to tighten nuts on bolts under the hood of a production line automobile (in case you are wondering, that’s why you just bought “Learning the Cantonese Language” by Rosetta Stone…because obviously there will be no surviving employers left to provide jobs here in the United States.)  You get my point!

Act now, contact a local labor lawyer or an attorney at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) so that you may prepare in advance for this legislation and safeguard your workforce against unfair union organizing tactics. You must prepare right now to keep your workplace union-free and conducive in making this country once again the most admired country in the world for its free market solutions and democratic success.

Despite the deep discounts, ‘brick-and-mortar’ retailers failed to lure in buyers this holiday season, with sales falling across most categories.  During our economies most disappointing times since the Carter administration, the ‘brick-and-mortar’ retail stores show “foot traffic falling 24% and sales falling 6.5% compared to a year ago” as reported by ShopperTrak Corp.  While 2008 online retail sales dropped slightly overall from the 2007 holiday season, it still produced record numbers and was the savior of many small businesses struggling to keep their doors open.

Online retail sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving increased 15% to $846 million—the second highest online shopping day in history, as the number of buyers rose 22%, comScore reported.

Having a small business, whether you provide products or services, is exponentially stronger during down economies like ours, when you provide your prospects more opportunities to find, research, and buy your products or services.  Creating a dynamic online experience for your prospects and existing clientele is the best way to maximize your company exposure and sales opportunities.  Your prospects can learn and buy from you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without limitations of your store or office hours, weather conditions, and more.

“Online spending over the most recent weekend was clearly substantially heavier than the corresponding weekend nearest Christmas last year, which suggests that many consumers opted for the cozier confines of online shopping rather than having to brave the severe cold and snowstorms affecting much of the northern half of the country,” says comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.

And while the obvious is staring most small businesses in the face, I continue to speak with business owners whom are still dropping thousands of dollars a month into printed yellow pages and other directories.  As reported by MarketingSherpa.com, in a survey polling consumers between the ages of 18 and 55, they found that only 37% referred to the yellow pages when looking for a product or service.  This means that 63% of the consumers polled went online for their product or service needs rather than pulling out their local printed yellow pages.

Did you know? Yellow page publishers have predicted the demise of printed yellow pages by the end of 2010.

The lifeline of your small business during these difficult economic times may very well be the technology you’ve been avoiding for years now.  Traditional marketing, while useful when executed properly, is far more expensive, requires long commitments to be successful, and yields far less desirable results when looking at overall returns on investment.  Now is the time to broaden your vision, look to the future and see what the online world has to offer you and your business.  It’s up to you.

For example, if your web page is going to be about California land trusts, you can use words like “land,” “California” and “Trusts” in your content to establish relevancy.   You can use these connected terms to legitimize your site as relevant without inundating your copy with the exact keyword phrase “California land trust.”

Google’s Latent Semantic Tool is available to assist you in finding terms related to your search and provide you with Google recognized Latent Semantic text for your keyword phrase.  In the example below I am looking for thematic words connected with the keyword phrase “California land trust”:

Step 1:  Navigate to www.google.com 

Step 2:  Type ~california land trust as your search term (don’t forget the symbol in front of “California.”)

Note the bolded terms that appear such as land, trust, land trust, California, and CA in the screen shot of the Google results page shown below.

Results from using the Google's Latent Semantic Tool

Creating search engine optimized web pages is the core effort of a successful internet marketing campaign. Taking care of technical on-site factors such as file names, title tags, meta description tags, and meta keyword tags is crucial to making sure the search engine spiders can determine the relevance of your website. I recommend you address the areas discussed below before handing your files off to your web designer.

In this section, you learn about some of the various tools that help the spiders read the content of your web pages:

• Choose File Names
• Optimize Title Tags
• Optimize Meta Description Tags
• Optimize Meta Keyword Tags
• Benefit with Header Tags
• Using Text Modifiers
• Optimize Images
• Validate HTML

CHOOSE FILE NAMES

Every web page that you create is stored in a file. Every file has a name. Using file names that are relevant to the content of your web page is important for numerous reasons. Besides your domain name, the search engine spiders see your file names before anything else. If your file names are not relevant to the content contained on that page, the search engines can algorithmically detect a disconnect. Taking the extra time to ensure that file names are properly designed is essential to providing an added boost to your rankings.

Just as it makes sense to fill that web page with keywords relevant to the topic, you should also give the file a relevant name. If you are writing an HTML web page about California land trusts, and you are trying to rank highly for the search term “California land trusts,” consider naming the HTML file californialandtrusts.html or even better california-land-trusts.html.

OPTIMIZE TITLE TAGS

Title tags are an extremely influential search engine ranking factor. What you place in your web page title tags has a substantial effect on where and for what terms your page ranks. Title tags should be descriptive of what your web page is about and compel potential visitors to visit your site.

Limit your title tag to 65 characters or less because most search engines do not display any more than that. Additionally, your title tag must be unique for each and every page of your website and should include the one or two keywords you want the page to rank for. Note – web pages file names should relate very closely to those pages’ title tags.

Example Title Tag:  <TITLE>farmland easements</TITLE>

OPTIMIZE META DESCRIPTION TAGS

Meta description tags allow you to summarize what a particular web page’s content is about. Writing a brief yet informative description of no more than 165 characters about your web page’s content and adding it to your meta description tag is a search engine optimization tactic that should not be skipped.

Example Meta Description Tag: <META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”This is a brief description of your web page.”>

OPTIMIZE META KEYWORD TAGS

Meta keyword tags allow you to indicate the relevance of a particular web page to certain keywords and phrases. Although many search engines ignore this tag, some still use it in their ranking algorithms.

Example Meta Keyword Tag:  <META NAME=”keyword” CONTENT=”farmland easement, farmland easements”>

BENEFIT WITH HEADER TAGS

Optimizing your content includes emphasizing your main topics and ideas. A well-structured web page has a logical hierarchal flow with headings and subheadings fortified with content. These main topics and ideas can be placed within header tags that not only alter the format of the text the web browser displays, but also tell the search engines and human visitors that these keywords and phrases are important.

Header tags can be used anywhere within the <BODY> tag of an HTML document. Using header tags also helps to logically format your content into hierarchal topics and subtopics.

USING TEXT MODIFIERS

Beyond just optimizing your main topics and ideas, you want emphasize appropriate keywords and phrases within your content.  Using text modifiers, you can emphasize certain blocks of text by bolding (strong tag), italicizing (em tag), or underlining (u tag). The search engines take modified text into consideration when determining your content’s relevance to that text.

OPTIMIZE IMAGES

Search engine spiders are becoming more sophisticated every day, but the spiders still cannot read any images present on your pages. Using Alt Image tags to describe your images gives the search engines a readable text description of those images and also is another ranking tool.

Lets use a “guerrilla marketing” page for an example. If your pictures are going to be placed on the guerrilla marketing page then the Alt Image tags should be descriptive of the image but include that pages keyword. Each image should be provided to the web designer with Alt Image tags included.

VALIDATE HTML

Writing valid HTML is just as important as speaking proper English. Improper HTML can cause web browser incompatibilities that result in your website being difficult for spiders to navigate and/or appearing differently across different browsers.

Search engines currently are unlikely to penalize your site for including invalid code; however, Google announced in March 2008 that it is working with the World Wide Web Consortium to clean up the web. This collaboration includes Google’s acknowledgement that sometime in late 2009 or early 2010 if your website code is not valid it will drop you off its search indexes all together. Put simply, if you choose to ignore using validated HTML your site may be dropped of Google and you will lose 63% of the entire online search market.

It’s recommended that your expectations of validated HTML web pages are made clear to your web designer. To ensure this is done, require the web designer to provide you W3C validation reports for every page created.

W3C Markup Validation Tool Link: http://validator.w3.org

Initially, you want to generate a potential keyword list that is as large as possible, with the keywords organized by search volume. Volume refers to the number of searches performed on a unique keyword over a period of time. A large list ensures that you have a healthy mix of keyword terms.

In this blog, you learn about a couple of the free tools that help make your keyword research and generation process highly successful.

• Select Keywords
• Analyze Your Competition with Seodigger
• Using the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool

Select Keywords

Regardless of whether you are optimizing an existing web site or building a new web site, you should select keywords that are consistent with the content of each unique web page, as well as the overall theme of the web site. In general, you should select tail terms when optimizing web pages with specific content and head terms when optimizing web pages with more general content.

Head terms refer to short keywords, usually one or two words in length that tend to have very high search volume. Tail terms are the longer keyword terms, typically three or more words that tend to have a much lower search volume than head terms. An effectively executed SEO strategy sets out to generate large amounts of quality web site traffic by targeting a blend of both.

Optimize every page of your website

When you select keywords to incorporate into your website, remember that your goal is not to optimize your website all at once, but to optimize each page of the website. With exception to general pages that use head terms, you should never optimize for more than one or two target keywords per page.

The approach you take to optimizing each page of your website is different depending on whether you are optimizing existing web page content or building new content. If you are optimizing existing web page content, you should select one or two keywords that best summarize that page. In addition, you may need to manipulate the content a bit to make that your targeted keywords are emphasized and stand out from the rest of the content. If you are building new content, you should have one or two keywords in mind before you start writing.

Analyze Your Competition With Seodigger

An effective approach to generating keywords for your website is to analyze where your competitors rank on the search engines for keywords that you want to rank for. Seodigger.com offers a free tool that allows you to easily determine the top keywords that your competitors rank for organically on both Google.com and MSN.com.

Seodigger offers two options for accessing competitor keywords. My preferred option is to become registered. Registered users are allowed up to ten domain searches per hour. Another registered user feature is site-wide search. The site-wide search function allows you to search for the top 20 rankings for every single page of a website, as opposed to just searching the home page rankings. Registration is free and only requires verifying your e-mail address.

Seodigger link: http://www.seodigger.com

Using The Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool

The Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool is a free tool offered by Google that generates keywords based on a user entering descriptive words or phrases or a website URL. Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool provides you not only with a list of potential keywords to target in your SEO efforts, but also analyzes keywords that your competition targets. By choosing the “website content” option, and entering your competitions URL of specific pages, Google will analyze their content and give you a clear look at the way the spiders are interpreting their page content.

Google Keyword Suggestion Tool Link: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

For more information and keyword research tools go to www.easyguerrillamarketing.com/resources.