Ghost writers can work just fine in lots of situations. I mean, when they write autobiographies, they are essentially shaping the words of the subject into a narrative. It makes sense that many people with a story to tell don’t have the ability to craft a 300-page book, with a start, middle, and end that tells a story. You really need writing skills (and lots of them) to do that.

But blog posts are different. They are short, so they require the ability to have an idea and write a few sentences, but they require nowhere near the skills needed for a book. Also, they are continuous, so you can’t sit down with a ghost writer a few times and have them pump out 20 posts. Blog posts need to be written by you.

They need to be your ideas. They need to reflect who you are as a company. If you don’t have any ideas, then you don’t need a ghost writer–you need to have someone else do the blogging (with their own byline on it). Don’t hire someone to write their own ideas and put your name on it.

You can’t outsource your personality.

If you really have ideas, but worry about your writing ability–stop. What you need to do is stop obsessing over how bad a writer you are and just give it a try. If you really can’t put two grammatical sentences together, get an editor who proofreads your stuff and makes corrections before posting. With practice, your writing will improve and you’ll need less editing.

You can also do team blogging, where you have a co-author for your blog. You might have the ideas and the other person might do more of the writing. It’s less common for blogs than for books, but it’s better than a ghost writer.

Social media is about transparency, so keeping a secret as to who writes your blog gets you off to the wrong start. If you want to blog, you’ll figure out a way to do it yourself, get someone else to do it, or get help to do it yourself. But a ghost writer is not the approach you need–there are too many better alternatives.

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A huge factor in online marketing is building links to your website. That is why it is so important to have a large number of relevant, one-way, do follow links pointing to your website. There are many ways to get links as you can read from some of my older blog posts. A new strategy that has been working well for many webmasters and SEO specialists is the use of link wheels.

Link wheels

There are different ways that you can use link wheels. An advanced link wheel would be where you link multiple articles to one site is a link whel fashion. You then link the link wheel into a larger link wheel. This builds links and passes link juice throughout even more sites and even more links. This is a great approach for building tons of links focused around a specific keyword phrase.

We now offer link wheel services for you to take advantage of. Just request a quote and mention link wheels.

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Dave’s Answer:

[This is not only a great question, but a fundamental one for anyone creating or maintaining an online community. I know, because I have the Ask Dave Taylor Fan Page on Facebook. As a result, rather than answer it myself, I asked my friend Patrick O'Keefe, author of the book Managing Online Forums, to tackle your query. Here's his splendid, thoughtful answer... ]

Facebook Groups and Fan Pages are a sort of repackaging or continuation of something we’ve already been doing in other online community spaces. So, when thinking about this question, it can be helpful to consider how you might keep an online forum or chat room active. After all, the Wall on your group is similar to what some would call a shoutbox and your Discussions tab is, more or less, a forum.

When it comes to keeping them interesting, there are a lot of different directions you can go in, limited by your own creativity. With that said, here are some ideas that came to mind when pondering your question:

Participate and Make it Routine

Your participation in your group has a direct impact on how interesting it is. You can’t expect to set a group up and then just let people talk amongst themselves indefinitely. That creates a host of issues.

For one, there is less overall activity. If your group is based around your company, product, brand, personality or something along those lines, having no interaction with you can lead to participants feeling unappreciated. Plus, there is always the danger of something inappropriate being posted that you won’t have removed because you weren’t there.

Instead, you should be a constant presence on the page, posting messages, responding to others and encouraging and monitoring discussion. Make it a regular thing, a routine; like checking your e-mail or reading your favorite blog.

Ask Questions

A simple way of generating interest is to ask questions. Put a call to action in your messages and the things that you share, asking for the reader to do something, even if it is as simple as asking them for their thoughts. Provide a prompt. When people answer, thank them for their replies.

Host Events on Your Page

Due to the live, fresh nature of Facebook, it can be used as a platform for scheduled events, aimed at drawing a bunch of people to your page at a given time. Here are some examples:

If you’re a company that creates a product with constant technical support requests, you could host a question-a-thon. Encourage people to ask questions of your product or company at a specific time with the promise that company executives, technicians, etc. are on hand to answer them as soon as they’re posted.

You can invite an expert or special guest of interest in the subject of your group and have them answer questions on your page for a set period of time. If you’re a sports group, you could have a writer from ESPN or an athlete. If you’re group is about growing your business online, you could invite Dave Taylor. If it’s about architecture, you could host a noted architect.

You could play a game where you ask people to post pictures of given objects (authenticated in some way) in real time and the people who complete all of the challenges (or something along those lines) are all entered into a giveaway for a cool prize.

Whatever your niche, you can come up with an event to host that will resonate with your audience.

Highlight the Contributions of Others

Everyone wants to feel wanted. Part of keeping it interesting is embracing the people you do have now and appreciating them. Not only that, but when they do great stuff, share it with everyone. Showcase cool contributions made by group members and draw attention to them.

This encourages further contribution by not only the person highlighted, but by others who would like to be highlighted. It’s a great way to reward people for doing great things.

Moderate and Kick Out the Cancers

Watch out for people who disrupt or damage the environment that you want on your page. Bullies and jerks can intimidate others and can change the tone of your page and scare people away. Don’t be afraid to cut them off, in order to maintain your focus and ensure that your targeted participants are comfortable.

Go Beyond Just Text

Text is the backbone of most every Facebook group in existence, but other content can provide a good change of pace - visually and otherwise. Post polls and share photos and videos.

If this is a company page, post photos of your people in action, of your office, of events. If your page is about a leisure activity, post pictures of you engaging in it and encourage others to do the same. One way to encourage photos is to have themes.

If you were a martial arts page, you could have a theme of everyone posting a picture of themselves in their stance, or of them doing a certain kick or wearing their uniform.
Likewise, a regular video show about the group and it’s activity is a great way to stimulate interest. You can highlight a particular member and various contributions, share a new theme or contest and just serve as a general news area for the community. If you’re camera shy, that’s fine - you can still share videos of interest.

Integrate Your Other Online Presences

Does your company or organization create a lot of content online? Or maybe just you as an individual: do you create content relevant to your group? Maybe you have a blog, a YouTube channel, maybe you write tutorials or articles. There’s no reason that these outlets should not be at least partially integrated into your group.

Every blog post you make or YouTube video you upload, that is related to your group, is potentially a discussion topic that can be brought up. If you have a directly relevant publication that you maintain, don’t hesitate to feed it directly into your group. Notice I said directly relevant: be careful of feeding anything and everything. It must be focused on what your group is about.

Take it Easy with Apps, Boxes, etc.

Facebook apps (applications) are cool, no doubt. But, they can be a problem when they take the focus away from the area where you want people to actually participate. In general, before adding any additional elements, apps, tabs or boxes to your group, you should consider how it really adds to what you have right now and what you really want to accomplish.

For example, would you prefer a page with 7 different apps and tabs, all of which have little or no activity, or would you rather have one Wall that has moderate activity? It’s really about showcasing what you do have, which makes you more attractive to potential participants. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Focus on doing one or two things really well; and then you can expand off of that.

Run Offline Events, If You Can

I love the internet. But, I also love meeting people in person. Meeting people in person allows you to grow relationships so much more quickly. I’ve been able to meet Dave a couple of times at conferences and I’m glad I did. Honestly, if I hadn’t met him in person, I’m not sure I’d be writing this right now.

The point is this: offline makes online better. Online makes offline better, too. They enhance each other. If you grow group relationships offline, they’ll be stronger online. So, if you’re community is based around a certain area - or if there are a bunch of group members near you - hold a meet-up. Take pictures and video of the meet up and post them on your group (more content!).

If you’re page is about a company or a product, invite people to your headquarters or a local restaurant or establishment for some face to face time. You can even use this time to let people try out new products, to get their feedback and to make sure they feel like an insider and a person who is a part of your community. This can only lead to good things for your Facebook group and, more importantly, your online presence.

Go Deeper

Finally, I want to tell you to go deeper, if you have the activity to warrant it, in two senses. The first sense is Facebook itself. The Wall is usually a place for shorter comments, not longer posts, like you might see on online forums. On Facebook, you can add a Discussions tab, though I don’t believe it is as intuitive as the established and well known format of forums.

That brings me to the second sense: don’t stop at just Facebook. Look beyond, to other platforms, to your own structured community on your own website. Having people on your own site allows you to do more with them and can allow you to have even more meaningful relationships.

This also allows you to have a more interesting Facebook group because you can share content between your on-site community and your Facebook group and use your group as a means of promoting your website-based community.

This isn’t right for everyone. For some, it’s best to stick with a Facebook group or similar. But, for many others, stepping beyond just Facebook will allow you to benefit even more.
With these tips in mind, you should be able to put together some ideas to make your Facebook group more interesting - and to keep it that way. But, don’t be limited by what I said alone, continue to think and look for other ways: you are only limited by your creativity and the time you are able to invest.

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First we need to take a step back and understand that there are several ways you can arrange your website/blog. The first is by subject, which most blog and CMS platforms call “categories.” The second is by date, which occurs as most blog/cms systems put things in year, month, and date groupings. A third is by tagging, which consists of the notes or descriptions you put on your posts or pages.

All of these different classification methods bring about one of the hallmark problems of blogs and CMS’s: duplicate content. Let’s assume that you publish one page. That page will exist on the page, but also on the category archive page, year archive page, year-month archive page, year-month-day archive page, and the archive page for any tag that you attach to the page/post. This can create issues as the search engines have to figure out what page they should really list in the SERP’s. First I suggest blocking all of the date archives from being indexed by using the “noindex” directive in the robots.txt (note Google is the only search engine who currently supports this command). I also use the “noindex/follow” robots tag on each of the date archive pages. Basically we are telling the robots don’t put these pages in the SERP’s but follow through and get the pages. We go with the exact same settings for the tag pages. If you are running wordpress you can use the Robots Meta plugin from Joost de Valk to get this done. This only leaves us with the duplicate issue on category and individual pages. To combat this problem, only show limited sections of your posts on the category pages. The thesis theme has this functionality built in. If you aren’t using thesis, you can use the teaser plugin to get a similar result or remember to use the “more” tag 100% of the time.

OK now that we’ve got the duplicate content issue resolved, why would anyone want to use tags in the first place? Can’t you achieve the same results with categories? Yes and no. Here’s an example of how I would use categories and tags: let’s say you have a celebrity website with categories like “baby bump,” “fashion,” “news,” “rumors,” etc. You are also going to have celebrities who are always in the news like Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. What I would do is create tags for each celebrity and, whenever I did a post about the celebrity, I’d tag it with his or her name.

Another example. You have a travel website with categories like “adventure travel,” “family travel,” “skiing,” “cruises,” and so on. I would set up tags for countries, states, or cities, like Bahamas, France, or Colorado. You could have a white water rafting page in the adventure travel category tagged with Colorado. You could have a Skiing in Vail post in the skiing category also tagged with Colorado. You can also have a family travel article about visiting the Museum of Science and nature and Botanic Gardens in Colorado.  Those three separate articles would be interconnected by using the Colorado tag.

Here’s where the magic of tagging comes into play. If you use the cross linker plugin,  you can set it up to automagically link any word like “Colorado” to the tag page for Colorado. So if the person reading any of the three Colorado articles clicks on “Colorado,” they visit the tag page and see all of your posts about Colorado. I’ve found that in-posts links get much higher click throughs than “tag” links at the end of an article. You could set it up the same way for Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, or any other word/tag you used. What this does is create an alternate navigation path that’s both really useful for readers and keeps your content exposed to the search engine spiders. You could link the word individually as you write each post, but I find it easier to manage a website when I cut down the maintenance wherever I can.

Another advantage is that tagging is a much more effective way to choose which ads to display. If I’m only using categories like “family travel,” it’s hard to know which ad to serve. Do I use Disneyland tickets, family cruises, or city based Go Cards? However with tagging I can be much more specific by only serving cruise advertising to the pages/posts with the “cruise” tag. If you want to get really specific you can have general “cruise” tag and a separate ”family cruise” tag. You just have to decide how granular you want to get.

There are some downsides to all of this, of course. You have to maintain your tags because they have a tendency to get out of hand, especially if you have more than one author, and they play fast and loose with the rules. For example you could end up with “cruise,” “cruises,” and “cruising,” which really are all the same thing and should only have one tag. A secondary problem that can take things off the track is capitalization. With wordpress all of the following URL’s will have the same content:

http://example.com/tag/word/

http://example.com/tag/Word/

http://example.com/tag/WORD/

If you’re blocking the tag pages from being indexed it’s not a huge issue. But it can come into play with an advanced tactic I’ll be talking about next, so I bring it up now as a problem to be aware of. To be honest the tools for administering and editing tags is pretty limited. The best one I’ve found if Simple tags. It isn’t perfect, but it gets the job done.

Advanced Tag  and Cross Link Utilization

Using tagging this way creates a problem: you squander internal anchor text on pages you are blocking from the index. In the examples above, you would certainly want a page about Colorado to appear in the index, but maybe not the tag for a small city with little value and traffic. In the example above you would set up the word “Colorado” to link to “http://example.com/tag/colorado/”. However, what if you set the cross link to a normal page like “http://example.com/colorado/” instead of the tag page? Then you could create a page with some editorial copy, install the EXEC PHP plugin, and use it to issue  a WP Query and automatically list posts tagged with Colorado. You will need to know PHP to make that happen, but it’s not too hard.

Another trick. If I’m creating “head and tail” content, I’ll set up the cross link to point to the “http://example.com/keyword/” page/post. However, if there isn’t any content there yet (ie only the “tail” pieces of content exist) I’ll use the redirection plugin to temporarily redirect to the tag page. I’ll take the redirect down once the “head” is written. This can get kind of tricky, so you should only use it if you are confident about what you are doing.

To recap and bring everything together, here’s what you need to remember:

• By using tags you can provide a more granular way to break down the content on your website.
• This break down can provide alternate navigation paths to your content for both humans and search engines.
• This break down becomes more useful to humans if you link words/tags within the main body of the content.
• This break down is extremely effective for serving very targeted advertising or affiliate links.
• Care should be taken to minimize duplicate content and duplicate/similar tags

Lastly one of the original purposes of tagging was to help blog search engines like Technorati understand your content; however, to be honest, that value is so non-existent it’s really not worth mentioning. When was the last time Technorati or ice rocket brought you any traffic?

Comments

That happens to a lot of small business owners when they decide to create regular content by adding a blog to their web site. Things move along really great for a while (a few days, a few weeks, or a few months) and then it dies. And that’s not a good thing. 

There are a lot of different resources for creating content on your blog. And you’ll want to make sure you’re prepared in advance for the day when you run out of ideas. (Trust me, it will happen.)

I was thrilled last week when Small Business Trends published 100+ SMB Blogging Ideas to Kick Start 2010. This is a comprehensive list of ideas you should keep handy to help you come up with topics to create content for your blog. But there’s one small problem. Having an idea and being able to write about it are two different things. And that’s where most people fall short.

So how do you turn an idea into blog content when there are no words in your head? There are several different ways. Here are a couple of my favorites.

1. Use Free Reprint Articles

Free reprint article directories like EzineArticles.com are packed with quality articles that you can reprint on your site. The only requirements are that you do not edit the article in any way and that you include the author’s resource box at the end (including any links the author has included). This is a win-win situation.  The author gets free advertising. You, the publisher, get free content. But there are some drawbacks to using free reprint articles.

>> Sharing the same exact article as everyone else on the web makes your blog content look like other sites. If you use this approach, make sure you write an introduction to the article, and preferably a wrap-up statement or recommendation at the end.

>> Sometimes it can be tough to find quality content. Gone are the days of grabbing any old free reprint article. It might take some time to find just the right article that will fit with your blog.

2. Use Private Label Rights (PLR) Articles

This is one of my favorites! PLR articles are usually written by a ghostwriter and sold to a limited number of website owners. You have the freedom to edit the articles and publish them without being required to link back to anyone or give credit for writing them. You become the expert when using PLR articles.

PLR articles give you a lot of flexibility and they’re affordable too. You can customize the articles, tweak them for your market, insert examples, photos or case studies and publish them on your website — or you can just use them as they are. These articles are a ton of help to many people. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to creating blog content is the “blank piece of paper” syndrome. It’s much easier for most people to start writing when there’s already words on the paper (so to speak).

So, how do you find a good PLR service? Simple. Find a PLR site that’s been around for a while that offers professionally written and edited content that’s sold in limited quantities. That will ensure you’re not getting recycled PLR, and are getting your hands on top-quality content.

My favorite place is EasyPLR.com. They’ve been offering the best niche PLR article packs on the web since 2006. They have a great reputation and thousands of happy, repeat customers. The articles are really good quality.

>> Content is written by professional writers on staff and edited by an additional staff member.

>> Articles have limited availability and are low cost. You aren’t sharing the articles with thousands of other people and it won’t break your bank account.

>> Great reputation. Thousands of happy, repeat customers over the years.

>> Run by respected internet marketer Nicole Dean. (Who runs her business by her gut and her ethics, not strictly by her pocketbook!)

>> Excellent customer support. When you need help, they are there for you.

I’m a customer at EasyPLR.com and have been very happy with the article content and quality. It’s saved me a few times when writer’s block has clogged up my brain.

If you need to create content for your blog, I highly recommend you check out EasyPLR.com today (before you run out of ideas and let your blog die a slow death).

Have you used PLR articles? What do you think?

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The Free Keyword Niche Finder   provides structured keyword suggestions by breaking the provided base word into “keyword niches”. These ‘‘keyword niches’’ are the groups of closely related keywords which can be equally effective in both paid and organic search marketing strategies. This feature automatically recognizes the semantic importance of a particular keyword and fixes it in a group of keywords closely related to it.

The Free Keyword Grouper is a feature in which a list of keywords or analytic data is clubbed into tightly related categories. Its purpose is to provide ways to use a particular word in more relevant PPC ad groups and targeted SEO Web copy. For instance, if you will enter a list of keywords, then you will find the best possible way to use them in PPC campaign to achieve more profitable results.

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In the first article we explored under what circumstances we should consider translating our website into another language.

In the second article we covered the three most common issues that people have when looking to implement a website in another language.

This time I asked Mark about the other things we need to consider in terms of translating our website (e.g. does the navigation need to change to fit with standards people expect in that country)

Mark: In general, we find that this area of ‘cultural adaptation’ is now less of an issue than say 10 years ago. The world is now a smaller place, and whether we like it or not, the effects of globalisation are bringing cultures closer together.

We all know the McDonald’s slogan of ‘I’m lovin’ it!’ – a very clever way to get around trying to come up with a different slogan for 140 countries.

Irish organisations can adopt a similar approach with their websites. Create a multi-lingual website and then ‘tweak’ each website depending on feedback and responses. Very often you can get advice during the translation phase – as to whether something will add / detract from a translated site.

For instance, in Chinese, ‘8′ is a lucky number, ‘4′ is associated with death. So in such cases, if you were thinking of entering the Chinese market, you might either highlight the fact that your company is called ‘Lucky 8′… or else decide to change your brand if it was called ‘444′.

Even the large multi-nationals can get it wrong sometimes, so any Irish organisation that is stepping into Europe or Asia should be confident that a strong English website, with good branding and a great product or service offering has every chance of succeeding abroad as the next company. As always, the success will depend on what is done with the website and how it is marketed.

Finally, its important to have the flags (or drop down list of languages) on the front page and to ensure the contact details and customer support services are clearly visible. Many larger Irish organisations now have some multi-lingual staff, so maybe it’s a chance for them to dust off their language skills and start supporting the sales effort.

But what other suggestions do you have – or what have you implemented in relation to translating your website when expanding your business internationally?

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RSS is a way of passing links to content in your web site that you’d like others to use. In other words, it’s a mechanism to “syndicate” your content, and its laser focus content.

We are going to explain the meat of RSS that you should know if you decide to create one or to subscribe to a 3rd party service with the understanding of the meat of it.

At the heart of an RSS file are “items.” No matter what version of RSS you have, your file will have to include at least one item. Items are generally web pages that you want others to link to. For example, let’s say you just created a web page reviewing the types of food seasoning. Information about that page would form an item.

To enter your item into the RSS file, you’ll need three bits of information:

• Title
• Description
• Link

In the case of our example page, let’s say this is the information we settle on to define it as an item:

• Free Shipping on Poultry Seasoning
• Buy 4 or more of Dean & Danny Poultry Seasoning and receive Free Shipping
• http://deananddannys.com/xcart/product.php?productid=3

Now we have to surround that information with XML tags. These are similar to HTML tags, with the exception that unlike with HTML, there’s no set definition of XML tags. Anyone can make up a particular XML tag. Whether it is useful depends on the program that reads the resulting XML file. In the case of RSS feeds, they have their own unique set of XML tags that are defined. Use these correctly, and then anything that reads RSS will understand your information.

Now there’s one more thing we need to do. We actually have to define all this information as forming a particular “item,” which we special  special item tag. Heres what it looks like:

<item>

<title>Free Shipping on Poultry Seasoning</title>
<description>Buy 4 or more of Dean & Danny Poultry Seasoning and receive Free Shipping</description>

<link>http://deananddannys.com/xcart/product.php?productid=3</link>

</item>

Having defined items we want to pass on, we now have to define our site as a “channel.” You’ll use the same tags as with the items: title, description and link. However, this time the information will be about your entire site, rather than a particular page. That means our channel information would look like this:

<title>Dean & Danny Signature Food Seasonings</title>

<description>Dean & Danny Food Seasonings introduces a line of quality seasonings</description>

<link>http://deananddannys.com</link>

There are some other things that needs to be added. We need to add a tag at the very top of the file saying that this is written according to the XML 1.0 specifications. Right under this, we also have to say what RSS version we are using. Here is what it would look like to show the website and the specific page to be distributed.  Heres the final look:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<rss version=”2.0″>
<channel>

<title>Dean & Danny Signature Food Seasonings</title>

<description>Dean & Danny Food Seasonings introduces a line of quality seasonings</description>

<link>http://deananddannys.com</link>

<item>
<title>Free Shipping on Poultry Seasoning</title>
<description>Buy 4 or more of Dean & Danny Poultry Seasoning and receive Free Shipping</description>

<link>http://deananddannys.com/xcart/product.php?productid=3</link>
</item>
<item>
<title>Buy Steak Seasoning</title>
<description>Buy 4 or more Dean & Danny Steak Seasoning and receive Free Shipping</description>

<link>http://deananddannys.com/xcart/product.php?productid=1</link>

</channel>
</rss>

Comments

Apart from having a different format from desktop site the mobile site has different management methods also. The latest Google Webmaster blog is talking about how you can make the mobile site available for users of mobile search. The blog is providing some troubleshooting tips that will lead to proper crawling and indexing of the mobile site.

In case your mobile site is not showing results of Google mobile search even after using the ’site:’ operator, there might be following issues with the site:

There are chances of Googlebot not able to locate the website.

The crawler Googlebot must crawl the website before including it in the search index. If your site is newly made, you might not be aware of this thing. What you can do is, create a Mobile Sitemap and submit it to Google. The map can be submitted by using Google Webmaster Tools and the process is similar to what you do for a standard Sitemap submission.

If Googlebot is not able to access your site.

There are some mobile sites that don’t provide access to mobile phones. If this is the case with your site, Googlebot will be unable to access it and thus the site will be unsearchable. The Google crawler for mobile sites is “Googlebot-Mobile”. You have to allow any User-agent including “Googlebot-Mobile” to access your website for crawling. There are chances of Google changing the User-agent information without prior notification, therefore you should not check if the User-agent matches the “Googlebot-Mobile”. Instead of this, you should check if the User-agent header has the string “Googlebot-Mobile”. The verification of Googlebot can also be done by using DNS Lookups.

How to Verify if Google can recognize mobile URLs?

After the Googlebot-Mobile crawls the URLs, it is checked if the URLs can be viewed on mobile device. If the determined pages cannot be viewed on mobile phone, they will not be included in the mobile site index. The determination process is based on factors like DTD (Doc Type Definition” declaration. You should check if the mobile-friendly URLs’ DTD declaration has an appropriate mobile format like Compact HTML or XHTML Mobile. You can get more information by going through Google’s Mobile Webmaster guidelines.

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Before now, your best bet for mobile Web access was the iPhone. To get an iPhone, you not only needed to shell out the cash for a smart phone (which more and more is gaining share over the dumb varieties), but you probably had to switch carriers, to AT&T, which naturally limited the size of the U.S. market for Web browsing. Similar exclusive deals surround the iPhone in other countries.

Now, you non-iPhone users have probably surfed the Web, too, but studies show that iPhone users do it far more. One reason is the browser built into the iPhone is based on WebKit, an open source “rendering” engine that does a far better job of showing Web sites than older mobile browsers.

See, before WebKit, anyone with a Web site needed to fool around with different formatting for the small screen than for computer screens. And before 3G networks, bandwidth was so constrained that images rarely rendered fast enough to be worth the time waiting. There were fat “best practices” documents for mobile Web sites. So, lots of programming time went into futzing around with Web sites to make them mobile-friendly, and more time was sunk into .mobi Web sites and mobile sub-domains. In short, if you wanted your Web site to look good on a mobile phone, you needed to know what you were doing and to pay through the nose on an ongoing basis to make it happen.

As you might expect, that attracted relatively few businesses, and it meant that mobile Web browsing was a hit-or-miss affair, with a few sites providing very nice experiences, while most putting you into a second-class citizen status, causing you to remember to come back and look at that site the next time you are at your computer.

Better screens, higher bandwidth, and WebKit has changed that for iPhone users. Nokia, Palm, and (most important of all) Android phones are all beginning to use WebKit, and other browser rendering engines are beginning to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by WebKit. In the next couple of years, it’s very likely that your mobile phone will do a good job rendering almost any Web site, whether designed for mobile or not.

And, Android phones are poised to be a force in this market–expect a dozen phones in the next few months, spread across virtually all carriers. Like iPhones, Android 2.0 phones are starting to show the ease-of-use needed to spur behavior change for users who want to surf the mobile Web. I can upgrade my phone in January, and I am eying these new Android phones for a place in my pocket.

And that changes things for your business. If you never thought that you should consider mobile users in your Web plans, because not many will use your site and because it is too expensive to retrofit your development, it’s time to re-examine that stance.

Think about what customers might want to do while on the run, whether it is checking order status, opening a service ticket, ordering supplies, or watching a video about your new product. Then check out your site with one of these mobile phones. Can you figure out how to do these tasks?

I know that my Web site fails that test right now, but I am in the process of redesigning, and mobile is one of the things I plan to attack, because someone might want to check me out during a speaking appearance, or just catch up on their blog reading while mobile. I want my site to allow that.

So, even if you’ve heard that the mobile Web is taking off every year for the last five years, it’s time to listen now.

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