Kaizen anyone?

More than 20 entrepreneurs attended an AIBA-sponsored Lunch ‘N Learn “Building Blocks for the Web,” presented by Emily Leach of Search Engine Academy Southwest. Thanks to Holmans and Don Chalmers Ford, this was a free peek at increased performance on the web.

Like many small business owners, these seminar participants already own web sites and want to increase their effectiveness. Emily reminded the group of four common myths of being on the Internet:

One strategy will work for everyone
All you need to do is build a website and traffic will come
Getting my meta-tags updated will get me to the top of search engines
I only need to be found for my business name on the search engines

Although she quickly exploded these myths and offered a number of different strategies, the value of Emily’s presentation falls into the questions she urged business owners to consider. She encouraged each person to think through a strategy with the query: “How is that working for you?”

The Japanese term kaizen, meaning continuous improvement, migrated into our vocabulary during the period after world war two. It’s a perfect word to describe the attitude with which one must approach the Internet.

What do you get from your web site? Is it currently working for you? And, if the answer is “no,” or, “not as well as I’d like,” what do you plan to do about it?