James A. Martin

You may have an amazing website, but not many people will see it if other sites aren't linking to it.

Relevant inbound links from authoritative, trusted and/or quality websites are every search marketer's dream. (An inbound link, also called a backlink, is a link from an external site that points to content on your site.) Google, which owns about 66 percent of the search engine market according to comScore, sees such links as votes of confidence for your content. Because Google wants to serve users the most relevant, freshest, trustworthy results, inbound links from trusted sites to yours can go a long way toward pushing your content up in search result rankings.

In an IT environment of MacBook laptops, Windows PCs, iPhones, iPads and Droid devices, why would any enterprise stick with Microsoft Outlook for email and collaboration?

That very question prompted a 60-day pilot test at New England Biolabs, an Ipswich, Mass.-based molecular biology company. Given the growth of Macs and mobile BYOD technology at the company, as well as the need to collaborate with mobile users and international subsidiaries, the IT team decided it was time to seriously investigate Google Apps for Business as an alternative to Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server.

I have a new Retina display iPad. I have a TiVo Premiere DVR, which records HD programming. Naturally, my geeky self got to thinking: "Wouldn't it be cool to transfer my favorite shows from the TiVo to the iPad?"

Yes, it would be cool. But the TiVo-sanctioned software I used for the job proved to be expensive, time consuming to use, and ultimately didn’t deliver the quality I had hoped for.

Google and other Internet search engines virtually never fail to deliver relevant results nearly instantly. That creates a problem for IT in terms of setting employee expectations around the search capabilities they use at work.

"They think an awesome search engine is a straightforward, must-have tool, and they wonder why the company doesn't have one," says Leslie Owens, a senior Forrester Research analyst. As companies seek to address that issue, they enter the world of enterprise search, where they'll find more than a dozen products available. Choosing the one that will work for your enterprise involves evaluating the types of products, coming up with a requirements list and performing a proof of concept test, among other tasks. To be sure, it's a challenging task. "Users' needs can be unique," Owens say, "and finding one system that serves a diversity of queries and users can be tough."

Your company's Website might look great, with plenty of multimedia sizzle. But if the site isn't consistently attracting targeted visitors and converting them into customers, it's not doing its job-which can have a negative impact on revenue.

It may be time to hire a search engine optimization (SEO) expert, whether it's as an employee, an individual consultant, or an SEO consulting firm. A qualified, experienced SEO expert reviews your site; asks about your business goals and target visitors; and identifies strategies to improve your search engine rankings and page views.

No matter how hard you work, you can't succeed in the small-business world if you don't put your customers first. But making the most of customer relationships isn't easy. Keeping your clientele engaged and coming back for more requires flexibility, a great memory, and creative thinking.

Today, customer relationship management (CRM) software is a must-have for companies that want to keep in touch with their clients. And for very small companies, the most compelling CRM products live in the cloud.

Cloud computing. For some, the term is wildly nebulous. Not long ago, even Oracle’s Larry Ellison publicly asked what the heck people meant by "the cloud."

For others, cloud computing instantly raises concerns about security and reliability. After all, Gmail, a popular cloud-based e-mail service that has endured some high-profile outages, didn’t earn the nickname "Gfail" for nothing.

Before you dismiss the cloud as a lot of vapor, though, listen to what three small-business people told us about their experiences with it:

• “We saved over $4000 in up-front costs by moving to an entirely cloud-based solution [for e-mail, Web hosting, virus protection, and more]. We were also able to substantially reduce our power bill and the costs needed to maintain and upgrade hardware.” --Bob Everett, president, Bottom-Line Consulting, a three-person firm offering various small-business services.

• “As a non-IT person, I find cloud-based applications easier to set up and use than many [computer] applications, and I don't need to rely on internal IT support as much for assistance.” --Cristina Martin Greysman, executive vice president, business development, Vuzit, a six-employee software company.

• “A power surge nearly destroyed our in-house e-mail server. Had we not recovered it, a great deal of historical knowledge and valuable information would have been lost forever, not to mention the lost productivity for days or weeks. Now we have a secure, redundant, cloud e-mail system we can access anywhere, anytime, with a consistent interface, and it’s made our business stronger.” --Kevin Hart, partner and founder, Hart-Boillot, a ten-employee marketing and communications agency.

To be sure, cloud computing has its shortcomings (more on that later); but small businesses looking to cut computing costs and improve efficiency during this long recession are finding the many benefits of Internet-based software and services increasingly attractive. In fact, companies with 100 or fewer employees are expected to spend $2.4 billion on cloud computing services in 2010, up from $1.7 billion in 2009, according to Ray Boggs, vice president of SMB research for IDC.

Here’s what you need to know about cloud computing: what it is, pros and cons, suggested services, and tips for applying it to your business.

What Does Cloud Computing Mean?

For decades, engineers have drawn a cloud to depict a network (such as the Internet) whose inner workings were unknown to them. From there, cloud computing evolved as a term to describe free or subscription-based services delivered in real time over the Internet.

Cloud computing can refer to software as a service, such as Salesforce.com for customer relationship management (CRM); to file storage, synchronization, backup, and other utility computing, such as Dropbox; and to infrastructure as a service, including Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, which delivers customizable computing capacity over the Internet.

For further discussion of what the cloud covers, see “Cloud Computing Explained.”

Examples of Cloud Computing Services for Small Business

We queried dozens of small businesses about the cloud services they use, and why they use them. Among the most popular services were these:

• Google Apps ($50 per user per year) and Google Docs (free) are offerings from the Google cloud empire. Google Apps is a business-class version of Google Docs and includes souped-up Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs (for word processing, spreadsheet, presentations and forms) components along with administration capabilities.

With either Google Apps or Google Docs, your data remains in one place no matter where you access it from, according to Brian Armstrong, founder of BuyersVote, a product review site that relies on Google's premium services. Despite Gmail’s periodic outages, Armstrong says, Google’s cloud tools are “actually more secure on the whole because, although you’re trusting your data to an external provider, Google works hard to secure a ton of data; and it's the sort of attention to detail that you probably don't have time or money for in your local IT department.”

• Box.net (free for 1GB of storage; $10 for an individual plan; $15 monthly for three or more users) is an online workspace service for file sharing and collaboration. Paul Rosenfeld, cofounder and CEO of Fanminder, a mobile marketing firm with 12 employees, calls it "incredibly easy to use and powerful": “Having a virtual team makes it nearly impossible to coordinate workflow without their tools,” Rosenfeld says.

• QuickBooks Online ($10 to $35 per month), unlike QuickBooks installed on PCs, makes collaboration easy across a small team. “It enables our bookkeeper, accountant, and outsourced CFO to all look at the same up-to-date information to advise us on our financial situation,” says Nicolas Boillot of Hart-Boillot, whose company uses the service.

• Skype is popular for its free video chats as well as for the low-cost calls to landline and cell phones that it makes possible. Brand Thunder, a browser customization firm with 11 members, uses Skype for all-team meetings, says Patrick Murphy, the company's founder and CEO. Though Skype call quality varies, the service “allows easy and open communication between team members, despite their being geographically dispersed,” he says.

• Highrise for CRM and Basecamp for project management ($24 to $149 per month each, depending on the level of service you choose) both come from 37signals. A number of small businesses we contacted recommended these services for their feature sets and ease of use.

The Benefits of Cloud Computing

Cloud-based services can help small businesses dramatically reduce their software and other computing costs.

For example, Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Business will cost $199 for a downloadable version and $279 for a boxed version. By comparison, Google Docs, which offers office productivity tools via the cloud, is free. (Microsoft is currently working on Web-based versions of Office 2010 apps.)

Storing files on a secure, reliable, cloud-based service helps eliminate backup worries and gives you anytime access to your files. Usually, cloud-based services are simple to use—the only things you need are a computer (or in some cases, a mobile handset), a browser, and an Internet connection. And such services require no maintenance from the user.

Easier collaboration with colleagues in distant locations is another oft-cited cloud benefit.

“If you're the kind of small business that has employees who work from different places--or has remote employees, board members, or vendors who need access to your data--cloud computing is the only way to go,” says Rosenfeld of Fanminder.

These benefits enable small businesses to “stay focused, be more collaborative, and bring products to market more quickly, because they’ve got access to the kind of infrastructure that only large companies used to have,” says Judith Hurwitz, president and CEO of Hurwitz & Associates and a coauthor of Cloud Computing for Dummies .

According to an oft-quoted study, 93 percent of Web users don't look beyond the first page of search results. The study, by famed Web-usability expert Jakob Nielsen, first appeared in Prioritizing Web Usability (2006), a book that Nielsen coauthored. "Even though the specific percentages are a few years old," Nielsen wrote recently in an e-mail, "the general conclusion definitely still holds."

With odds like that, it's no wonder every business wants its site to land in the top ten results for relevant queries.

If you're a frequent pond jumper, Garmin's nüvi 1370T (with maps of North America and that place across the pond called Europe) is a GPS device worth considering. It's lightweight, it has a crisp 4.3-inch touchscreen, and it offers plenty of features. On the flip side, the 1370T is lacking a few essentials, it can be slow to pick up a satellite signal, and it doesn't offer much useful points-of-interest (POI) information.

The nüvi 1370T is part of Garmin's T series of thin and light GPS devices. The sleek, attractive, black GPS unit is 0.6 inches thick, about 0.02 inches less than some other Garmin models, and it weighs 5.7 ounces. That doesn't sound like much, but every bit helps.

Can you tell which of the following tweets is from a small but rapidly growing company?

"One more glass of wine and I will b buying pop tarts from that damn vending machine for dinner, again"

Tips and Tools for Travelers

Seven years ago, this blog you're reading now was an online column offering advice on such things as traveling with a PDA in lieu of a laptop. On that particular topic, I wrote that accessing the Internet on a PDA was like "driving cross-country in a Pinto with a cracked windshield--painfully slow and monumentally irritating." One of the main options for checking e-mail on a handheld, I explained, was to connect the PDA to "a dial-up modem and a landline connection."

We've come a long way since then, don't you think? And I've thoroughly enjoyed the journey, reporting every week on the collective digital path we've been on. But after nearly eight years of writing Mobile Computing, this blog post is my last. It's time for me to move along my own path. I'll still contribute to PC World on mobile technology, social media, and other topics.