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Archive for May 23rd, 2009

A Website Is Not Enough

Your small business needs an appealing and professional website but that is just the beginning. If no one visits your website and more importantly if it does not bring in new customers and allows you to sell more to your current customers then your site is not effective. What do you need to improve your online marketing efforts?

The first step is to decide on a primary goal for your website. Is it to directly sell products or services through ecommerce? Or is the goal to capture leads so you can followup and make the sale by email and phone?

For ecommerce you need a website design with a shopping cart system that encourages people to purchase products using the shopping cart. Both the design and written content should maintain this focus.

If your goal is to capture leads the key is to have the content that provides initial information about your products and services that interests prospective customers. It should be easy for the prospective customer to fill out a contact form and hit the submit button or call your 800number. The form should be submitted to a contact management system such as Salesforce or SugarCRM.

Getting it Done

Your business needs a professional website which can cost between 2000 15000 to design. This is not only more than most small businesses want to spend but also unnecessary to succeed on the Web.

For small business there is usually little need for an elaborate expensive website. You can get an appealing and professional website design for as little as 250.

The key to a professional website design is to work with a good designer who takes the time to listen to you and translate your vision into an effective website. Your designer must be as skilled in listening as in design.

Once the site is completed there must be an easy way for you or someone on your behalf to maintain the website. The designer should provide you with an easytouse content management system CMS enabling you to edit your website without having to contact your designer. This saves you money.

Once you have a professional website you have the foundation for marketing online. You can build on that foundation and use the Internet as an effective marketing tool.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing can be divided into two main categories: Search Engine Optimization SEO and Pay Per Click PPC.

Please do a Google search right now for something pretty popular e.g. coffee. The results on the left side of the browser window that reach down to the bottom of the page are the organic search results. The top results are generally the more popular sites. The highest ranking sites are those sites that have the most links from other websites especially other high ranking sites. In a sense other people have voted for the high ranking sites by linking to them. Often the high ranking sites are the most popular but there is also a lot of gaming of the system. You cannot however pay Google to increase your site’s ranking.

On the right side of your search results and sometimes up at the top of the page are the “Sponsored Links.” These links are paid advertising through a system called Google Adwords. Look for the “Sponsored Links” heading and compare how these links look with the nonsponsored organic links.

Search Engine Optimization

To increase your search rankings in Google and other search engines you can do a number of things. We will focus on Google because of its dominant position as a search engine.

The truth is that it is a crowded field out there for most keywords. Your best bet is to find some niche keywords and work on those. It would be very difficult to achieve a high ranking for the keyword “coffee” but if you have a more specific niche you have a better chance of succeeding.

For example and this is just an example for illustration not necessarily a good keyword combination “Guatemalan shade grown coffee” would be an easier space in which to compete. You would have a chance of rising to the top or at least getting on the first page of results.

The primary way to increase your ranking is to have other high ranking sites establish links to your site and have those links associated with specific keywords such as “Guatemalan shade grown coffee” as in our example. What follows is a few ideas on how to do that in an ethically and effective way. Don’t be tempted by gimmicks because Google and other search engines are becoming more savvy and can penalize sites that try to game the system too much.

First submit your site to as many directories and other clearinghouse type sites in your industry as you can. That should probably be your first step in SEO. Again use the keywords that you are most interested in associating with your site.

Submit your site to general directories that are organized by topic. Some sites charge money for fast consideration of your submission and are probably worth it. For example Yahoo Directory charges 300/year for expedited consideration of your submission. For other highly prized directories such as the Open Directory Project you just have to submit your site and hope it will be considered reasonably soon.

Next talk to your vendors and people in related industries and see about arranging for link exchanges or perhaps even success stories that include a link. They link to you and in exchange you link to them.

Then start writing articles. The key to articles is to write about something you know and that has information that is genuinely interesting to your audience. Publish your article in publications that are related to your industry. If your article is published in web publications you will not only get direct sales leads from your article but your article will also help your search engine position.

For example our fictional coffee vendor could write an article on exactly why shade grown coffee is superior to nonshade grown coffee. Or better yet why “Guatemalan Shade Grown Coffee” is truly the best. The article would have to include facts to support this claim and not just fluff. Maybe the next article could be on how to make the perfect cup of coffee. I would be first in line to read that one.

The key thing to remember is that SEO is a long process. You rarely get instant results. It can take 812 months to see any significant progress. You have to keep at it.

Pay Per Click PPC Advertising

There are a number of PPC providers but we will focus on Google Adwords as they are currently the dominant PPC system.

First you decide on the goal called a conversion of your Adwords campaign. Is it a direct signup? Is it capturing sales leads?

A conversion when the goal is achieved and Google Adwords keeps a running tally of your conversions and the cost per conversion. You can see the cost of obtaining a lead or the cost of getting a customer. You can determine if Adwords is working for you and whether you should make adjustments or discontinue it completely. Generally it takes a bit of experimentation to get it right but it can be a steady source of business for you. It is worth some effort as once it is set up well it runs and can bring in a steady stream of business.

You set a daily budget say 35 and a maximum bid on specific keywords say 2.75. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad click. So if you are bidding 2.75 you might only pay an average of say 2.60 per click. It depends on the keywords and how much you want to bid. Spend some time choosing good keywords. Google Adwords has tools to help you choose the most powerful keywords. You will also need to embed some special code in your website to enable Google to track conversions.

Google Adwords really works. Try it and see if it will work for you. It does not require a big investment to get started. In fact some web hosting and design companies offer a coupon so you can get started with Adwords for free. Google Adwords is easier to use than you might think.

PermissionBased Email Marketing

Spammers have given Email marketing a bad name in much the same way that unethical salespeople have given sales a bad name. This is unfortunate as a knowledgeable salesperson can be an essential part of making good buying decisions. The same is true of good email marketing.

With permissionbased email marketing as opposed to spam the receiver of the email has expressed interest. Think of spam as the wily salesman in the polyester suit and think of permissionbased email as the knowledgeable salesperson we respect.

For example I am on an email list at a bookstore that I frequent. I look forward to the enewsletters as they often have interesting content and good discounts. I enjoy receiving this enewsletter and the bookstore gets more business from me as a result. I rarely go anywhere else to buy books. They have retained me as a customer and I buy more often at least in part because of their enewsletter.

Email marketing can help you increase customer retention and help you earn more revenue from each customer by crossselling and upselling to your current customer base. It can also help you expand your client base.

Email marketing is becoming crucial to online marketing and when done ethically and well can be extremely effective. Sign up for a free trial with an email marketing service and see if it works for you. If not try another service. Find a service that meets your needs.

You can grow your own email newsletter list with a sign up form on your website and by asking for optin in your signup and lead capture forms.

What to look for in an Email Marketing Provider

At a minimum an email marketing service should make it easy for you to create eyecatching emails manage multiple email lists and place newsletter signup forms on your website. There should be powerful list management robust reporting and reliability. Your provider must also have excellent customer service.

Your email marketing service should include an easy way to track the results of your email campaigns. Who opened your email how many times and when? Did they click on the link you provided? Did they purchase anything or submit a lead? The service should enable you to track message reads in real time and read detailed reports online or export them to a spreadsheet.

In addition your email marketing service should give you the ability to manage multiple lists and divide lists into multiple segments.

Conclusion

Obtaining a website and marketing your products or services online does not have to be expensive. An economical way to accomplish these goals is to hire a company to design your website and provide you with bundled web hosting and permissionbased email marketing services. It would be an added bonus if they can get you started using Google Adwords with a free coupon.

About the writer:  Shawn Hickman is the internet marketing manager for Web Solutions of America. Visit our online portfolio and seo results for clients at wsoaonline.com

Getting Your Content Manager For Well-positioned To Have A Web Search Engine

A Professional online marketing parthiban is working with WDO Technologies India. Is a leading web design and development companies have been Providing web design graphic and logo design web design programming web content writing SEO and the staffing of search engine optimization services around the world. T

Take into account the Search Engine optimization for the Web search engine positioning comes to implement a content manager can keep our investment in content is devalued by a poor presence in the search engines.
The managers of content
The generation publication and file a huge number of pages in the major portals and Web sites poses many challenges that the management systems of web content or CMS Content Management System Have tried to solve in recent years:

• To facilitate the generation and editing content for the Web by personnel without specific training in programming.
• To ensure a uniform appearance of all content and its presentation according to a corporate design and editorial line with a predefined.
• Maintain consistency in the structure of Web sites allowing the incorporation of new content in the appropriate sections after approval and the preliminary screening of the persons listed.
• Maintain a consistent navigation that allows users to reach each of the contents that are published at the time.
• Avoid the existence of duplicate content different URLs that show the same content an orphan content files left on the server unnecessarily because they are pages that no longer suggests any link or image files or multimedia to be shown on pages deleted or broken links pointing to pages that do not exist on the server.

The managers of content or CMS are software tools that allow decentralize the work of maintaining the content of a portal so that nontechnical staff from different departments of an enterprise can add edit and manage their own content on a corporate Web.
CMS and search engine positioning: a symbiosis impossible?
However despite its obvious advantages the traditional approach of such tools has focused on providing the best content management by streamlining production processes approval and publication of the same rather than generate Web pages properly optimized to be competitive in the search engines.
The factors that make a Web portal is friendly to the search engines were discussed in various articles of this section as well as the Basic Guide to Search Engine Positioning.
Among the problems from the viewpoint of optimization for search engine positioning appearing in a recurring portals supported by content management systems include the following:

• Dynamic URLs: search engines sometimes limit the number of dynamic variables in the URLs that indexed. The pages generated by many managers frequently contents include a large number of dynamic variables in your URL.
• Unique Titles: The title of a page is one of the most important factors when it comes to positioning well in a content search engines. However many content management systems do not allow users to assign a single relevant to each page.
• Lack of support for meta tags: CMS does not have many specific fields for the user to specify the contents of the Description and Keywords meta tags. Although not as important as the way to achieve a good position in search engines these labels are still playing an important role in the choice of the user to click on our site on a search results page.
• Lack of keywords in the URL: dynamic URLs generated by many content management systems tend to be somewhat friendly to both the user and for the search engines and do not include search terms that contribute to a better positioning.
• Unable to post an optimization: the process of producing content that imposes the use of a CMS system makes it very difficult optimization of the postgenerated content and in the best cases adding an extra work load that could be avoided if SEO company aspects had been taken into account in the implementation of the manager.

It is therefore ironic that precisely those companies that are investing more resources in the maintenance and creation of new content for their websites which while less benefit from the volume that could mobilize such traffic due to poor implementation of their systems content management from the standpoint of search engine positioning. A failure that in many cases is not due to shortcomings of the tool itself but an ignorance on the part of technicians to implement the importance of having that content generated by it can be competitive in the search engines.
Making content management system the best tool SEO
But in the same way that a poorly implemented content manager may reduce the return on investment in content generation of a portal one that has been taken into account the basic aspects of the optimization for the Web search engine positioning can be the ally most effective way to generate content that will be climbing the posts of more competitive. Let’s see how.

Use code valid according to W3C: managers of content based on templates and users can not alter to generate new pages. If we validate the code of these templates at home we ensure that the pages generated from them also contain valid code. The use of valid code ensures that the page will display correctly in different browsers and search engines will be able to track smoothly.

Create a site map: nearly all content managers allow you to create and maintain an updated map of the site. Search engines limit the number of links that can keep 100 per page and be normal HTML text links. If you adjust our content management system for generating and maintaining a hierarchical map of the site with these premises to provide search engines that can track each and every one of the pages on our site.

Limiting the level of subdirectories: search engines give more importance to the closer a page is the portal’s home page. That is why we must limit the number of subdirectories that shows the URL: many managers allow content hierarchically organizing the content regardless of the physical location of files on the server introducing much more simple URLs that the actual structure of the directory.

• Connect the control validation of the CMS links: Most managers control the publication of broken links that point to content controlled by the managers themselves but few validated that a link that points to an address outside is not a broken link. If control there make sure to connect it to prevent a user can insert a link to a website nonexistent.
• Leave the control of the robots.txt file to the webmaster: some allow content managers to edit the content of the robots.txt file by the author of a page. In general is better than only the webmaster controlling the contents of this file to prevent through ignorance a user can block crawling robots an important part of the Web.
• Avoid duplicate URLs: search engines are highly selective when it comes to punishing the duplicate content of a Web so you must make sure that each page only exists under a single URL. In any case if the users can get to the same content from URLs counterparts it is better to schedule permanent redirects 301 which are not penalized by the search engines.
• Reduce the garbage code: simplifying the HTML code using the templates and opt to use Cascading Style Sheets CSS instead of tables to lay out the contents. The use of Cascading Style Sheets makes it easier to update a Web design chennai reduces the weight of the file layout traveling once from the server to the user then it is already available in the temporary memory or cache of the browser for following pages visited and gives greater preponderance to the significant content of the page with respect to the total weight of the code of it.
• Select the option of text for the navigation of the site: avoiding wherever possible the use of Javascript or Flash menus as their links can not be followed by the search engines. In many cases we can achieve through the use of CSS effects similar to those of the menus Javascript or Flash. If the content manager can create a trail of breadcrumbs breadcrumb activmoslo. Improving the usability of the site helps put the user in the whole structure of the web and is a great shortcut to the search engines crawl the entire contents.
• Do not forget that there are the headlines: the use of styles makes us forget the existence of a hierarchy of HTML tags H1 H2 H3 etc.. Whose final appearance can also change styles but they help search engines to better understand the logical structure of the page signal and what aspects are more important. It is therefore important to encourage publishers to use content headings rather than simply defining the text larger or smaller in size and font if possible limit to a single heading a top level H1 per page.
• Require the creation of a single title and the addition of meta tags relevant: CMS schedule so that the completion of title and meta tags is a requirement for the publication of the contents and if possible activate a control to verify the uniqueness of title.
• Require filling in the alt tag to add a picture to the content. This tag lets the search engines to index the best images is working on the relevance of key terms of the page and improving the accessibility of content by individuals with vision problems.

Implement controls to prevent the issuance of duplicate content.

To encourage use descriptive texts into links: instead of “Click here” using “More information on our customer support 24H.

The best of both worlds
It is therefore evident that if the implement a content manager to generate and maintain the contents of a large portal takes into account aspects relating to the optimization and web search engine positioning of the portal we can encourage or in some way impose a certain discipline through the CMS system itself involving the editors to create content pages easily traceable and indexed which can compete adequately in the search engines.
The big companies have the raw material favorite search engines: content rich original dynamic and rapidly updated. Size all the capacity of managers of content to extract the maximum return on investment they make in their presence on the Web.

About the writer:  WDO Technologies Provide Web design India PHP Web development Search Engine Optimization Search Engine Marketing and Link Building