July 2, 2007
Get the Word Out on the Web
By Chad Preston | Lowes for Pros
The world and all it has to offer is available at the click of a
mouse. Have you ensured that your business is part of that offering?
Your Web site has all the pertinent information you need to hold an effective Web presence for your business. The problem is not many people are visiting it. How do you get the word out? Here are some tips on ways to market your site effectively on the Web and bring in more traffic.
Bonnie Harris, founder of Wax Marketing Inc. in St. Paul, Minn., says businesses must understand how to utilize proven techniques that are invaluable online marketing tools.
- Blogs. “Everyone should have a blog, in my opinion, but you should put real content in there, not your latest trip to Jamaica,” Harris says. Search engines, like Google, for instance, can pick up blogs in as little as two weeks, and it’s one of the best ways, along with press releases on wire services, to improve your business’s natural search results quickly, she says.
- Search engine optimization (SEO). The purpose of SEO is to increase the quantity and quality of online visitors who find your site by performing a simple search engine query. Be mindful of the keywords you use—search engines use keywords to locate the pages a Web surfer is looking for. “Be realistic about your keywords, and don’t expect to rank high on ones that have millions of searches a day,” Harris says. “Choose keywords with geographical references like ‘tools supply Detroit’ or ‘painting services Minneapolis.’ Longer-term objectives such as branding, name recognition or support for a direct sales campaign lend themselves well to natural SEO.”
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Harris says this can be an effective method of marketing your products—you only pay when someone clicks on your “sponsored results,” but the conversion rates for PPC ads are much lower than natural search engine searches, she warns.
- Web ads and e-mail campaigns. “Short-term goals lend themselves well to Web ads and e-mail campaigns,” Harris says. “Short-term objectives tend to have much stronger calls to action, and those translate well to banner ads and e-mails.”
Integrating more than one technique is critical for Web marketing, Harris says, adding that there is no best method to use. She tends to look at objectives and separates them into short-term and long-term and applies the appropriate method.
You can measure how effective these marketing tactics are by conversion, or the amount of click-throughs to your site or landing page, she says. From there, if customers aren’t purchasing or contacting you for more information, then it’s a problem with your Web site, she says, not the tool or method you used to get them there.
And don’t be afraid to let Web surfers know how to get in touch with you. “Put contact information front and center on anything you do,” she says. “It cannot be too obvious. Forget about cool Flash or fancy tricks. The best ‘Webvertising’ uses simple, bold words that say what they mean.”
Keep It Simple
Kelly Cutler, CEO of Marcel Media in Chicago, says the following are four, out of many, actions that can diminish your Web site’s marketability, keeping it from being search-engine friendly.
- Utilizing session or user IDs. In computer science parlance, a session ID is a piece of data that identifies a series of related message exchanges—a “session.” A user ID is like your log-in to Yahoo! Mail or Google Mail account. Session and user IDs create new pages that appear to search engines to be spam every time the engine's crawlers visit a new page, Cutler says.
- Deploying Meta title and description tags across the Web site. Web crawlers have a hard time distinguishing pages that have the same Meta title and description tags. Web crawlers will determine that your site lacks content and will penalize the site—it won’t do well in search results.
- Creating an all JAVA or Flash Web site. “JAVA and Flash Web sites are not indexed by search engines,” Cutler says. “Many site owners believe that high-tech sites will create appeal and engagement. Content becomes buried in sites that are completely JAVA- or Flash-based. As a result, these sites become invisible to Web crawlers and are essentially obsolete.”
- Failing to update site content on a regular basis. “Stagnant or stale Web site content diminishes ‘stickiness’ and can kill a site,” Cutler says. “Engaging your audience is key to search engine optimization. Continuously fresh content draws in new visitors and increases the number of returning visitors.”
Read the full article here.
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