An attractive website is a beautiful thing to behold. But looks, shall we say, are only screen-deep. For a website to be a catalyst for reaching customers, it also needs compelling, web-friendly copywriting.
It’s not just about having a fabulous website, you need stellar copy that will attract business and inspire customers to take action – whether to buy product, call for an appointment or email for more info. Without skillful writing, people visiting your site may lose interest, fail to understand your mission, or click away to another site after mere seconds. Even worse, lackluster writing without keyword-rich content means search engines won’t be able to help people find your website.
Is your website content already written or do you want to write it yourself? Don’t forget that crucial second pair of eyes check your grammar, polish your prose, and edit your message for optimal web readability.
Content should never be an afterthought. Smart content strategy considers content placement as well as writing new content and editing existing text. In fact, the best approach begins with the end in mind: defining initial goals from search engine optimization (SEO) and website design and architecture to content strategy and ongoing maintenance.
The Internet has made apparent that a company’s website is an increasingly important asset, and many businesses are now embarking on website redesign projects to “improve” their websites. However, in order to really get the most out of a website redesign, companies need to construct their website in the context of a greater Internet marketing strategy.
The following video is from a free webinar presented by HubSpot’s VP of Marketing, Mike Volpe, discussing strategies for a successful website redesign.
Before you get started: when and why to do a website redesign
Keyword research to build out website content strategically
Building your website’s reputation via blogs and social media
How to measure results from your Internet marketing efforts
Also known as social networking, the social web allows you to share with your colleagues, friends, family and strangers. It allows you to share your writings, thoughts, videos, music, pictures and more.
While the old Web was about Web sites, clicks, and “eyeballs,” the new Web is about communities, participation and peering. As users and computer power multiply, and easy-to-use tools proliferate, the Internet is evolving into a global, living, networked computer that anyone can program. Even the simple act of participating in an online community makes a contribution to the new digital commons – whether one’s building a business on Amazon or producing a video clip for YouTube, creating a community around his or her Flickr photo collection or editing the astronomy entry on Wikipedia.
The following slide show, although it’s from 2006, provides a helpful explanation of the Social Web, from Wikis and RSS to Blogs, Flickr and more.
Being Sociable
With today’s enormous shift toward online communication, understanding the online space is critical. Too many businesses are still merely dipping their toes into the world of social networking. This year, the need to jump in is even more pronounced. Interest groups are being formed, new brand leaders are being established, and thought leaders are constantly emerging in these new social communities. Anyone who is not out there making mistakes, learning the protocol, and getting a feel for how their brand and personal connection play in the bigger business cycle, will quickly find themselves isolated and on the outside looking in.
Big sites with big traffic are great places to drive traffic to your own site, whether it’s on Twitter, in blog comments, with a Facebook fan page, or whatever is appropriate for your niche. To establish brand credibility and your place in this new marketplace, create a group in LinkedIn, Facebook and other essential social media and trade association directories. Start the invitation process and begin to get a feel for what it’s like to be a participant in the community.
With nearly 60% of adults under 35 with a social networking site profile and Twitter usage nearly doubling in 6 months, it’s clear that successful online marketing and development groups need to get their arms around using these online web services.
In the following slide show by OHO Interactive, you will learn about Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube web services, who is using them, and how you can get started.
Topics include:
- The impact of these Web 2.0 applications on marketing
- The key offer and attraction of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube
- The latest demographic usage data for social networking applications
- Best practices – and biggest blunders – for using these applications
Homepages are considered some of the most valuable real estate in the world. Not even a square foot in size, the homepage is your company’s face to the world. In one short glance, a website’s homepage must communicate where users are, what your company does, and what users can do at your site. If a user has to ask “What is the purpose of this site?” it means your site has missed the mark, from which it’s nearly impossible to recover.
In order to communicate well, homepages must give appropriate emphasis to both branding and high-priority tasks. The homepage must also have a memorable and distinct look, so that users can recognize it as their starting place when coming from any other part of the website.
Top 9 Homepage Guidelines
Make the Site’s Purpose Clear: Explain Who You Are and What You Do
1. Start the page with a One-Sentence Tagline summarizing what the site or company does.
2. Begin the Title tag with the company name followed by a brief description of the site. The Title tag needs to provide good visibility in search engines and bookmark lists.
3. Group all company information in one distinct area – About Us.
Help Users Find What They Need
4. Emphasize the site’s top high-priority tasks by offering users a clear starting point for the primary one, up to four, tasks they’ll undertake when visiting your site.
5. For larger sites, include a search input box.
Reveal Site Content
6. Start your content on your homepage.
7. Begin link names with the most important keyword.
Use Visual Design to Enhance, not Define, Interaction
8. Don’t over-format critical content such as navigation areas, users often dismiss graphics as ads.
9. Use meaningful images to serve as powerful communicators depicting items of interest to users.
For a more in-depth look at this topic, check out 113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability
excerpted from the book Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed by Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir.
What are you doing to fully optimize your efforts for SEO and extend your web presence?
Using social media to market your business is a good idea. Social networks provide wonderful opportunities for sharing, but no one will want to share your content unless it’s awesome. Set yourself apart from the crowd by doing things that others think are awesome and want to talk about – using social media to get the word out.
Your “Awesome” is comprised of things you do that others want to talk about. It’s all about how you spin your content to make it engaging in the social space.
Start by creating a strategy to effectively market your business using social media tools and sites like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, StumbleUpon and other kick-ass business networks. Use social communities like Yelp, Gotime and Biznik to increase your SEO footprint online. Set up and launch ad campaigns with multiple levels of targeting by age, gender, marital status, location, etc.
Regardless of what tools, platforms, or strategies you pick; at the end of the day; you have to understand where you money is going and what you are getting out of your investment. Before plunging into social media marketing, establish a social media ROI framework that will allow you to understand, measure, and maximize your ROI as well as to improve your marketing ROI and accountability as a whole.
Every two years, SEOmoz surveys top SEO experts in the field worldwide on their opinions of the algorithmic elements that comprise search engine rankings. Developed by Rand Fishkin as a gauge of the most important elements considered by Google’s organic ranking algorithm, this year’s 72 participants were each asked to rate more than 100 search ranking factors along with specific questions about hot issues in the SEO field. The results represent their collective wisdom, forming one of the most useful resources for SEO practitioners of all varieties, helping to provide transparency into what matters (and doesn’t) for best practices in search engine optimization.
Top 5 Ranking Factors
1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links 73% very high importance
2. External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links) 71% very high importance
3. Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains) 67% very high importance
4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag 66% very high importance
5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g. TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.) 66% very high importance
Developed by David Mihm, the inspiration for this project came from SEOmoz’s biennially-published Search Engine Ranking Factors. This year, 27 prominent bloggers and practitioners were asked to rate the importance of 49 criteria with respect to their influence on rankings in the Google and Yahoo Local “Universal” search algorithms (those that drive the 10-pack, 3-pack, and authoritative onebox search results; NOT the standard organic algorithms).
If you find yourself confused by Local Search, this report will prove an excellent resource to help you fine-tune your marketing efforts. For example, Google Maps is now incredibly accurate (and forceful) in listing your business in your city/town regardless of your actual service area. Results indicate that:
It’s becoming even more important to have a physical location for your business within the city which is being searched.
The importance of links in the Local search algorithm(s) seems to be on its way down, while the importance of citations, particularly those from major data providers and industry/location-specific directories, was deemed to be increasing in importance. Hyper Local citations (from blogs or other businesses in your area) are becoming more important, too, but not at the same rate. The quality of links seems much more important than quantity, which speaks to the idea of Location Prominence as a central algorithmic factor.
When it comes to reviews, it’s the exact opposite–at least in terms of rankings. Nearly every expert felt that positive customer experiences dramatically increased clickthrough and conversion, but that volume of reviews is what makes the difference in ranking.
As the Web has evolved, websites have become much more diverse, particularly in how they are constructed. Most notably, with the wide variety of programming languages and design techniques now being used to build websites.
Unfortunately, some of these coding and design techniques are detrimental to search engine positioning. And if your website uses any of them, it’s probably time to build a new website, or at least rebuild in a format that is better suited for search-engine positioning.
Something to think about: Your website’s home page is where your site makes its first impression with the search engines. Therefore, it’s important to present the site with informative text that both the search engines and people can use. Start by making sure your website meets w3c validation guidelines.
If your website falls short, don’t hold off making improvements. While it may be costly to make a change, the cost of not showing up on the search engines is far greater.
Before you get stuck on what features are most important to incorporate in your website, check out this video by Wil Reynolds, head SEO consultant at SEER Interactive. He discusses which SEO practices are no longer being used as well as explaining best SEO practices.
A blog is your quickest path to top search engine rankings
It used to be where you could just build a static html site, stuff keywords throughout the title, description, and keyword tags in the code, and you’d be able to rank for those phrases. However, Google’s algorithm is changing from the days of old. Google.com, accessed by hundreds of millions of people each day, uses over two hundred signals in their web search rankings but the keywords meta tag is no longer one of them. (Source: Google Webmaster Central Blog, September 21, 2009) Google disregards keyword meta tags completely and has now turned to favoring sites that feed a continual flow of freshly updated content.
Blogs inherently create a continual flow of fresh content. Each blog posting is actually a new page that is crawled and indexed in Google search results. So, the cumulative effect of writing a lot of content is that you are continually building an inventory of pages that are accessible in Google for a wide range of keyword phrases. If people are finding your content, bookmarking your site, subscribing to your RSS feed, and coming back for more, then that means people will also be linking to your content. The more traffic, subscribers and links you have, the more PageRank will be attributed to your site. PageRank is the number and quality of links to your site. The more PageRank your site has, the higher it will rank in Google, the more often your site will be crawled, and the deeper those crawls will be – all of which adds more PageRank to your blog.
If you’re thinking about starting a blog, I highly recommend using Wordpress, an extremely powerful platform for achieving high levels of exposure and top search rankings in Google’s search results. Wordpress is a super clean CMS (content management system) that Google finds easy to crawl and who’s coding is well structured. Matt Cutts, a well known Google engineer, has even stated that Wordpress takes care of 80-90% of the technical SEO elements automatically. To boost your blog’s success, check out the following video of Matt Cutt’s talk on SEO for Wordpress at WordCamp San Francisco 2009, he shares a wealth of tips and recommendations:
Stay in touch online, subscribe to the KSL Designs Blog for articles on design, tech, Internet and social media. Follow me on Twitter, be my Facebook fan or let's connect on Biznik or LinkedIn. Get updates on all my networks with FriendFeed.
