|
Marketing your business effectively over the internet is
based on doing a few simple things well, but it takes a lot of work and
information to ensure that you are doing those things well enough. Before
you begin, consider what your
Internet
marketing strategy will be.
All effective marketing on the Internet begins with the
creation of an effective web site. "Effective" in this context means
specifically that the site will produce traffic that is relevant to the
content of the site. There are many other considerations to creating
an effective site, ranging from attractive design , to comprehensive
coverage of the topic, to "user friendly" design, but these issues are not
addressed here.
The key ingredients to an effective web site are:
(There are many tools available on the Internet
to help you with your development of your site. Here are some useful
reference sites that I have found.)
If the initial
design of the site takes account of all these factors, the site will be well
positioned to attract qualified prospects to the business.
Let's take a further
look at each of these factors:
First, recognize
that keywords are important, but the real secret is making use of the right
"key phrases". Key phrases are more targeted to your particular interests
and those of the community you are trying to reach. They will deliver more
focused visitors and are also easier to rank on in the search engines. Think
of the "key words" as the elements of the key phrases. There is a
lot to consider in doing your keyword
analysis to achieve your search engine ranking.
Picking the right
key phrases consists of two issues; picking terms that describe the elements
of your business that you want to promote, and picking terms that will be
commonly used by your target audience.
Back to Top
Once the optimum
keywords ("...phrases") have been identified, they must be placed properly
in the page. Search engines evaluate pages based on these phrases in several
different ways. The number of times the phrase appears on the page is one
indication of the importance of the phrase to the content of the page.
Search engines are also on the alert for "spamming", or using phrases
excessively in order to influence ranking. The engines are capable of
determining the ratio of keywords to total words on the page, and will take
this into account. Different engines observe different standards for what
ratios they consider acceptable and appropriate, but a ratio of five percent
(5%) is generally acceptable.
Emphasis is also
considered an important indication of relevance. Use of the words in section
or paragraph headings increase the weight they are given, as does increases
in font size or font weight. Using keywords or phrases ad links to other
pages in the site that pertain to the phrase can be very helpful.
Back to Top
Many of your
prospects for your business will be familiar with industry oriented
directories, or may prefer to search through such directories for their
services. Your site needs to be effectively displayed in the listings in the
appropriate categories to let prospects know that your business provides the
services or products that fit their needs. Knowledge of your industry and
how it is represented on the Internet is important to establishing your
marketing position.
Many directories are
created as business sites on the Internet to assist users in finding
information. The creators of these directories are motivated to make their
directories as comprehensive as possible. Their revenue base is intended to
be advertisers who want to reach the community that uses the directory. Many
of these directories will carry a listing for your business at no charge. It
is to your benefit to find all such directories and ensure that your
business is represented effectively.
Other directories
earn their income by charging for listings. Where these directories are well
established as industry references, they are certainly worth consideration.
In whatever
directories your links to your site are placed, be sure to examine the place
where your listing will appear before you submit to the directory. The
description that you submit to each directory should be tailored to provide
the impact that you will need within the listing to draw the users to your
site instead of your competitors. Think about what you can say in the
description of your site that will set you apart from the other listings and
attract the particular clients that you can serve best.
Back to Top
Search engines have
placed more and more emphasis on links from other sites as a measure of
quality of content. In effect, they are letting members of the Internet
community vote for the best sites. They compound these votes by placing more
weight on the votes of the more powerful sites, and from sites that are
clearly relevant. (Remember that relevance is determined by the existence of
keywords & phrases.)
Because of the
popularity of "link farms", engines also discount links from pages with a
large number of links to other sites. Every site on the Internet has
effectively earned a certain value in the eyes of the search engines that it
can dispense to or share with other sites of its choosing. This value,
however, is finite, and diminishes in value as it is dispersed more widely.
For the business
owner of a site, this places a premium on identifying other sites that bear
some relationship to the concept of your site and soliciting links from them
to the pages on your site that are most directly relevant. A link from a
powerful site that is related to yours is worth a great deal, and is more
valuable to the extent that there are fewer links from that page of the site
to other sites. Back to Top
A handy tool that I use for managing
reciprocal links on my site
and on my clients' sites is Arelis, a software package available from
Axandra. 
This is not "freeware", as are many of the software packages I mention
on this site, but it is software that I use personally and have found
to be a very powerful and useful aid to the tedious work of obtaining
and managing the all-important links in to my sites. It is
available for a trial period to give you an opportunity to experiment
with its functions, although you cannot use the trial version to work
with the links on your site. You can get a good idea of the
functionality of the software and how you use it. |
All the factors
described above are strategic and deliberate, but, essentially, passive
marketing. With the use of newsletters, the site manager becomes a
proactive marketer, sending out information to interested parties, and
encouraging them to pass the information on to other of their contacts who
might also have an interest. This can be an extremely powerful marketing
tool. Everyone in your prospect community knows others who share their
interests, and if you are able to engage them in distributing your
information, they become an extension of your marketing and sales force.
(And, they work for free!)
|
FreeFind