Want to market your web site?
Most people think that if you build a web site people will come. I have spoken to people that believed this. Owning a web site is like owning a business. You need to do something to market and promote it.
Here are my thoughts that can help you realize your marketing avenues. First, you need to review your website for the following:
1) Content – Content is the most important step in getting your business noticed. You need to have information that people are searching for in relation to a product or service. I would use at least 250 words per page. As far as search engines go, the more content the better. You want to keep the web page readable by your audience, so too long is not a good thing. It may turn off your readers if it’s about 10 pages long! Try to add 1 page per month and update the information on your main page as often as you can.
2) Menu Layout – Be sure that the web site has an easy to use menu system. I have found that text based links have an advantage over graphics based hyperlinks. You can perform mouseovers with both graphics and text based hyperlinks, but text based hyperlinks carry more weight because the search engine spiders can read them more easily. Hyperlinking also tells the spiders to read those links as well. Graphic based hyperlinks may not have the alt tags (the text description) to gain any relevance. Even if the alt tags have text, the alt tags seem to have less importance because too many web sites like to keyword stuff the images in the alt tags.
3) Web page layout – Balance your graphics and text on a web page. Try to have your layout look professional. You should look at other web sites to get ideas before a single minute is spent building the web site.
4) Web page loading – Keep in mind, that if your web page takes too long to load, then you need to review what size your images are and if you really need them. All the images need to be optimized (reduced in sized yet still look good), all the code needs to be checked to see if there are any problems as well.
5) Do you have your contact information on every page? You don’t want to visitors hunting for your contact information. You should have at least your phone number, company name, address, city, state and zip code on every page. E-mail addresses are important, but due to all the e-mail harvesters out there, which will send you tons of spam, I would recommend an encrypted e-mail link or a well developed form page (one that will accept information from your web site only).
6) Hyperlink keyword phrases in your page to other web pages in your web site. This is called interlinking. The search engine spiders look for links connecting your web site and if you use the keywords to hyper link you can increase the likelyhood that these links will be found in the search engines. Highly recommended.
7) If you are using CSS or JavaScript, create separate files and add those files to the web page. Sometimes the different search engine spiders have issues with CSS and JavaScript. They can actually block the spider from seeing your whole web site.
Be sure that your web site is W3C compliant http://validator.w3.org/ . Search Engines are getting more sophisticated. The websites that have less errors in the html code seem to do better in ranking than those that have errors.
9) Check your grammar and spelling. Again, the search engines are getting smarter as they evolve in their algorithms. It has been rumored that search engines are using spell checkers and can also check the basic sentence structure.
10) If you are collecting information or have a contact form consider having a privacy page. A privacy page tells the user what you will do with their contact information. Obviously, you want to protect all customer contact information.
Check back for part 2
Until then – good luck in your SEM
-=Smitty=-
