Internet Marketing Blog

These days its very easy for small businesses to get a site up and running. A business owner can have his son, cousin, brother, co-worker, etc. design a site in Front Page and get it up on the web.

The difficult part seems to come when their site has been online for a while and they don’t get any hits or they get hits but don’t get any sales. Website Marketing is a fine art and there are dozens of things you can do. I will outline what I feel are 5 of the most important ways to make your website more marketable.

1) Content - It’s great to have a site that looks good with flash, animation, images etc. but good content is the keyto getting the right potential customers to your site and getting them to take action.

a. Search engines like content - When a search is submitted, the search engine scours the web to find sites with content most relevant to that search. So the more relevant content you have on your site the better but you want to keep in balance so that it is also interesting and valuable to your visitors.

b. Visitors like good content - When writing your content you want to make sure you are not only using terms that search engines will be looking for but you want to make it interesting to the reader. Ask yourself the following: Why would people come to this site? What am I offering that is unique and attractive to a potential buyer? Why would they choose my product or service over a competitor?

2) Clean code - Sites that are coded well are not only faster loading but more easily ready by search engines. Ideally make sure your site is coded using CSS (cascading style sheets) and W3C compliant (World Wide Web Consortium).

Once your site is up and running, here are some tools to run to make sure your code is clean:

Markup Validator Service

http://validator.w3.org/

NetMechanic

http://www.netmechanic.com/products/HTML_Toolbox_FreeSample.shtml

Dr. Watson

http://watson.addy.com/

3) URL Structure - Search engines can scan through your site urls and find keywords relevant to the search. Therefore if you are selling Nike shoes, it much better to name your page nike-shoes.html rather than something like page21.htm. This also applies to folder names so you should use something like shoes/nike-shoes.html rather than /store/page21.htm.

4) Link Submissions - We’ve all seen sites that promote submitting your site to 100,000 search engines. This may have worked back in the 90’s but it can actually cause more harm than good. What you want to do is submit your site only to directories with related content. When submitting to search engines, it is best to submit to only the really important ones such as:

a. Google

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

b. Yahoo (account needed)

https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?.src=srch&.done=http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

c. Open Directory

http://www.dmoz.org/

5. Get Feedback - Marketing research can be a very simple but invaluable thing to have on your web site. Simply put up a feedback form to collect data from your visitors. Listen to what they have to say and adjust your site accordingly. When you receive glowing feedback on a product or service you have delivered, post that to a testimonials page. This will instill trust in others who are considering buying from you!

In summary, create a site that has clean code, fast loading and provides quality content that your visitors are looking for. Keep in mind the url structure to make the pages easy to find and only submit your site to the most quality directories and search engines. Quality is more important than quantity here. Finally get feedback from your visitors and heed that feedback to continually improve on your site.

GOOD LUCK IN YOUR ONLINE MARKETING EFFORTS!!

Its official. WIworks, Inc has finally launched our Internet Marketing blog. It’s affectionately termed the WIblog.

We’ve given a lot of thought into how to present the most useful information for CEOs, directors, managers and other executives involved in any aspect of your company’s internet marketing strategy. The goal of this blog is to provide a wealth of internet survival tips for CEOs.

So, here’s some tips on how to get the most from this blog:

• Choose the subject matter that’s most relevant for your business organization by looking under the Categories section to the top right. There you’ll find pertinent subjects such as Reputation Management, Social Media, SEO, PPC, Web Design, Programming, Training, etc. Feel free to add your own comments to any post. We want to hear how you, as executives in your company, handle internet marketing challenges and find out what help you need to survive and thrive in this ever-changing online world.
• Check in each week for our WIcast a podcast featuring a variety of C-level executives, like yourself, who are managing the challenges of staying ahead of the pack in the internet marketing space.
• Subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up to date with the latest in Internet marketing strategies that we discuss on the WIblog
• Follow WIworksInc on Twitter and find out just what goes on in the day-to-day routine of this Internet Marketing Firm. We’re sure you’ll find some gems that you can use to ramp up your own internet marketing efforts. We post articles that we find helpful and tear apart those we think are giving misleading information. You don’t want to miss that.
• Check out some of our web design projects on our Flickr feed. You might find just the inspiration you need to move ahead with that Internet Marketing strategy you’ve put on the back burner until just the right time.

This is an internet marketing strategies blog, but there will be no shortage of passion here. This blog was created for you. Your online business is your livelihood, and surely you have much passion for that. We want to hear about it. We can’t wait to hear from you. We only ask that, as professionals, you treat others in this space with respect, even if they have a differing view.

So jump into the conversations. Ask questions or make suggestions. Feel free to talk to us. We’re listening.