Internet Marketing Blog

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

The difficult part comes when their web site has been online for a while and they don’t get any traffic or they get traffic but no sales.

Internet  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 key to getting the right potential customers to your site and getting them to take action.

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) Relevant Links - 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.  Sites that rank on the first page of search results have links that come from trusted industry sites. When submitting to search engines, it is best to submit to only the really important ones such as:

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!!

Shaun Roos
B.A. Marketing, Utah State University
Web Development Director
Utah Web Services

If you are a small-to-medium sized website owner, have you put off performing multi-variate testing on your website? A/B testing? Think it only matters for multi-million dollar e-commerce websites?

Conversion rate optimization has finally started to get the attention it has deserved all along. But how many of you small-to-medium website owners are actually implementing a solid conversion improvement strategy on your website?

The number of small-to-medium website owners implementing conversion optimization is slowly increasing, but guaging the impact of marketing campaigns is not only for large online retailers. ROI matters even more for small-to-medium businesses with fewer resources to play with. So Here are 5 free- to low-cost ways that small to medium websites can increase their optimization rates and boost ROI.

1. Establish conversion benchmarks. Where does your website stand right now in terms of sales? Are there areas of your website that you would like to see improve? Note this and establish your current website standing as a benchmark.

2. Choose your definition of success: Is it traffic? Sales for a certain product? Leads? Whatever it is, articulate these business goals and have your marketing person log your website activity up to this point as the benchmark for future improvements. This is critical since many firms lack an effective system for measuring the success of their website against business goals and objectives.

3. Set up website analytics: If you have not done so already have an analytics product installed to help you collect valuable information about how visitors are using your web site. This data is gold to a web site owner, as well organized data helps you to make timely decisions, such as the best products to feature, how effective your advertising efforts have been at bringing converting visitors to your web site, etc. An analytics program I’ve used with good results is Omniture’s Site Catalyst.

So, now that you’ve got this web site visitor data, what do you do with it? Next week we’ll talk about how to use visitor data to raise your web site conversion rates.

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.