Website Marketing - How to make your site more marketable
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:
http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?.src=srch&.done=http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
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!!
Shaun Roos
B.A. Marketing, Utah State University
Web Development Director
Utah Web Services
Tags: Internet Marketing, SEM - Search Engine Marketing, SEO Training
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