Online Marketing

Far be it from Dreamscape Multimedia to exclude one of our favorite topics: online marketing. This section covers all facets of marketing your products and services on the World Wide Web. During the Internet boom of the 90's, many companies created websites that were nothing more than online brochures. They did this, primarily, because they were hearing the buzz and feared being left behind. As more and more companies have developed an online presence however, it hasn't been enough to simply be on the Web. As awareness has expanded, so has the initiative to make a company's website a real player in the sales, marketing and production arm of the business. In order to do this, however, you need to know how to draw traffic to your site.

More Tips on SEM and SEO

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HTML Coding/Development

  • Add brief descriptions to the alt attribute of image tags. The attribute should describe the image, not be a summary of the article.
  • Use H1, H2, and H3 for titles and headings. Ensure the main body content is immediately after the H1, with no breadcrumbs or navigation in between.
  • Create a relevant HTML title for every page. Using the actual article title that appears in the page is a good idea.
  • Use style sheets as much as possible to keep the page size low.
  • Use brief and relevant meta tags (keywords and descriptions) to provide a backup for the description that appears in search engine listings.
  • Don't fill the meta tags with words that don't appear in the content of the page. The exception to this is to put common misspellings in the meta tags.
  • Don't repeat meta tag content on every page. The content should be specific to the page.
  • Create separate sites rather than making a site a sub-site of a larger one.
  • Do not make every visit to a URL unique by appending a session ID or something similar.
  • Create a site map. This is as much for users as for search engines as it can serve as a gateway to deep content.
  • Don't link to redirects. Better to link directly to the destination page.

Images, Flash, Video

  • Avoid creating images that contain only text (i.e. if an image contains just text, consider using HTML instead.)
  • Ensure all images are named appropriately, have alt tags and are placed near text that is relevant to the image.
  • Don't put content in Flash movies. Better to have the content outside of the Flash and in the HTML.
  • Provide transcripts for video or audio interviews.

Copy and Content

  • Create a title that uses words that describe the main theme of the article.
  • Use headings and sub-headings that describe the main theme of the copy that follows.
  • Don't automatically swap out repeated words and phrases in favor of less common words and phrases.
  • Post all content on the web site including newsletters.
  • Keep all special content such as Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving specials on-line.
  • Don't use pop-up windows for content. If pop-ups are necessary, provide an alternative link to the same page that isn't a pop-up.
  • Don't remove content from a web site.
  • Ensure all content—in particular old content—has a link pointing to it. Use a sitemap or archive list page if necessary.
  • Allow search engines to view forum discussions. This is free content.
  • Update content as often as possible. Search engines like frequently updated sites and will visit more frequently.
  • Don't worry about writing articles that are too long. The longer the better when it comes to SEO.

Links

  • Use link text that is relevant to the destination page. Avoid creating links that read "click here" or "read more".
  • Don't create links out of entire sentences.
  • Don't fill the page footer with links to other sites. Better to keep the list short.
  • Cross-link between pages in the web site.
  • Link to external sites.
  • Encourage external sites to link to specific content. Many sites are open to sharing links.

More SEM and SEO Tips

  • Decide what search phrases you want to target. Use a tool such as the Google keywords suggestion tool to see what search phrases are popular, and optimize your site for these. You can optimize for any number of phrases; a bigger site can target a greater range of phrases.
  • Clean up URLs. No capital letters, no spaces, no special characters. Separate each word with a "-" dash. Make sure each URL accurately describes the page.
  • Remove query strings from URLs. No question marks in your URLs.
  • Redirect the non-www version of your site. When you enter domain.com into the browser, it should redirect you to www.domain.com using a SEO friendly 301 redirection.
  • Make sure you don't link to "index.htm" or "index.php". Instead, link to "/".
  • Remove frames from your site.
  • Ensure the title is different on every page of the site.
  • If your main navigation is flash or image based, ask yourself if it can be done using CSS. If it can, do it.
  • If using CSS styled text for navigation is unthinkable, then add text based footer navigation on every page.
  • Add a Google XML sitemap, even if it's just a simple list of all the URLs on your site. Submit this to Google through the Google Sitemaps program or Google Webmaster Tools.
  • Is your website tables-based? Consider a cleaner CSS-based layout for your site.
  • Have you got a website statistics program installed? Do you know how to access it, and do you check it regularly? If not, discover Google Analytics.
  • Do you know where your website currently sits for your main phrases? If not, check Google, the localized version of Google (e.g. google.co.nz,) Yahoo and MSN. Remember: few visitors will search past page three.
  • Check the optimization of each page. Pick one search phrase that is relevant to the content on the page. Ensure the page contains the phrase in the title, H1 heading, twice in the meta description, twice in the opening paragraph, and also in the URL if possible.
  • Have good content? SEO will be much harder if you don't have plenty of original text content, so engage in more time writing good content.
  • Check the source order of your page. Good source code will have the page content as close to the top of the HTML document as possible, and the least important elements such as sidebars and footers last. If you can get the content above the main navigation, great.
  • Action all recommendations that it makes, such as fixing broken links. Look carefully at the list of URLs, and make sure they are clean (no spaces, capitals, etc.)
  • Check the search engines to see how well indexed your site is. If the search engines have indexed pages that have since been moved or deleted, setup a 301 redirect to redirect all traffic that these pages generate (or lose it).
  • If you are a local "bricks and mortar" business, make sure you use your town / city / country on every page, in the title if possible, and in close proximity to your chosen search phrase.
  • Contact Dreamscape Multimedia to optimize your website and help you with your search engine marketing.
 

When Do Cookies Expire?

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Cookies will either time out on their own, OR your browser will clear them out (manually or automatically). Take Firefox (v3.0.14), for example. In your menu bar, go to Tools> Options...> Privacy and look at the cookies area in this panel. You can clear your private data (including all cookies) by hand or set things to clear every time you close your browser. You can also view the cookies that have loaded onto your machine from here and you will see expiration information for each.

So—while companies may like to set their cookies on users' machines for their own time periods—they are ultimately at the mercy of the user's sophistication, preferences and paranoia. This means the data collected from cookies will NEVER show the whole picture, though they may offer a decent snapshot at times.
   

Is It Our Job to Educate Businesses in Tactical SEM?

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Read John Sylvester's article, Is It Our Job to Educate Businesses in Tactical SEM?
   

A few tips about search engine optimization (SEO).

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Do you want a website that gets found in Google, Yahoo, and MSN? Do you want more traffic? Do you want more revenue? It's not terribly hard, but it takes some work. Here is where to start:
  1. Myth #1: If you purchase a new domain with maximum information per square inch, you'll rank higher in the search engines. Answer: Yes and no. Domain names are the first things a search engine looks at, so if you have the name of your product or service in your domain name, kudos to you. Google, on the other hand, uses what's known as an "aging delay" for all new domains. This allows them to weed out many of the fly-by-night's and give priority to the sites that have remained staples the longest (thereby making Google a more valuable resource to those who use it.)

  2. You must strike the balance between optimizing your website for the search engines and optimizing your website for your target audience. Yes, construct your content with keywords and search engines in mind, but always write for your customer. What keywords are they going to use to find what you're offering (read: What are they looking for?) The keywords your customers are using are the ones you want to appear on, so once you know what those keywords are, work them into your site. You will do this a number of ways:
    • Domain name
    • Your title
    • Meta tags (description, keywords, et cetera)
    • Copy (your content)
    • Your links (use descriptive links instead of "read more" or "click here"), and
    • Your image "alt" tags
    • (There are still more items to consider, but we'll go into greater detail on that in another subject.)

  3. Continually refine your keywords. You must know what your customers are searching on. It doesn't matter if you sell the best widget in the world. If your customers call your widget a thingamabob, they will never find you. Worse, they will find your competition who may make a very find widget as well, but they refer to their widget as a thingamabob, which brings them up in the search engines in front of YOUR clients. To see what people are searching on, use keyword research tools such as Google AdWords, and Yahoo Search Marketing data. Create lists of the most relevant keywords for your website and choose different ones to embed on each page (in the meta data and content.) The more specific you are, the more qualified your visitors will be to buy from you.

  4. Construct (or reconstruct) your site with your keywords in mind. Once you know what your clients are looking for, now you can ensure your site offers it in the way they would like to see it presented. For instance, if we go back to our earlier widget example, you might consider that people may be looking for a particular brand of widget, type of widget, size of widget or widget genre. The more you know about how they're searching, the better you'll be able to set up your site to show them what they're looking for.

  5. Back to optimizing your site for the search engines. There are certain things most search engines choke on.
    • Flash
    • Frames
    • JavaScript links and menus
    • Image maps
    • Dynamic URL's
    • (They also can't read graphics, so without descriptive alt tags, the graphics are simply ignored.)
    When search engines get caught on these things, they will stop indexing your site and not dig deeper. This, obviously, doesn't win you any customers. You can certainly use these components on your site, however you also need to ensure a search engine can find what it's looking for. Using text links, linking images to web pages (and using appropriate alt tags), including ROR.XML and ROBOTS.TXT files in your website's home directory, and using sitemaps will help search engines make sense of your site.

  6. Make every page title unique. It's terribly easy to use the same title for every page as you're constructing a website. Take the extra time, however, to vary the title for each page. Ensuring that each title is different and uses the keywords used within that page will take you far. The search engines rely heavily on page titles, so use them wisely. The title will be what the search engine presents as a link to your site (providing it even appears.)

  7. Ensure people want to link to your site. If you've worked to make your site helpful, informative or just plain cool, you may earn the links from other websites that will increase your standing with the search engines. If your site is lame? Well.. it's likely your search engine ranking will be as well. Don't be afraid to approach other webmasters with an offer of "link reciprocity". If your websites compliment each other, a reciprocal link campaign may be just what the doctor ordered to help drive traffic and rankings. Just be sure to link to only the best and the brightest; your links are a reflection on you and your site.
   

Hire a web designer to make you a great looking website.

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Hire a web designer to make you a great looking website. It can be a simple brochure site at first (if you want to start small), but if you're in business, you should probably have a website. Tip: Read our article, "6 reasons why a website is critical to your business" by Jamie Kiley.