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mack - 6:40 am on Feb 3, 2009 (gmt 0)
In the past I have written a couple of beginners guides to website marketing articles and have posted them here. A lot of the information contained within those original posts is to a greater or lesser extent still very much applicable today, but I thought it was time to revisit the topic and bring then right up to date. There have been quite a lot of changes over the past couple of years and there are quite a lot of new and exciting ways to let people know you are here. If we think back (circa 99) it was all keywords and meta descriptions. Now website marketing is a cross between art and science, maths and mystery. This article is written with the intention that the reader is a webmaster, or someone who is just starting to promote their own website. I have written it in such a way as to make it easy for newbie's to understand, but at the same time still be useful to seasoned professionals. It should be noted that a lot of the information within this post should not be taken as fact, seo and website marketing is such a fast moving industry and because of this you will notice the goal keeps being moved. What is website marketing? Marketing your website is vital if you want people to find you. I remember when I first uploaded my first website. I was very impressed and thought "yes, people will love this". If the truth be told they probably would have liked the site, if they knew it existed and where able to find it. Simply having a website is not enough, people will not find you unless you act to help them. there are millions of websites out there, what would bring a user to your website? Marketing is what can drive traffic to your site. I will not lie and say website marketing is for everyone, or say it is simple. you need to be prepared to put in a lot of work and be very patient but a properly conceived marketing plan can be very cost effective compared to other forms of marketing. It is also very effective both short term and long term when it comes to increasing your brand awareness. In this digital age that we live in there is no company I can think of that couldn't make good use of a well marketed website. Lets put things into perspective with a very strange and fictional example... In the beginning there was nothing Ok so you have a plan, you have though up a great idea for a new site and you are about to start building it. Great, the very early stages of development is am excellent time to start implementing your website marketing strategy. Many may disagree and say design and marketing are very different tasks.. I can see why people would think this, but right from the point where you start adding content to your site is where you need to have your marketing hat on, even the actual structure of your site should be considered from a potential seo/sem point of view. Structuring your website The way we lay out our site structure can have a positive or negative effect not only from a marketing point of view but also from a usability point of view. You may be asking what has structure and usability got to do with marketing? well nothing at all if you're short signed, but If you look further you will realise that a well laid out site, that is easy to use and delivers excellent content is a good site. Now lets think away from the internet. you have two potential marketing projects. You can either be lead marketer for this brand new Mercedes SLK, or this car Mack made out of cardboard and sticky back plastic. The choice is obvious and so is the answer. Its far easier to market a good product.. going back to the web, a good site is a far easier site to market than something that looks and feels half hearted. Now lets get back on topic and sort out our structure. This will depend a lot on the sort of website you are working on, and the topic. when it comes to structure there really is no perfect layout but I will demonstrate one of the more common structures. This is often referred to as the pyramid. I am a bit of a car enthusiast so this example is based on cars. The most important page on most websites is the homepage. For my car site I have an index.html file (homepage) and this page contains some general information about the site. It has a set of navigational links to the various manufacturers I have reviewed. One of these links is Chrysler. If I click this link am taken to example.com/Chrysler/ The Chrysler page will have information on the company and link to the models Chrysler makes. Les say I click on cruiser it will take me to the following page What we end up with is a nice neat folder structure containing our html files. Not only does this allow is to keep our site organised it also enables us to use very simple yet effective bread crumb navigation links... I love breadcrumbs for 2 reasons. I find it a good idea to mock up your site structure with post it notes on a wall or white board, just scribble the page title on each. I find this an extremely easy way to work out just how the jigsaw of pages will be pieced together. now for the pages The structure of the site is only part of the equation, you now need to develop the pages themselves. What you need to remember is, this is what your site visitor will see, they need to look good but work perfectly. Many people who visit webmasterworld.com are designers and/or developers, but it is very important to get your priorities right. There are people who can develop a site and there those who cant. If you are still very new to the industry then I suggest you hire a designer if your site is going to be a business, or part of your existing business. If on the other hand you are simply building a site to educate yourself about web development then I admire you and encourage you to continue. The actual design and creation of the pages goes far beyond the scope of this article, what we will do is talk about aspects of a page that are very important from a marketing point of view. Page title The title is a short and concise term used to describe the main function of the page. I cringe every time I open a page look at the title and see "Home Page" this would be all well and good if you where a major established online company, but not for a new site. Lets go back to our example with the car website. We had a homepage, a page about Chrysler and a page about the Chrysler Cruiser. Good examples of titles would be "Information about cars" "Information about Chrysler cars" "Information about the Chrysler Cruiser" When you are writing a Page title try and be specific, do not use excessive wording because this will reduce the value of your important words. The page title should be placed within the html header of the document as shown with this example... Meta description and meta keywords In recent times these 2 items have been quite heavily depreciated from a search engine point of view, but I still believe it makes sense to add them. The description and keywords tags are not simply there for search engines, they are part of the overall html mark-up language. We also do not entirely know what will happen in the future. For these reasons I suggest using them. The description tag is simply a description of the page, not the site, but the single page. I see quite a lot of examples of the description tag being used on every page to describe the website. Going back to our car example lets write a description for the Chrysler cruiser page... The keyword tag follows the same mark-up, but it used differently. The keyword tag is used simply to contain words related to the page.. Try and use precise words and avoid words that are borderline or off topic. The keyword and description tags are also placed within the header section of the html document... Content I have said this before and I will say this again... On the web content is king. It is the content that readers will view, it is the content search engines will analyse, it is the content that will make other sites link to you. If your site lacks good quality original content then you will really struggle when it comes to marketing. Again it comes down to quality, it is a lot easier to market something that is good. When writing content think to yourself, what will my users want to read. Concentrate on generating good quality content for your pages. Content creation is far from easy, but you will know your industry well. Yet again we will go back to our car site example. If you where creating content about the car think in terms of what would a potential owner want to know. What It used to be the case that you could stuff keywords into your articles or content and this would push up the keyword density and in effect allow you to rank better in search engines as a result, now things have changed and search engines have got a lot smarter. By reading a piece of text you should be able to work out what the piece is about. Search engines are getting to about the same level. When you start to over do it you run the risk of being flagged as spam. Here are to examples... Page headings Page headings are used as headings for various content items. We can think in terms of print media and newspapers, they use headings to highlight articles and make us notice things by causing a stand out effect. On the web we can do the same thing by using different types of header tags. <H1>This is the main page heading</H1> Page headings should be correctly nested. What I mean by this is your H1 should be followed by your H2 and then your H3. You may choose to have several H3 headings, but don't then go back and use an H2 further down the page. From an SEO point of view improper use of the H tags may not hurt you, but it is certainly not how the tags where intended to be used. The heading tags are designed to allow you to highlight certain areas of your content. The tag its self is not to be used for a large area of text, but simply for a short piece of heading text. Here is a very simplistic example... The example I used was very simple but it showed how the content and the heading tags can be used to create a nested set of heading to break up and point out specific areas of content within the page. When we look at a page the headings stand out. The same is true for search engines. The headings are in effect providing the search engine with tips to help it work out what our page is about. The more help we can provide to the search engine the better. When ever a search engine seen a heading it thinks .. "ohh this part is important". content copy Make sure your copy reads well and is free of typing and grammatical mistakes. My spelling is terrible so I generally have someone proof read my content before I upload it. Using a spell check is good, but even with that there are sometimes bits and pieces that get through, either errors or grammar mistakes. Make your content flow. Make it easy for your users to simply have a read and get the information they require. When I create content I always find errors when I proof read. I have came to an arrangement with a friend online whereby we proof read each others content. It is amazing how blind you can be to your own mistakes no matter how many times you read it. This is important from a site quality issue, remember what we spoke about earlier, it is a lot easier to market something that is good. Navigation We very briefly spoke about navigation earlier within this post. Navigation is not only the means that users will trust to guide them through your website, it also dictates the route each engine spiders will take as they crawl your pages. there are pages on your site that will be a lot more important than others, you want to make it as easy as possible for users and search engines to be able to locate these pages. For example your sales page is a lot more important than a page dedicated to your companies history. top navigation Just like it says on the tin, the top navigation area can be made up of a section of links that allow the user to navigate the site. What you need to be aware of is, these links are taking up some prime on page real-estate so should be mainly used for very important links. What are people looking for? give them as much direct access to this content as possible. Side navigation Side navigation can be placed to the left or right of your main content. There are many arguments regarding what side it should be placed on, but both left and right do work. There are people who will choose right or left based on various findings, but this topic goes beyond this articles scope. The side navigation is good for breaking your site up into topic areas, If we go back to the car site as an example the side navigation could be used to split the site by manufacturer Ford, Audi, GM and so on. Like all site navigational systems the aim to to route traffic through your site by letting the user have direct access to key areas. Bottom navigation It is very common to have simply... Continued in next message... [edited by: mack at 2:44 pm (utc) on Feb. 3, 2009]
Beginners guide to website marketing 2009
A new town has just been built. It has all the utilities set up and running, it has shops, a school, housing and parks. It basically has all the things any small town would need except for one small detail. It has no roads going in or out. How much traffic do you think will be arriving at this town? Oh I forget to mention the name of this town... Your new website.
example.com/Chrysler/cruiser/ again we have another page with information, this time info on the Chrysler cruiser.
Home > Chrysler > Cruiser
1 They allow you to retrace your steps very easily
2 They allow visitors who have arrived at the site to go down one level if the information is not 100% what they where looking for. for example they may be interested in Chrysler, just not that specific model. If your navigation system allows them to go back a stage, they can easily navigate to the model they where interested in.
<html>
<head>
<title>Your page title goes here</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
<meta name="description"content="Information and articles about the Chrysler cruiser">
<meta name="keywords"content="cars, autos, Chrysler, cruiser">
<html>
<head>
<title>Your page title goes here</title>
<meta name="description"content="your page description">
<meta name="keywords"content="keywords, related, to, page">
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
is it like to drive, what about economy figures and performance. Think of as many key areas as possible and cover them all with a well drafted and laid out article.
The Chrysler cruiser is a well built attractive car with a wide range of futures and optional extras. On the road it handles well and its performance is impressive. The Chrysler cruiser prices start from just $#*$! and comes with a manufacture backed warranty.
The Chrysler cruiser is a well built attractive Chrysler car with a wide range of futures and optional Chrysler cruiser extras. On the road the Chrysler cruiser handles well and its performance is impressive. The Chrysler cruiser prices start from just $#*$! and
comes with a Chrysler cruiser manufacture backed warranty from Chrysler.
The first example reads well. The 2nd example is crammed with keywords and key phrases. As a result it doesn't read so well. The keyword density is also very high. To be honest the 2nd snippet may do better for the short term, but it is clearly a little bit spammy. One golden rule I always follow is design your site with the user in mind. With search engines getting smarter all the time it is only a matter of time before search engines and users view pages in the same way.
<H2>This is a section heading within a page</H2>
<H3>this is a lesser heading for an area of content</H3>
<h1>Winter gardening</h1>
now place you page intro text so the user knows what the page is about
<h2>Winter flowering plants</h2>
again some information directly related to the h2 header
<h3>Winter shrubs</h3>
content about winter shrubs
<h3>Winter roses</h3>
content about winter roses
What we can do is introduce a link structure for our navigation areas.
Home - About us - Contact us
This works well, but there are instances where sites have gone to far
Home - About us - Contact us - Directions - Phone us
In the above example the site is creating links that are not needed. In the first example the contact us page could be used to either contain the directions and phone number details, or the contact us page could have linked to the directions and phone number pages. It is important to keep as many of your links pointing to important pages as possible. The reason for this will very soon become apparent.