That doesn’t mean that other media aren’t crucially important, they are. But make no mistake – all paths often lead back to your website. Email marketing commonly has links to pages on your website. Facebook call-outs and tweets often reference specific webpages on your site too. In fact most marketing strategies are designed to drive traffic back to your website. So the big question is…

Is your website ready for all the attention?

Many websites fail to have what it takes to be an effective marketing tool. Sometimes this is due to poor design or site structure, sometimes it is because there was no real plan or strategy when the site was first created.

You’ve heard it a hundred times before – traditional forms of advertising and communication are on a constant decline. The habits of the people are more and more reflecting a attitude of looking “online” for answers before they “do”, “ask” or “seek” from any other source. So you better be there when they go looking.

Your company website should be the very best marketing tool it can be. I’m talking the super-deluxe variety of website. So what makes a business website a great website? Here is a list of ‘must-haves” if your site is going to make an impact (and money) using one of the most powerful medias available to the common business owner or mega corporation alike.

1. Build your website with analytics
No site is worthy of being called great if you can’t measure it’s success. If you don’t have an analytics program on your site – get one. The basic principal here is – “those things that can be measured – can be improved”. And when you have a website , improve you must. Constantly and consistently.

2. Build SEO into your website
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the practice of designing and programming your website to be found near the top of the first pages of a search result. SEO is a combination of programming in key words (words that your target audiences uses to find your type of products or services) into your websites back-end and into the content of your website. To have your site ‘search engine friendly’ hire a professional web design firm or SEO company to help you through the process. They can help create a website that is attractive to search engines so that you get found by more people more easily.

3. Present the best first impression you can
Your website is like any other marketing tool, it is a media you use to get your message out to the masses. And your message is based largely on your company or products brand image and brand message. Treat your website as you would any other media. make sure you have first worked out you company’s brand messaging and that your are presenting an image and position that is designed for your audience.

4. Create easy to use (and understand) navigation
When designing your website you should follow many of the best practices for design and usability to minimize confusing or frustrating your visitors, because if you don’t they will click away faster that you blink. Sites that are designed using usability best practices often have the best conversion. A good reference for usability is the book: “don’t make me think” by Steven Krug.

5. Build a blog into your site
In the world of smart search engines you need to have the mind set the search engines have – which is “give the people what they want”. And what they ‘want’ is information. The search engines (and your audience) is always looking for new content on your area of expertise. so give it to them. You will rank higher on the Search engines and attract people who are higher up in the sales process who are looking for the products and services you have to offer.

6. Offer value on your website
Another key component of your website is it’s ability to offer valuable information to your audience. There are millions of people already in motion this very moment, looking for answers to their problems. You could be the one who provides it for them. It could be a report, a white paper, a checklist or diagnostic tool, whatever it is – make sure its valuable to your target audience and make sure you offer it on your website.

7. Create effective calls to action on your website
A call to action (CTA) is a method for driving a visitor to a desired action. CTA’s are a key tool in lead generation – but only if done right. Some calls-to-actions are more effective than others. The more valuable and copelling the offer is – the better the response you’ll get from your CTA. It can be the offer of a free trial or an immediate download. Whatever it is make sure they are compelling and that they are present on your website.

8. Design your website with ‘customer proof’ written all over it
No matter how well written your content and brand messaging is – your visitors want to see proof that you have made many other customers happy and satisfied with your product or service. You can do this with testimonials (written or in video format) or you you can use tools like case studies. These can be featured as short statements on your site or as short stories or even downloadable reference sheets. The more proof you have on your website – the better.

Developing a keyword strategy for your website is kind of like a sales pitch to your computer. If you were introduced to a possible lead by a colleague, you would great them with a handshake, a smile, and know exactly what you had to say. Let me take this opportunity to introduce you to my friend – Google. Developing a keyword strategy for search engines is not much different than writing your sales pitch. You need to take the time to work out what the key messages are and what order you want to say them in. You want to tell the potential customer what you have to offer and why then should come to you for it. Here are the 4 steps I used to get a keyword strategy started:

1. Start the brainstorming process
Like most tasks of this matter, getting started is always the hardest part. So don’t waste anytime and just start writing on a piece of paper. Just write anything that you think of when you think of your business. These thoughts may not necessarily make great keywords or phrases, but it will get the ball rolling. A few questions that might help you get your ideas on to paper at this stage are:

• • How would you search for you?
• • How will your client search for you?
• • What kinds of problems does your business solve?
• • How does your client benefit from your service?

2. Don’t forget about your competition – Your customer certainly won’t
When starting out your keyword strategy, take a friendly look at your competition, I’m sure they won’t mind

See what kinds of things they do, and don’t do on their sites. A few questions to ask yourself while reviewing your competition’s site;

• • Are they positioning themselves as experts in one particular area?
• • Do they neglect something you feel is important for your customer to know about?
• • Are there aspects of your particular industry you want to compete with them for?
• • Do you see a hole in their game you think you can take advantage of?

Try not to limit your competition review to the companies you already know about. Try plugging a few of the keywords you have for your company into a search engine and see what comes up.

3. Start testing your keyword strategy with Google Adwords
Google Adwords is an essential tool in the keyword mapping process (link). Its a free tool that lets you see how many times a month any keyword is searched for, and how much competition there is for them.

The best thing about Adwords – you are LITERALLY seeing what your potential clients are searching for. Use the words you came up with as a base, then compare them to the highest ranking related terms. I’m positive you will find words with this tool you didn’t think of that return higher results.

Have you been building your online shoe store around the phrase “Discount shoes”? That’s a very targeted message, and a great phrase for attracting potential customers because it returns approximately 12,100 local searches a month. But I bet you didn’t think of using the phrase “Cheap Shoes”? It sounds low quality – and in most cases it’s a negative way to describe footwear – and a phrase you probably wouldn’t want associated with your product. Well, it returns almost twice as many results with 22,200 local searches a month. Keep in mind, not only does your keyword strategy have to reflect how you want to portray yourself to your customers, it also needs to reflect what people are actually typing into search engines. It’s a delicate balance that requires strategic thinking, but it’s hard to ignore an extra 10,000 potential customers a month.

4. Use your keyword strategy to optimize your website
Google (and all the other search engines) read specific areas of your web pages to quickly understand who you are and what your about. Use your keywords and phrases to write optimized headers, titles, descriptions and body copy throughout your site. Don’t just list words (Google doesn’t fall for this anymore), but put some thought into writing attention-grabbing copy, rich with the words your potential clients are searching for. Each page needs to be treated just as important as the one before it, make sure the viewer is taking in and understanding your message with each line of text.

Optimizing your website with a keyword strategy goes way beyond retro-fitting and cramming phrases into all the nooks and crannies of your site. Effective website design starts by mapping out what you want to say and where you need to say it – make it easy for Google Spiderbots to scan – and ultimately present your website as the obvious result to those searching. Use your keyword strategy to clearly define who you are and what your about, so Google will know what customers to bring to you.

Instead of creating multiple posts like this down the line, I will just update this page as new terms become relevant to our sites content. So check in every now and then to stay up-to-date.

Alt Tag – A HTML tag usually used with an image, helps with google image results. Its main use is to display the text incase the image is unable to be displayed.

B2B – Business to business, when one business markets or has a transaction with another business.

Backlink – When one website points links to another site, used for link building

Black Hat SEO – Describes bad or unacceptable tactics to build SEO. These tactics can boost page rank but run the risk of being black listed from Google.

Blog – “Web Log”, a popular way to share information over the internet. First uses where mainly online journals, but many companies and industries use this form of social media for marketing now.

Conversion – The process of changing web-traffic or followers to clients.

CMS – Content Management System, websites that run on CMS are database driven and dynamic. Most updates to the site are done through the browser, and involve a websites programed template “pulling” the content from a database updated by the user.

CPL – Cost Per Lead, a way to measure and track the expense of a marketing program vs how many leads it produced. Divide the campaign cost by the amount of leads to see their value.

CPC – Cost Per Click, a way to measure the cost of webtraffic

CSS – Cascading Style Sheet, programming rules and language set up to control the way a website will look. Governs font, colours, behaviours, and many other design elements.

CTR – Click Through Rate, measure the success of an online advertising campaign. Divide the amount of times an ad was shown vs how many times it was clicked on.

Dynamic Content – Website content that updated by the user (usually frequently). A template is created and designed by a programmer, then a user updated a database populates that section of the website.

H1 Tag – A meta tag the tells the search bot the pages headline. The pages headline or “H1″ is one of the many ways that help the search engine quickly determine if the pages content is relevant to the search term being used.

Keywords – Used by search engines to determine the pages content or content when returning results to searchers.

Keyword Density – How often a keyword or phrase is used on a web page

Landing Page/Squeeze Page – A page with a goal that a lead is directed to. (ex. Leads are sent to the page for the purpose of signing-up to a mailing list)

Link Building – The process of building a sites popularity with inbound and outbound links. A high amount of relevant links will help achieve a higher page rank.

Meta Data/Tags – Specific and descriptive keywords/phrases to help search bots determine the web pages content for indexing purposes. The most common meta tags are the page title and description.

Organic Results – Results returned by a search engine that are not paid. Paid results appear at the top and down the side of the results page. Organic results appear in the middle, their rank is determined on how relevant their content is based on the terms searched for.

Page Rank – How high your page ranks for a specific term with a search engine.

PPC – Pay Per Click, online advertising where the advertiser pays to have their ad shown for a specific word or phrase. The cost of the ad depends on how popular the search term is.

Sandbox – Is kind of the Google waiting room. When a new site is created Goolge puts them in the sandbox until the site is verified as legitimate, then the site is put into its proper index.

Search Algorithm – Googles highly secretive program used to scan and rank pages based on their content. According to Google, each page is considered on over 200 factors to determine its value in response to the particular search in question.

Search Engine – A website thats main function is to help users find information

SEM – Search Engine Marketing, online advertising campaigns and strategies. Market products and services with websites, email campaigns, organic and paid page ranking.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization, the process of improving how clear and accurate you describe your website to search engines for indexing purposes. By improving what search engines “know” about your site, you will rank higher on specific terms. Learn more about Mindwalks SEO practices here.

SpiderBot – A program designed to search for, gather, and organize information. Used to index and reference webpages in online searches. Called spiders because they “crawl” the web.

Splash Page – The first page of a website, uses solely to “wow” the viewer. Not common anymore due to their lack of content, and that with the higher use of search engines most viewers are introduced to your site through other avenues other than the front door.

Static Content – Parts of a website that are coded into the page and do not change regularly. (ex banners, navigation)

Title Tag – Meta data that gives the page a title, for SEO purposes its common practices to be more descriptive than the pages name. The title tag appears at the top of your browser when looking at a page, and is clickable when reading search results.

URL – Uniform Resource Locator, the address of a webpage.

W3C – World Wide Web Consortium, a series of rules and standards that websites follow to be displayed properly by browsers.

White Hat SEO – The proper use of SEO practices to boost page rank and get more web traffic.

1. Be relevant to those who are looking for you -
Create an SEO friendly website

One of your first priorities is getting ‘found’ on the internet when people are searching for your type of products or services. But if you haven’t discovered this out already – that’s easier said than done. There are millions of searches going on every minute by people who are looking for relevant results to their searches. And there are just as many competitors fighting for their attention. So unfortunately if you aren’t found one page one near the top of the page – you are going to be difficult to find. But there are a couple of things you can do to improve your ranking on Google.

Have a keyword strategy
Because searches are focused on providing relevant results to the searches you do – it’s important to decide which words are the most profitable to you and your audience. What type of words will your marketplace be using to find businesses like yours. When you know what those words are – it’s called your keyword strategy.

Build SEO best practices into your website
One of the ways to ensure you get found easier is to program in those potent keywords into the title tags and header titles of your website. The more targeted you are with the content in key areas of your website (based on your keyword strategy – the more likely you will be found by those searching.

Create relevant SEO content – and update frequently
Google loves relevant content. So give it to them. The more you create content around your key-word strategy and to more you add and update content – the greater your chances will be of being found on a Google search.

2. Position and sell

Your content should achieve two main objectives (apart from being filled with SEO  content)

1. Position your firm as the authority in your marketplace

You want your company to be the go-to business authority with your audience. Along with an SEO keyword strategy your website needs a content strategy – content centered around your unique offering – focused in on your specific audience.

2. Provide the ultimate sales process for your user

Your website content should be designed to answer all the questions your prospects have while in the process of buying your product or service. Your website needs to not only project authority but provide reassurance an proof that you can deliver on your promises and claims.

3. Track and evaluate your web traffic

If you don’t have an analytics program on your site – you need to get one. Your analytics is the key to profitable growth with your website. If you don’t know how many people are coming each day, where they go and where they come from then you have no measurement to review and improve. Those things that are measured can be improved. When you know your numbers you can constantly review results and improve on them

4. Collect contact information on your target audience

It is imperative that you collect the contact information on your visitors. In the early days of website this was done by making offers on newsletters and ‘contact us for more information’ forms. But the power of these simple lead generators has greatly decreased. And for the most part – they are all but ineffective. You need to create offers that have a higher perceived value and greater pull power than many of the offers that are promoted on the web. And you offer these great things in exchange for their contact information. And for permission to contact them in the future.

5. Followup with automated email marketing

Once you have a visitors contact information it’s important to create a strong bond with them as quickly as possible. The best, easiest and cheapest way to do that is with automated email marketing. You should have an automated email marketing program in place before you collect someone’s contact information. That way you will be able to followup with that person immediately to start a an online relationship with them. All of this is to start the sales process between them and your company.

Your program should include many pre-programmed followup messages at key points in your relationship. It could be to check-in after a few weeks to see if they need specific help, or to make them a special offer. The choice is yours. But the point is – have a plan, and automate your followup as much as possible to be predictable and stay connected.

Following these 5 simple tips will make your website more than a digital ‘brochure’ it will make it a profitable marketing machine.

Google is working 24-7-365

Googlebot’s (or ‘Spiders’) are constantly “crawling” the internet – finding and indexing billions of websites using super computers and a secret algorithm process (a set of rules used to evaluate websites). These ‘rules’ decide what sites the bots should crawl, how often to crawl them. They also determine what and how information from websites is indexed. (ie:  What relevant information each site has that is worth indexing in order to return accurate search results for its users).

The limitations of Google

So you ask – “If my site has already been indexed by Google, why am I not ranking very high?”

Well, Google can’t do everything… at least not yet.

You see… although Google bots actually read the content on your site and then index it so it can access it for search results. It can only and search what it ‘sees’. If it can’t see it (or make sense of the content) it won’t rank your pages very high on the relevancy scale.

You need to take control of your search results

Although it would be nice if Google just “knew’ who you were and indexed you correctly the reality is that YOU need to optimize your site to achieve a high rank. You need to organize your sites information and tell Google what are the most important things and what needs to be read and indexed. By designing your companies website with SEO best practices in mind, you will increase traffic, and in-turn increase the number of potential customers that come to your sites.

The bottom line on SEO – Tell them what you want them to know

SEO at its most basic level is taking specific keywords to describe your business, and plugging them into specific places on your website where Google Spiders  (or any search engine bot ) will read them.

Strategically optimizing things like Titles, Page Names, Headlines and even the Text on the page with relevant keywords, will go a long way in getting you recognized by Google. Remember – the search engines are already scanning your site and deciding what is the important content on the page is. But you need to go the extra mile and TELL the Spiders what is the most important. How? By placing keyword-rich content in specific areas on your website you are telling Google who you are and why you are important.

Benefits of Building Your Site SEO Ready

A website is like a home, you need to start with a blue print. Plan out every room, hallway, window and floor board before a single nail has been hammered – or any key has been pressed. Yes, you can always go back and try to adjust your existing site to be more SEO efficient, but patch work is patch work. You may see some improvement, but at the end of the day if your website is not designed to attract as many potential customers as possible, you are just leaving more leads out there for your competition.

Remember, Google Spiderbots need to crawl your site to determine what is the most useful information. If your site has been touched by several different programmers in attempt to get a better page ranking, the code will reflect that. The harder the Spiders have to work to sort through layers of access code tacked on your site, the harder it will be for them to get an accurate reading of your site’s content.

When building or redesigning your companies website, don’t skip out on the SEO during the planning stage. Yes, its much more exciting to think about how your site will look (being a designer, i much rather design than plan), but if nobody is there to see it – there isn’t much point in all that money being spent in the first place, is there?