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Published a new web site for Sea-Trek Enterprises, Inc.

http://www.seatrekenterprises.com/

Sea-Trek Enterprises have more than 25 years of providing the highest quality frozen seafood to markets throughout the world.

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When web designers publish a web site it is often only  after many, many,  client project reviews and page edit after page edit with a focus, a sole focus,  on how the web site will appear in a browser. Few clients have any interest other than how the web site will appears in a web browser and they just assume that everything else is in place that will make the web site perform on search engines.

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However, in the months that follow publication the client  observes that the web site simply is not performing well on search engines!. What to do!

One of the first steps is to understand how a search engine reads you web site.

A great, efficient and simple  way to evaluate  your site is to look at the site in the same way that a search engine spider would… checking each page with a text browser using a Lynx Browser. This tool reads all the text on a web page including the ‘Alt’ text assigned to images.

If you’d like quickly to check a page on a site you could use the Lynx Viewer. but for maximum convenience and efficiency you can download Lnyx and run it locally.

It is quite common that web sites that look spectacular have little-to-no content and this occurs because of a dependence on images and flash files and very little use of text. Spiders read text.

If your web site must be image intensive then please read this blog entry for advice on image optimization for search engines…http://webdesign-ri.com/web_site_design_and_SEO_blog/2009/09/18/how-to-search-engine-optimize-images/

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In order to achieve a high Google page rank, you web site must be seen to be popular amongst the users of the Internet and there is a very complicated algorithm that is used to complete the page rank calculation.

Popularity is often thought of as the number of backlinks (inlinks) to your site but there are other methods of increasing your site’s popularity ( off site SEO) and one such  method is delicious.com: a Social Bookmarking service, which means you can save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking.

So, the more people that bookmark your web site on delicious.com the more popular your site will be; and this  is one important tactic to increasing the page rank of your site.

You can adopt a passive strategy and wait until browsers bookmark your site or you can adopt a pro-active marketing strategy by:

• Encourage all of your company employees to bookmark your site
• Encourage all of your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and myspace contacts to book mark your site
• Ask your social media friends to spread the good news about your site through their networks

Delicious should be a component of any social media networking marketing program.

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One of  problems associated  with Social Media Networking is that it can be overwhelming to a new user (marketer). However, there are tools that can be employed to automate the process. In my last blog entry I detailed the connectivity between Facebook and Twitter. When  Facebook and Twitter are connected, by updating your company ‘page’ on Facebook you will automatically send a tweet to Twitter. One data entry point will feed two Social Media networking platforms.

We can take a similar approach to connect your company blog to LinkedIn such that every blog entry will automatically appear on your company LinkedIn ‘page’.

How?

Set up a Feedburner account for your blog and  the simply add the Feedburner address to you LinkedIn account.

Simple! while on the surface this may not seem like much but the fundamental problem with Social Media Network marketing is keeping current with every platform. So, by reducing the data entry point to two, we can feed 4 elements of Web2.0 marketing media. The simpler we can make Social Media Marketing for the marketers who use it  on a day-to-day basis, the more effective the marketing programs will become.

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For businesses, managing the marketing process via Social Media Networking can simply be overwhelming but there are a couple of methods to simplify the process, here is one such method:

It is questionable whether Twitter is a truly a good platform for B2B marketing but one thing is for sure is that it should not be over-looked because of it’s reach. Reach, however, is not everything – any marketer who has ever worked a trade show, with thousands and thousands of visitors, will understand that we do not want to waste our time on ‘tire-kickers’ we want to find our ‘A’ class prospects.  Not easy to do on with a marketing media whose very foundation is the ‘shotgun marketing method’, whereas in the B2B world we really want to adopt a ‘rifle-shot approach’ and create a following from our target market segments.

To collect followers that is in your market space:

• Add a ‘Follow-me’ Twitter Icon to your company web site
• Add a ’Follow-me’ Twitter URL in your company’s email template
• Add a “Follow-me’ Twitter logo on all marketing collateral

By adopting these tactics, you will build a targeted following and as you build this following, not use Twitter to make your Twitter posts but instead use Facebook!

Sorry for switching gears on you!  But Facebook has connectivity with Twitter and we want to take advantage of this connectivity to expand our marketing reach and minimize our work.

In Facebook, create a Company ‘Page’ and then use exactly the same tactics as detailed above to create ‘Fans’ for your company Facebook page.

And here’s the rub…

Facebook provides connectivity to Twitter. Simply set up your Facebook Company Page to link to Twitter and, every time you update your Facebook page, Twitter will send that same information via a Tweet to all your Twitter followers.

Enter your marketing information once and distribute it via both Facebook and Twitter.

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When WEB Design RI performs SEO web site check the most common web site ommision especially a site that was designed several years ago (Sitemaps in this format were fiorst used by Google in 2005),  is the  sitemap.xml file. The sitemap specifications are detailed at http://www.sitemaps.org

If you want your web site to be indexed  by the major search engines and you would like the search engines to be  to be notified of changes to your site then you must include a site map XML file in your web site. These files permit the search engines to  crawl web sites in an intelligent fashion.

Sitemaps are what is known as a URL inclusion protocol where we notify the search engines of all of the URLs that we would like to be included when they crawl our sites and this compliments the Robots.txt files which is a URL exclusion protocol. See my Robots.txt blog entry.

Sitemaps are extremely useful on web sites which are not browser friendly and that use rich Flash or AJAX content.

Sitemaps are used by the largest search engines:  Google, MSN, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.

The process is relatively simple:

1)    Create  an XML site map file  – http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ is a free sitemap generator tool  – there are many free products like this

2)    Save your sitemap.xml file to your web site root directory

3)    Upload your sitemap.xml file to your web server.

4)    Create a webmaster account with Google Webmaster, Bing Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer and upload the sitemap file.

5)    This step is important and is often ignored: When you make changes, especially the addition of pages, to your website – create an updated sitemap.xml file  and upload the new file  to your web server and the next time your site is crawled the spiders will look for the new pages.

Sitemaps do have limits 50,000 URLs and 10 megabytes , so keep your web site to under 50,000 pages!

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Conversion rate is simply the measurement of visitors to a web site that take a specific, desired, action.

These actions will vary from site-to-site but may include, but are not limited to:

• Completion of a request form
• A download
• Membership registrations
• Subscriptions
• ….and ultimate in conversion…a sale

One of the primary goals of an internet marketer is to convert a visitor into one of the following

• A unqualified prospect:  a prospect has taken an action on a web page and through that action we have obtained teh prospects contact details;  and with these details our sales teams can contact the prospect to determine whether or not this is a hot or cold lead and determine next steps.
• A qualified prospect – here the prospect will request product samples, downloads demo software and has taken an action that may lead to an order
• A customer – the ultimate conversion goal – completion of the shopping cart.

If we do not capture our conversion rate all we are left with is anonymous browsers, we will be able to tell our management team how many page hits, unique visitors etc.  but this has little value, other than ego stroking, when you get down to the business-of-business.

If we measure our conversion rate,  we can take steps to increase the conversion rate to meet our desired marketing goals. If we do not measure conversion, we are left with is statistics. No names, no addresses, no email email addresses…just statistics.

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Hotels on the Las Vegas strip clearly get much more traffic than the hotels that are located in the lesser attractive off-strip areas; and it is with this very simple analogy we have the objective for our internet marketing strategy, we want our web sites to be on the strip!

Okay the, so how do we move our web sites high up the search engine rankings to be exposed to maximum eyeballs?  The answer is pretty simple, if not a little confusing at the outset, and that is  ‘indirect’ Internet marketing.

The problem with indirect Internet marketing is quite simply the word ‘indirect’ because most businesses expect, and measure, their marketers on some form of direct marketing. However, with Internet marketing, the only part of the marketing process that we control is the on-page search engine optimization (SEO) of our web site and that may only count for 30% to 40% of the elements required for a complete search-marketing program. We must pay attention to ‘off-page’ SEO.

However, while SEO is not an exact science, it is the off-page SEO activities that separates the web sites from those that are ‘on the strip’ from those that are ‘off-strip’; and it is this off-page SEO that calls for an ‘indirect’ internet marketing strategy.

Search engines measure the value of a web site by the number of other websites that link to that site and this is where it is imperative to develop and execute an aggressive strategy that falls within the guidelines laid out by Google. If two web sites have identical on-page SEO, it will be the site with the best off-page SEO that will rank higher with the search engine.

So, what should the core of an indirect Internet marketing strategy look like?

1)   Connect with friendly web sites to link back to your site.

2)   Join many forums and become active in many discussions; and ensure that your URL is included in your signature.

3)   Develop and host groups on all social networking media web sites to promote your business and update on a regular basis.

4)   Issue press releases on a regularly via paid, and free, PR web outlets

5)   Write article for ezines

6)   Add a blog to your site but do not use it to sell your products directly, use the blog to position your brand as being expert in your field. Every time you make a blog entry you will increase both the size and the freshness of your site and if you can get subscribers to your site you will be well on your way.

7)   Take part in all industry associations.

8)   Be relentless

These tactics could be considered to have little value individually, but collectively this a is a powerful force.

To accomplish the above you have to pursue it, as it will not come to you. There is a lot of work, much of it mundane, involved in executing an indirect marketing strategy but if executed you will move you business onto ‘the strip’ where the foot traffic is great and opportunities abound.

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