27 Ways to Make Your Website More Trustworthy

This blog entry was posted on December 11, 2010.

1. Exactly match your business name and your domain name. (YourBusiness.com)
2. Use a .COM domain instead of NET, INFO, etc. since 73% of all domains are COMs.
3. Use your website domain in your emails instead of Hotmail or other free email.
4. Have an interesting About-Us page that tells your company story.
5. Your website should have a professional appearance to create a positive first impression.
6. Your home page message should be clear, focused and relevant to your visitor.
7. Provide a clear and visible action to buy, sign-up or join.
8. Provide clear navigation that is intuitive and easy to use.
9. Keep your content updated so that it appears credible and timely.
10. Optimize your graphics so that your page loads fast.
11. Regularly check your site for dead links.
12. Spell-check your website content.
13. Have your phone number posted clearly on every page of your website.
14. Include your physical address on every page of your website.
15. Have a contact page with email form and all your phone numbers, fax, skype and address in one place. Include a driving directions map.
16. Provide a money-back guarantee (risk reversal).
17. Post a refund and returns policy.
18. Post a privacy policy if you collect email addresses.
19. Post a security policy that shows how you make transactions and the site secure.
20. Ask for testimonials to show you hold yourself accountable and that you care.
21. Post real testimonials on your website (social proof).
22. Secure purchases or forms with private information with SSL encryption.
23. Keep your SSL certificate up to date and make sure it doesn’t expire.
24. Add a blog and educate visitors with tips and how-to advice.
25. Publish case studies that show how your products solve real problems.
26. Have high search engine rankings. People trust number one rankings more.
27. Include logos of associations you belong to, credit card logos, etc. (trust logos).

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Filed under: Website Design

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Five Ws for Creating A Business Website That Generates Income

This blog entry was posted on December 9, 2010.

Your business website needs to produce leads or sales for your company. As you plan your website, start by asking the Five W’s; Who, What, When, Where and Why. These are the same five Ws used in journalism for news style research. As you answer these questions, you can create a website that will target your customers and get them to take action.

1. Who is this website for? Specifically target your ideal customer. Understand their demographics, their motivations for coming to your website and if they are a decision maker. If you market to B2B clients, they are likely to make a slow buying decision.
2. What do you want them to do? Design in a specific action that is clear and visible on your home page. This should be highly relevant to why they came to your website in the first place. What answers are they seeking? You will want to answer your visitor’s questions.
3. When will you launch your new website? Create a schedule from concept to launch of your new website. Create a content plan for website copy, video and social media. Make sure you can commit resources and time for a successful website.
4. Where will your website traffic come from? Will you optimize for search engine traffic? Will you advertise on the search engines (PPC)? Will you use blogging and social media? Will you use email marketing to reach prospective buyers?
5. Why are you launching this website? There should be objectives and goals for your web marketing. This could be leads, sales, new customers, phone calls, signups, etc. You should expect measurable outcomes and then set up Analytics and metrics. Chart your progress toward your goals.

If you think through these questions and then plan your website accordingly, your website is much more likely to produce the results you want from it.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing

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7 Ways to Promote Your New Blog

This blog entry was posted on December 7, 2010.

You have a new blog and now you want to attract people to read it. How do you start?

1. Ping Update Services: Every time a new blog is posted, RSS feeds send out a small text file or ping to the web with the title of the blog posting, the first 25 words and where the blog can be found. You should configure your blog to send these pings out to all these update services. List of ping update services.
2. Use keywords: Before you start blogging, select a topic that your best customers will find interesting. Prepare a list of keywords from your topic that you can use in your posting titles, links and in your content. Keyword research tips.
3. Focused content: Blogging is not about selling, it is about educating and engaging readers with thought provoking writings. Start by creating a one page plan that includes your audience, topic and keywords you want to focus on. Use your plan to keep your writing focused. Write original and interesting posts to keep people returning. Blog writing tips.
4. Commenting: Be active in reading other related blogs in your niche. Leave comments regularly with your blog URL. Make your comments interesting and insightful. Some of the readers of that blog will follow the link you leave and then read your blog.
5. Forums: Participate in online forums as an expert. You get to promote your business “quietly” in your signature line. Include the URL to your blog.
6. Social Networks: Set up profiles at popular social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace , etc. Include the URL of your blog.
7. Email signatures: Include a signature in every email that you send that includes your company name and website URL.

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Filed under: Blog Marketing

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Who In Your Company Should Be Responsible For SEO?

This blog entry was posted on December 5, 2010.

Who in your organization should be responsible for search engine optimization? Does it belong to IT? Should your web developers and programmers handle this? Should your marketing department be responsible? Should this part of your sales team? These are the questions CEOs are asking.

• It is the IT department and your developer’s job is to build in the functions and the technology that keep the website working.
• Your sales department will act on the leads generated from the website.
• Marketing directs which markets and which prospects to target. They determine the best approach to reach buyers. They should handle search engine optimization.

SEO is much more than just a traffic initiative. SEO must be planned at a strategic level. Your company SEO strategy needs to support your marketing and brand strategies. The keywords you select should target your market niches and bring in your best buyers.

SEO should be the responsibility of Marketing. Serious SEO done strategically allows for serious business success. SEO is not merely a deployment of technology; it is about effective strategic marketing of your company.

How do you deploy SEO strategically?

1. Keywords should target your niche and your ideal decision maker.
2. Website content needs to support both the keyword phrases and your conversion strategy.
3. Navigation needs to support a focused link structure and an ideal selling sequence.
4. Content growth needs to be both keyword focused and designed to appeal to attracting buyers.
5. Link building needs to attract keyword focused links and encourage buyers to follow the links back to your website.

SEO must be a marketing initiative rather than a technology deployment to achieve meaningful results.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies

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How to Optimize an All Flash Website

This blog entry was posted on December 3, 2010.

Flash provides a great user experience. But attracting search traffic is frequently a problem. Websites produced entirely from Flash are more difficult to optimize for search engine traffic and I will advise my clients to avoid creating an all Flash website.

Google in the last few years has developed Flash indexing techniques which improve Flash crawlability. There are still many limitations that make it much harder to get the same rankings as a site done in HTML would enjoy. What can you do to get good search rankings for your all Flash website?

All Flash websites are usually produced as a single movie with many sections. This entire movie can exist on a single page URL. This structure does not allow the search engines a way to index this Flash content with direct access to an individual section. There is a way to create separate HTML URLs for each deep link (do this without the # in the URL).

1. Unique Page URLs: Adobe Flash in all Flash websites does not have unique HTML URLs that search engines require to index individual web pages. Creating these HTML-based-URLs are critical if you want your Flash site to be indexed. Create these HTML deep links using the recommended SEO procedures for Adobe Flash.
2. Title Tags: Place your relevant keywords that describe each page. Use your most important phrase at the beginning of the Title tag. Google assigns greater weight to the words at the beginning. This signals the search engine what your page is about. Place the company name at the end of the tag if you want it included.
3. NoScript Tags: Use these HTML tags to provide content for search engines when content cannot be read by search engines. This is a way to provide some indexable content for search engines.
4. Back Linking: These are incoming links from other web pages to your web pages. These must be keyword focused anchor text from external web links. See available link popularity packages. Use heavy back linking with all-Flash websites.

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5 SEO Strategies for Start-Up Businesses

This blog entry was posted on December 1, 2010.

Start-ups face special challenges. Startups have to deal with a brand new website that can take time to develop top search engine rankings. These are strategies a new business can use to jump-start their SEO results.

1. Existing Website: Buy an existing website and domain that already has top rankings in your market niche. You will want to maintain the domain’s age benefits by not making sudden changes in the domain ownership. I recommend changing the registration info slowly over several months. Change the login first, then a month later the owning company’s name, etc.
2. Add a Blog:. A blog will attract visitors and links to your new website in a very natural way. A blog broadcasts its message to the Internet via RSS. The blog will much more quickly gain a readership following if the content plan is good and your blog should allow interested readers to find navigation links to your website.
3. Write Articles: Writing articles promotes yourself and your company as a respected expert by providing solutions and insights for problems in your market niche. These articles should be placed onto article syndication websites. By publishing articles that are highly keyword focused and providing a keyword based link back to your website, you help your website’s link popularity.
4. Web Directories: Submitting your site to directories is still a valid and cost effective link building method that should be part of developing your portfolio of back links. You just have to be selective on which directories you use. Find directories that are focused on your market niche.
5. Social Media: Social media optimization is a form of word of mouth marketing through the use of social networking, social bookmarking, and media sharing (photo, video) websites. The essence of SMO is giving people a reason to visit and link to your site because of great original content. Links from social media back to your site are important for SEO.

Startups should also use other promotional techniques that can give very quick visibility and attract visitor traffic. These would include email marketing and PPC (pay-per-click) such as Google Adwords.

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