27 Ways to Make Your Website More Trustworthy

Doug Williams @ 5:54 am

This blog entry was posted on December 11, 2010.

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

Doug Williams @ 4:50 am

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.

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.
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.
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.
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?
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

Doug Williams @ 4:30 am

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?

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Social Networks: Set up profiles at popular social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace , etc. Include the URL of your blog.
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?

Doug Williams @ 5:32 am

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?

Keywords should target your niche and your ideal decision maker.
Website content needs to support both the keyword phrases and your conversion strategy.
Navigation needs to support a focused link structure and an ideal selling sequence.
Content growth needs to be both keyword focused and designed to appeal to attracting buyers.
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

Doug Williams @ 5:15 am

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).

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.
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.
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.
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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Filed under: SEO Strategies

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5 SEO Strategies for Start-Up Businesses

Doug Williams @ 4:09 am

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Filed under: SEO Strategies

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Google Maps Optimization Tips

Doug Williams @ 5:33 am

This blog entry was posted on November 29, 2010.

Google map results are triggered when someone includes a city or state name with certain search terms. Although these map listings are free when a business registers with Google Places, only the top 7 listings are displayed on the results page when a search is done. To appear in the top 7 listings, you will still need to optimize your map listing.

Keywords: This is very important as you create your new business listing. Not all keywords will produce a map listing when paired with a city name. You will need to test this as you finalize your keywords. Make sure your keywords are highly relevant to what you sell.
Local: The address and phone number for your business must be local and the same as you use on your other online locations. Place your address on every single page of your website, blog and web directory listing.
Categories: This is the business category that your business falls under. The category should be your keywords you selected above. The first category must be a legitimate Google category but the next 4 can be completely arbitrary and keyword rich.
Develop Citations: These are web pages that “cite” your company, address and phone number. You can develop these citations yourself by creating pages or listings at: squidoo.com, aboutus.org, kudzu.com, google.com/profiles or brownbook.net.
Customers Reviews: The more reviews your listing has, the better your position. It not only provides social proof for your company, reviews will keep your listing near the top. Try sending new customers an email asking them to leave you a review. You can even do this automatically using an auto responder series that greet new clients.
BackLinks: An effective targeted link building campaign can do wonders for your placements. This can move your listing above your competition by using keyword anchor text in a backlinking campaign.

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Filed under: Local Search

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Setting Goals For Your Social Media Marketing Campaign

Doug Williams @ 4:52 am

This blog entry was posted on November 27, 2010.

Your customers do read and use social media. It is in such high use today that every business should be incorporating social media marketing into their marketing strategies. So how do you get started? The first step should be setting goals.

Just how big is the opportunity?

5 of the top 10 highest-traffic websites (Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Blogger and Twitter) are social media websites.
With over 500 million users, if Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd largest country in the world.
5.4 billion videos were watched by US audiences in October 2010 with YouTube having the majority share of viewers.

Before you start your social media marketing initiative, you need to establish your goals of what you want to accomplish. How is social media going to help your business? Many companies that are new to social media have a hard time with this because they don’t understand what is possible.

Sample social media marketing goals

Increase brand awareness using social media marketing
Monitor and measure the number of mentions of company brand / name online.
Gain a better understanding of how your target audience feels about your brand / company.
Build and develop relationships with your current customers.
Increase search engine traffic to your website by 40% by the end of the year.
Generate 50% more quality sales leads over current levels.

What are the next steps?

Start by listening and monitoring.
Select which specific social media sites to start with.
Start small and stay focused.
Measure results.
Make adjustments and changes.
Expand your campaign.

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Filed under: Social Media Marketing

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5 Very Common Mistakes in Selecting keyword Phrases

Doug Williams @ 4:45 am

This blog entry was posted on November 25, 2010.

Selecting the right keywords that will attract interested visitors is the most critical step in any search engine optimization campaign. One of the biggest dangers is selecting the wrong keywords and then building an expensive campaign around them. Watch out for these all too common mistakes.

Search Volume: Don’t select phrases based on the daily search volume, instead select first based on relevance. Would someone that typed in a phrase for a search really want what you are selling? I would rather have a hundred interested visitors instead of a thousand uninterested ones.
Word Order: Don’t optimize for words in the wrong order. Do your keyword research based on “phrase match” rather than “broad match”. Example: “marketing small business” appears to have a high search volume (broad match). Researching in phrase match shows that the real phrase with high search volume is “small business marketing.”
Phrase Length: Don’t select short phrases. Short phrases don’t attract buyers. Buyers will typically use phrases with 3-5 words or even longer. Researchers look for short phrases (1-2 words) and they are very general. Buyer phrases are very specific and will include things like make and model or specific locations or details as searches get refined.
Commercial Intent: Don’t select phrases that attract people that just want information. Other phrases attract people who are interested in a transaction. Microsoft has Online Commercial Intention tool that will show which phrases will have a high level of commercial intent.
Local Phrases: Don’t select broad, national phrases if you are a local business. It is much easier and faster to get ranked for local phrases (broad terms + city or other geographic descriptor). Your local area is where 80% of your sales come from. This could be your neighborhood, city, state or a multi-state region.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies

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There Ought To Be a Law Against Spam!

Doug Williams @ 4:04 am

This blog entry was posted on November 23, 2010.

There is… It is called the CAN-SPAM Act. OK… looking at our inboxes, we can see it isn’t working well. Rather than create new laws, we need to get this one being enforced. After all, any law without enforcement isn’t really a law at all.

The term spam is generally thought to have originated from the well known Monty Python Spam sketch. Unlike the spicy lunch meet, spam, the email is a form of mass marketing like junk mail. Let’s take a look at this law.

CAN-SPAM stands for “Controlling the Assault of Non Solicited Pornography and Marketing.” The act was put into place January 2004 to set out requirements for those sending out commercial emails, establish penalties for spammers, and give consumers the right to ask e-mailers to stop spamming them.

Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $16,000,

From: Don’t use false or misleading header information. Do not disguise who the sender is in any way.
Subject: Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line cannot mislead the receiver.
Identify the message as an ad. Clearly and conspicuously state that it is an advertisement.
Location: Tell recipients where you’re located. Include a physical address or a PO box on every email.
Opt-out: Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Specific instructions or an opt-out link must be included.
Honor opt-out requests promptly. All opt-outs must be processed within 10 business days.
Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. You are responsible for another company if you hire them to send out emails.

The law seems clear… Why then is there no enforcement? Why then are our inboxes so full of spam?

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Filed under: Email Marketing