A typical site consists of 4 things:

1.) The Design
2.) The Content
3.) The underlying code(affects how well it loads, and how well it indexes)
4.) The Features(like forums, chat, member areas, etc)

If you drop the ball on any of these areas, your site will never reach it’s full potential! I’ve seen plenty of sites fail because once the site was completed, it was ‘junked up’ with unorganized text, and poor quality images. At that point, the design looks horrible, because it’s wrapped around ugly, unusable content! Your content should never, ever be an afterthought! Hiring a professional photographer to photograph your products or projects, and your staff, is worth every penny. Pay attention to the details, and everything else will fall into place.

In other sites, I’ve seen people get sites that look horrible, and then spend a massive amount of effort updating content, and marketing it, only to be frustrated by a general lack of interest. If a site looks like it was designed by a high school kid, then people will assume(often wrongly) that the quality of the content is also at a high school level.

You want to drive a ton of traffic to your website? Great! But what will they find when they get there? Will they want to stay? Will they want to come back?

So what’s the weakest link on your website? Let’s fix it!

SEO is a constantly changing field, and there’s a lot of bad information online about it. Some of the information is simply outdated, and some is designed to get quick rankings, at the cost of getting black-listed long-term. Believe it or not, SEO is not voodoo, or even horribly complicated. Let’s look at a couple of popular misconceptions about SEO, and along the way learn how to approach it successfully.

1.) Ignore SEO concepts when creating your content.

Search engine’s are designed to find great websites, and these companies have hundreds of engineers who are constantly tweaking their algorithms to try to accomplish that goal. They’re not looking for perfectly-coded sites with some secret sauce of keywords, and code-to-text ratio. They try to return sites that people love! As an example, one of the many ways that Google determines that is by looking at how many legitimate sites are linking to your site. If people like your site enough to link to it, then it’s more likely to be popular! This is just one of the many, many clues Google uses to determine “popularity”(and none of them can be effectively faked). The best way to rank on Google is to create the site that your visitors want to come back to. It seems to simple, but trust me, it works! When you create that kind of site, and give it a little time, your site will begin to rank well!

(Note: If you’re worried about keywords, remember this: If you’re writing about your business, the keywords will be there! If you’re writing a sales pitch, it probably won’t have the keywords you need. Keep it focused, and leave out the sales mumbo-jumbo!)

2.) You can have a site that ranks well that’s not successful

Let’s say that you have a specialty business in a small town. There’s very little competition, and your site is ranking at the top of most searches for your service. Why aren’t you getting a ton of hits? If only ten people today searched for “locksmith in timbuktu”, then no matter how well you rank, don’t expect a hundred hits a day to your website from search engines! This is a very common oversight. Search engines are not magical traffic generators! This doesn’t mean that your site can’t be successful though, which ties into my next point!

3.) You can have a site that doesn’t rank well, and is still successful

Alright, no one is coming to your site via search engines, either because your site doesn’t rank well yet, or because no one is searching for you. What then? Just as with a typical storefront business, if you want to get people in the door, you have to create demand(or at least curiosity!) Make sure your website address is on everything that you produce. It should be on your letterheads, business cards, receipts, billboards, print ads, flyers, banners, etc. The next thing, which most people miss, is to give people a reason to come to your site! This could be for exclusive coupons, helpful articles about things in your industry(it works, you’re reading one!), product manuals, video demonstrations, online forms, etc. Be creative! If you want people to show up, give ‘em a reason!

4.) Sometimes, your site isn’t the best site for that query

This is one that no one really wants to hear! Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you want to show up for a broad competitive term like “Real estate agents Nashville”. Now if you were a customer searching for this term, you’d want Google to only show you the best results for this query. You’d probably hope that they returned some of the best rated, most-professional real estate agents, and preferably the ones that have been around the longest. But if you’re a real estate agent in Nashville, your only concern is that your web developer “do something” to get you listed on the top! The hard truth is that maybe, at the moment, your business isn’t the most relevant result.  Maybe you’re the new kid on the block, and/or no one knows about you yet. Search engines are not designed to help people discover new places. They only care about showing the best places! The better option is to work towards being the best real estate agent in Nashville, and watch your ranking soar with your reputation. It’s sort of a snowball effect!

What can you do online to help people discover you initially? I always recommend Adwords! It’s the most cost-effective way to get your name out online with measurable results, and should be a part of nearly every business’ marketing plan.

Don’t treat SEO like a marketing campaign. If a typical marketing campaign is done well, you’ll see results right away! Search ranking however, is really more like your online reputation. It takes time to build it, and trying to rush it never ends well. Just like your “real-life” reputation, if it grows legitimately, it will benefit your business for years to come!

There are several different ways to provide a mobile-optimized experience for your site.

1. Mobile Stylesheets

   Modern websites are designed via CSS stylesheets, and with a properly structured site that’s not very complex(your typical content/advertising sites, blogs, etc.) can have an additional stylesheet attached that optimizes your site’s layout and design for small screen devices.

2. Mobile “Mirrored” Site

   More complex sites, have advanced features like live chat, polls, or forums that may not be needed or advisable to have on a mobile site. In cases like this it’s better to have a separate mobile website that has the same information(pulling from the same database typically). These sub-sites can selectively show the content that is relevant to mobile users.

3. 3.) Separate Mobile Site

   Occasionally a mobile site has it’s own purpose and function unique from the main site. This could be a competition, an event registration, or a location based site. In these cases, of course it’s simpler to just create a separate site.

Whichever option fits your needs, let’s keep your website in the hands of your customers!

1. The Anonymous Friend Approach
   

   “I had a friend who thought your web design was horrible. Me personally? Oh, I didn’t think it was that bad, just needs a little oil on the hinges if ya know what I mean.”

2. The Apologetic Approach
   

   “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, I mean I don’t want to hurt your feelings. Not that you’re overly sensitive or anything! I just thought you might want to consider making some minor changes, not that you have to, if they’re not to difficult…”

3. The Brutal Approach
   

   “Your site looks so bad a kitten dies somewhere in the world every time it’s pulled up!”

4. The Clumsy Approach
   

   “I thought your grandmother did a fantastic job with your site!”

5. The Oblique Approach
   

   “Have you considered revamping your site to adopt more of a 21st century look?”

6. The Optimist’s Approach
   

   “This site has huge potential! With some new colors, images, layout, and content, it could go citywide!”

7. The Friend Approach
   

   “I wouldn’t tell just anyone this, but your site is really horrible. I just wanted you to know before everyone starts laughing at you behind your back!”

8. The Intervention Approach
   

   “We’re all here today to tell you that we love you, but we can’t bear to see you ruining your public image with such an awful site! It’s not fair to you, it’s not fair to the people who have to look at it, and it just has to stop!”

9. The Exaggerated Approach
   

   “Dude, I’m sitting here at the emergency room, and it’s all your fault! I pulled up your website, and felt strangely compelled to stick a fork in my eye, repeatedly! You’ve got to do something about that site, PLEASE!!!”

10. The Technical Approach
    

    “After extended analysis, it has been determined that your site is less than optimum in several key areas, thus imperilling the conversion efficacy within the combination of social, financial, and age-based demographics that define your potential market. Of considerable interest is the lack of initial positive feedback regarding the overall aesthetics of the site. This is further exacerbated with the lack of current information, and generally confusing arrangement of said information. This general confusion combined with the poor aesthetics is theorized to generate a considerable amount of mental and emotional stress for visitors, who promptly vacate the site, resulting in the less than stellar results from the site in question.”

Whatever your approach, be sure to use it soon(at your own risk!), and feel free to append the following statement to the end:

“If you want a professional, affordable website, you should contact Andrew Trivette Design!”

(Tailor it to sound natural of course :)

Together we can make the Internet a better place! ;)

1. Virtual Office
   Your website provides your potential customers with a first impression of your business, similar to them actually coming to your place of business for the first time. It offers 24/7/365 availability, and customer support. A website for many people is a low pressure, time-efficient way of gathering pertinent information about your business, such as business hours, directions, contact method, and general product/service information.
2. Expanded Services
   With a professional site, you have the ability to offer your customers a whole range of additional services for their convenience, and ultimately your profit. Whether they be basic features like directions, and contact forms or more custom features such as application forms, progress reports, order tracking, weekly ads/coupons, client discounts, or weekly newsletters, these features provide for many small companies a whole new level of professionalism for a relatively low cost.
3. Enhanced Marketing
   Promotional websites offer a unique opportunity in marketing. A product or service can be fully expounded upon on a website much more than practically any other form of marketing. It is for this reason that websites are increasingly the intermediate goal for many other marketing campaigns. Many tv, newspaper, mail, and radio ads are referring their customers to their websites for more information. This tends to work better long term for sales, due to the inherently low pressure, information rich nature of the web.
4. Efficient Services
   Web based services can bring a critical element of efficiency to many small businesses. Communications can be simplified, and everyone is kept in the loop so much easier than with traditional memos, and time consuming conference meetings. You and your employees are then free to do what you’re there for – to make money. Online applications and forms for clients and prospective employees can reduce the time from request to implementation, further making your company look good.

Indexing

When Google or any other search engine looks at your site, they’re going to see alot of code, and essentially a bunch of words strung together. From this soup of code and words, they have to try and figure out what your site’s purpose is, what the focus of that page is, and then rank it compared to other pages with similar content. This is the main purpose of the indexing process.

SEO is all about making sure that search engines understand your site. It is not about getting your site to rank highly in the search results(although it often helps). This is a huge misunderstanding that many people have. Google can index your site, fully understand all of your keywords and content, and still not rank it highly!

Ranking

Your site’s content is only one small part of what determines the “quality” of your site(according to search engines). Other small factors that play a part in your site’s ranking include: how long your domain is registered for, how long your site has been around, how recently it’s been updated, how many other site’s have linked to you, how relevant your content is to what people are actually searching for, and whether your page url’s contain keywords relevant to the content on that page. Also keep in mind that search engines technically don’t rank websites, but rather they rank the individual pages within your site.

The fact is this: there is no single factor that will determine your site’s rankings. Quality search engines like Google hire the best and brightest programmers in the world to ensure that no one can guarantee that their site is ranked first! The total number of factors which determine a site’s ranking is around 200 factors(most of which are not publicly known!)

Conclusion

All this may sound a little depressing, but bear in mind that focusing on delivering relevant information, in an organized manner, to the people who actually visit your site(with good HTML optimization) is the approach that all the search engines recommend for best results. After all, when you boil down all the quality factors, their goal is simply to provide the most relevant sites based on what someone is searching for. If your site is current, and relevant, it will rank!

My recommendation for new sites, or newly SEO’ed sites is to run a Google Adwords campaign for at least a year or so. This drives visitors to your site initially, and if it’s a good site, with good information, you will begin getting traffic, referrals, and links to your site, which will slowly begin improving your ranking for relevant searches!

Disclaimer: I am not a marketing expert. I have however studied, implemented, and consulted on many online marketing campaigns, and I’ve seen a lot of good and bad along the way. That’s what I want to talk about today.

“Personally, I’ve seen the web work for almost any business demographic”

More often than not, I see people trying to apply the techniques that they learned in "traditional” advertising to their websites. The next thing I know they’re complaining about the web, and how it doesn’t work for their demographics, or even that it is just generally worthless. Personally, I’ve seen the web work for almost any business demographic. However, online marketing is fundamentally different from almost any other type of marketing method because of one simple reason: Control.

The internet is controlled by its users. If I don’t like what I see on a site I can immediately jump to another site that is more accomodating. For many people the web is one of the few places, if not the only place, in their life where they are in complete control. This control combined with practically no commitment, or consequences is very empowering, even if it is only on a subconscious level. This means that high-pressure tactics don’t work online! Trying to force people into becoming customers by forcing them through a sales “funnel”, or by limiting they’re ability to navigate through your site just doesn’t work. You may get some sales from this approach, but your results will never be as good as when you give your visitors the ability to look around as much as they wish, while making it easy for them to purchase as soon as they’re ready.

Purchasing Patterns

It’s helpful to remember that customers tend to fall into different groups based on purchasing habits. The two primary groups to consider are what market researchers call "emotional" and "logical". Some people are considered emotional shoppers because their decision is based on the presentation, the images, and perhaps the general hype surrounding the product or service. Purchasers like this are less likely to care about the details, technical specifications, or testimonials for their purchase. Your website’s aesthetics, the quality of your product images, and the brevity of your descriptions make a huge difference for this demographic.

Others are considered logical shoppers, and tend to do their research before making a purchase. These potential customers will want to comparison shop, learn as much as possible about the product, look at reviews, learn about your company, etc. These will be the first visitors to leave your site if they experience any pressure throughout the sales process. Pressure could be popups, restricted navigation, etc. Additional factors that will lose sales to this group is lack of information, an unprofessional, or inconsistent design(doesn’t establish trust), lack of business policies, and hidden costs(like shipping) before or during checkout. On the positive side, if you turn these visitors into customers and follow through with a quality service/product, you will have loyal, repeat customers whose referrals will make them your best marketing team!

“Communicating your idea, and building trust online become extremely important, and significantly more difficult(but not impossible!)”

Online marketing is further complicated by the fact that you have lost the personal/emotional touch that many one-on-one marketers rely on to make a sale. Communicating your idea, and building trust online become extremely important, and significantly more difficult(but not impossible!).

Now that i’ve got the depressing part out of the way, let’s talk about what you can do to turn your online marketing into an advantage for you.

Tips for Online Success

1. Let your customers go
   Trying to hold onto your customers is futile, and a huge waste of effort. Someone who leaves your site without a purchase is not necessarily a lost sale since they may simply be doing their research for a future purchase.
2. Give your customers control.
   Give your visitors the ability to write reviews, and leave feedback on your service. Let them know that their opinion matters and will be taken seriously. Instead of adopting an us vs them approach, turn your business into a team effort with your customers. If you’re really brave, let them leave public feedback on your site!
3. Focus on the customers experience than on the conversion
   If your only concern is getting customers out the “door” with a big sale your customers will sense that very quickly and leave. This goes back to what I mentioned earlier about building trust. Give your customers everything they need to understand your product/ service and make sure they know you’ll be around after the sale to ensure they have the best results possible. Provide training videos, written tutorials, and phone support once the purchase has been made. Throughout your site be creative in finding ways to give your visitors everything they need to make their purchasing decision while making sure that as soon as they are ready, they’re able to purchase.
4. Be transparent until it hurts
   When you lack the personal aspect of a physical store, you have to go the extra mile to ensure that customers feel like they’re more than an invoice number. Write some articles about how your company operates, and perhaps even create some videos about your company. If you’re a small company, don’t act like a mega-corporation. When you make a mistake or have some unexpected rush on a particular product, be sure to let your customers know right away. If it affects more than a couple of customers, I usually recommend posting a short apology on the site. This not only helps those affected, but also builds trust with future customers by showing them that you’re honest and you care. Everyone knows companies aren’t perfect, so if you act like you are, they know you’re lying!
5. Create a conversation
   When your customers know that they’re important to you, and that you listen to them when they complain, you’ll be amazed at how much better your customers you’ll have(and how much better a breed of customers you’ll attract). Think of your website not as a static facade for your business, but rather as an interactive conversation with your customers and potential customers. Don’t just make it possible for people to leave constructive feedback, actively ask for it.

Much of this advice requires a different approach to business online, and a different approach to websites in general. It’s not just about marketing, it’s about putting your customers first. As trite as it sounds, it’s very true that if you take care of your customers, your customers will take care of you!

A conventional marketing plan probably sounds alot like this:

“In an effort to promote brand-awareness within a cross-section of your target demographic, and increase your monetization potential, it is recommended that you leverage your self-contained locomotive capabilities to establish your physical presence within the center of the highest density collection of core potential consumers(also known in lay terms as a group of people), and capitalize on your vocal assets, and your facial contortions(aka “smile”) to begin the process of introducing your cold market to the services that form the core of your monetization potential. Enhancing this venerable approach by presenting free tangible wood or cotton based sheets of information that your potential clients can retain for future reference purposes can only further improve the efficacy of the potential returns per unit of time and effort expended, thus allowing capable marketers to work “smart” and not hard.”

As opposed to the common-sense version:

“Go tell people about your business!”

Don’t let all the marketing technical jargon confuse you. It’s just what marketing experts use to make their advice seem important. But is it really so hard to find a couple of ways to get the word out about your product/service?

Just a thought from AT Design.

It is important when looking at the value of a website, to not equate the size of the site with it’s value. The intended audience, number of features, and degree of maintainability are just a few of the variables that affect a site’s value. Let’s look more in depth at a few of the most important site attributes.

No two websites are the same.

Much like a house or a car, a websites quality can be measured on several different levels. A house with a nice looking design, interior and exterior, tells you nothing about the foundation, plumbing, wiring, and overall integrity of the house. You could impress your friends and family with such a house, and end up spending a fortune repairing it’s most important, yet hidden, functions. In the same way, a website that looks cool, or trendy, or exciting, tells you very little about the overall stability and quality of that site. You will enjoy it until it starts crashing under moderate loads. Or you might be forced to redo whole sections(or even the whole site), in order to add new features in the future as your business grows. The ability to expand your site in the future, is an oft overlooked consideration in building a professional site.

Good impression from start to finish.

“…your guests aren’t coming to see your site’s incredible design, they’re coming to find information…”

So what does a good site look like? A good site not only provides a good visual first impression to your (potential) clients, but leaves them informed and pleased when they leave as well. Good first impressions count for little if one can’t follow through to the end. What does this mean for a site? 1. Clean, easy to use site layout. 2. Fast loading site. 3. Simple navigation. 4. Consistent layout throughout the site. Factors such as these play an overwhelming part of your guests overall experience. It is important to remember that your guests aren’t coming to see your site’s incredible design, they’re coming to find information, or to contact you to begin a business relationship.

Building a strong foundation.

With a professionally produced site, you are getting a site with an excellent foundation on which you can expand. One of the measurements of a good site is whether or not it follows the code standards set up by an organization called the W3C. Essentially a site that meets these standards is most likely to display correctly across different browsers, operating systems, and most importantly, future browsers and operating systems, and other internet enabled devices such as mobile phones.

Investing in a long-term solution.

When a website can be built by an amateur with a minimal investment in time, a professionally built site might not seem like a good investment. But considering the amount of time that can be saved in maintaining an enterprise level website, not to mention the potential increase in business inquiries/transactions, your investment in a good site can pay off tenfold.