The primary goal with search is to attract the visitors that are the most likely to convert into a genuine enquiry. These are the visitors that have searched for a phrase that you have optimised your website to rank well for.

To attract the right type of visitors you need to know

1. The keyword phrases that are currently generating clicks to your website via search
2. The most popular keyword phrases searchers are using in the search engines

How to tap into your website’s keyword referrals

At least once a month you should check what keyword phrases have generated visits to your website. You can get this information from your website visitor statistics which are provided as part of your hosting. If you don’t have web stats with your hosting, you can sign up for Google Analytics for free (you just need the code added to your website) see http://www.google.com/analytics/.

Your website stats offer a great source of intelligence about how your site is performing in Google, as you can discover exactly what content is attracting people to your site. It can make very interesting reading, and you may be quite surprised at some of the phrases used. Knowing this information will tell you a) what keywords you are ranking for and b) which keywords are the most popular. You’ll also get to see keyword trends over time, and this will generate ideas for new content like articles, blog posts and offers.

Discover the keyword phrases people use in the search engines

There are a number of ways to find out which keyword phrases people are typing into the search engines. This information is extremely valuable, as you may discover that people are using completely different words than you expected, or at least different combinations of words.

One of the best places to start your research is with Google. If you want to tap into the wider search space check out the Google’s Zeitgeist feature at http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist/index.html.

Google also has a very impressive tool called ‘trends for websites’ which shows the traffic trends for major websites. Want to know what kiwis have been searching in the last month? Wonder no more – just click on http://www.google.com/insights/search/#geo=NZ&date=today%207-d&cmpt=q

To research specific keyword phrases check out the Google AdWords keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. From this site you can enter in phrases and see how many searches a phrase gets in a month (and you can tailor the results to New Zealand). Other keyword tools include http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/ and http://www.wordtracker.com/ which both have free trials available.

If you’d like more help with keyword research or improving your rankings in Google call us on 03 366 3340 or email info@tmlwebdesign.co.nz

Performing well in the search engines is vital to the success of your website, but there’s a lot of competition which can make it challenging. Most web searchers won’t go past the first 10 results in Google and in most industries there are dozens if not hundreds of websites jostling to get into those first ten spots.

So what is the magic formula to get to the top of Google? Well, only Google knows for certain, as they use a secret algorithm to rank websites. But there is widespread general agreement about the basic things you can do to rank well. These include;

1. Getting links from other websites

Google takes into account how popular a website is when it ranks it against other websites. Google does this by determining how many links are going to the website. It also factors in the quality of these links. So you want to get lots of links from other websites, but especially so from sites that are very popular.

2. Good content

Well written content helps considerably with your rankings in Google. So make sure you use the words people will put into a search engine.

3. Adding more content on a regular basis

Adding more content to your website helps in two ways. Firstly, Google will know you are updating your site more often so will visit your site on a frequent basis (which means new pages can get into Google quickly). And secondly, the more topics you can cover in articles or blog posts the more visitors you can draw to your website via search and links.

4. Pay attention to your title tags

A title tag is a piece of HTML code that tells the search engines what your website is about. Every page on your website needs to have a different title tag that includes your keyword phrases.

5. Well worded description tags

A description tag is a piece of HTML code that describes in a short sentence what a web page is about. This description is shown in the search engines, so it’s important that it is enticing to searchers and it should also include your keyword phrases.

6. Include your keywords in your page address (URL)

The words used in your page name create the final URL (or web address) for a specific page. So if the page is about dog grooming services, an ideal URL and page name would be www.doggroomers.co.nz/dog-grooming/.

To find out more about search engine optimisation and how we can improve your ranking in Google give us a call on 03 366 3340.

When ranking a website, Google takes into account the words used in a link to the website. So if links to your website contain keywords then the link text is going to help with your rankings, as Google will consider your website to be ‘relevant’. A relevant website is one that uses the keywords someone searches for (either in the HTML code or in the web copy).

And it’s not just the words used in your domain name that can help with rankings; the words used in the page names of your website can also help considerably, so a page about dog training services should be called dogtraining.html rather than services.html.

To get the full benefit out of a keyword domain name it needs to go to a website and not just be a ‘redirect’. A redirect is where a domain name goes to a website with a different domain name. Google will ignore the domain name if it’s just redirecting to another domain name.

The solution is to use a keyword domain name for your main website, or to set up a secondary website. This secondary website could be a blog, a forum or a new website that is about a specific topic. To continue with the dog trainer example, the trainer could write a blog about their training experiences with tips for dog owners, set up a forum so dog owners can swap information, while the specialist website could be about training a particular breed of dogs.

If you are thinking that all the good domain names have probably gone then you might just be in for a surprise. We regularly discover premium keyword domain names that have expired and are now available to be registered.

If you’d like help finding a keyword domain name give us a call on 03 366 3340 and speak to one of our web consultants. We can also help you develop a blog or website for the new domain name.

RSS stands for ‘real simple syndication’ and it is a way for people to subscribe to your website updates or blog posts. Once someone has subscribed to an RSS ‘feed’ they are notified of new content via their RSS Reader. To read RSS feeds you can download a reader from the internet or set up a free account with an aggregator website like Google Reader (www.google.com/reader) or Bloglines (www.bloglines.com).

You can also create your own personalised page on Google called an iGoogle page where you can add your favourite RSS feeds as well as cool little ‘gadgets’ like the daily weather forecast for your city. To set up an iGoogle page you need a Google account. You can sign up for a Google account for free at https://google.com/accounts or go to http://www.google.com/ig.

When you visit a website look out for the RSS icon either on the page or in the address bar at the top of the web browser. Click on the icon and you’ll be able to add the RSS feed to your iGoogle page or Google Reader.

Here’s an example of an iGoogle page set up with RSS feeds.

If you use Google Reader to subscribe to feeds it will learn what you are interested in and start suggesting feeds for you to subscribe to.  This is a fantastic way to discover new information sources, and to have your RSS feed discovered by others.

As people become more familiar with RSS, they will start to look for the feed icons on websites. If you’d like a website with multiple RSS feeds (for different subject categories) then give us a call on 03 366 3340

If you have any questions about RSS feeds, readers or blogging, leave a comment and we’ll email you a reply.

If you’ve ever used Facebook (www.facebook.com) and updated your status on a regular basis, then you’ll ‘get’ Twitter.

It’s free to sign up for a Twitter account, and you can customise your Twitter page with your own graphical background and add a profile image. Your friends, family and colleagues can then ‘follow’ you on Twitter. This means that your updates – or ‘tweets’ as they are called – will show up on their Twitter page. People can respond to your tweets if they want to, so the conversation can be two way. Some individuals are followed by hundreds of thousands of Twitter users. Take Barack Obama, for example. He has 548,910 followers (http://twitter.com/BarackObama). Other top ‘Twitterers’ include Britney Spears, CNN Breaking News, The New York Times, Stephen Fry and Al Gore. Visit http://twitterholic.com/ to discover more of the most followed people on Twitter.

Twitter updates are limited to just 140 characters, so it really forces people to be concise in describing what they are doing. Updates can be received on your cellphone, and you can also update your Twitter account by cellphone.

So what about the business applications of Twitter? Well for starters, if you want to tap into some of the brightest business minds in the world you can follow them via Twitter. In fact there is a whole site dedicated to the tweets of leading entrepreneurs ExecTweets – check it out at www.exectweets.com. Having a Twitter account for your business is also another way to increase your profile online and get more visitors to your website or blog.

Now if you are thinking ‘Oh no, not another site to update!’ then relax. If you are writing a blog you can sync your blog and your Twitter account so whenever you post a new blog a Tweet is sent to your Twitter account about the new blog. We think that’s pretty cool.

Give us a call on 03 366 3340 if you would like more information about customising your Twitter account and having your website publish updates to Twitter.

There are many ways to get your website better known – both online and offline. Let’s start with the offline marketing of your website. You want to make sure you have your website address on everything. Here’s a checklist for you to get started with:

Add your website address to:

Number plates, car signage, building signage, pens, letterheads, business cards, compliment slips, carry bags, television adverts, print adverts, radio adverts, all promotional materials, clothing, name badges, billboards, and anything else you can think of.

Online marketing of your website:

Social media

If you have a personal profile on Facebook (www.facebook.com) or other social media sites, make sure you add your business website address. Consider creating a Facebook group, or a Facebook page for your business, or try out Facebook advertising (which is pay per click). Sign up to LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) – this is a site for business professionals to network with each other. In addition, sign up to Twitter (www.twitter.com) – this is a popular site overseas but not so well known in New Zealand, although it is starting to get some publicity here (www.stuff.co.nz is now on Twitter at http://twitter.com/NZStuff and so are the Christchurch Police at http://twitter.com/nzpolice_chch ). With Twitter you publish short status updates about what you are doing. So the CEO of your company could twitter about the business happenings. Don’t think you have the time to twitter? Well, you can use your blog to automatically update your Twitter account every time a new blog post is published. And you can access Twitter using an iPhone or other mobile device.

Link building

Many websites are discovered via links from other websites. The place to start is with the New Zealand search engines and website directories. Most web directories will list your site for free (though many will insist on a link back). We recommend you create a links page on your site for this purpose so you are ready to place links on your site to other sites. To find New Zealand website directories run a search in Google for “new zealand web directories” as new directory sites come online every few months.

Not only does link building get you traffic from the actual link, but the number of links you have (and the quality of those links) can help with your rankings in Google, so it certainly pays to get as many good links as you can. Think carefully about the sites you swap links with though, as to get the maximum benefit out of reciprocal linking the site you swap with needs to complement yours in some way (for example if you are a real estate agent swap links with a law firm). We recommend you stay away from sites that send out automated link request on your behalf – these are very annoying for website owners and go straight to the junk box.

Search engine optimisation

By far the best way to promote your website is to have the site rank highly in the search engines. Your goal should be to rank in the top 10 for your primary keyword phrases. By keyword phrases we mean the main words that describe what you do or what you offer. For example if you are a motel in Christchurch your phrases might be “Christchurch motel”, “motel accommodation Christchurch”, etc. There’s a lot to search engine optimisation and in particular a lot of misinformation online about what to do, but essentially it boils down to making a website more ‘relevant’ in the search results. A good place to start is by reviewing the wording on your site. Have you included your keywords in your copy and used synonyms for those keywords? If you are targeting a particular market place (say North Americans) make sure you use words they would search for – a classic is ‘vacation’ instead of ‘holiday’. Common spelling mistakes are another source of traffic to a site, but we don’t recommend you add the mistakes to your content; they need to go into your metadata.

Tracking your marketing efforts

Remember to track what you are doing so you can measure its effectiveness. Monitor your website statistics every month and watch for increases in traffic, check which sites are referring visitors, review the keywords used in the search engines that resulted in a visit and track how many visitors Google is sending to your site each month. Most web stats packages will record this information, so check with your web company. If you don’t have a stats package with your hosting you can sign up for Google Analytics for free and have a tracking code added to your site.

Good luck with your marketing efforts, and if you would like some assistance please contact one of our web team on 03 366 3340, as we can assist you with search engine optimisation, link building and Facebook marketing.

And we can’t think of a better way to advance your business than by utilising the web more, though of course as a web firm we may be just a tad biased. However, the smart cookies out there will know that web marketing is extremely measurable thanks to all of the visitor and click-through metrics you can track – you will know within hours if something is working or not and respond accordingly.

As more businesses feel the squeeze, competition for the consumer and B2B dollar is going to be fierce. So you’re going to need all of the exposure you can get. The goal then is get your message in front of more of the right people – with the right people being those that are the most likely to be interested in your offering. 

So let’s put to one side all the talk about doom and gloom and focus on the actions you can take to spread the word online about your business (and have others spreading the word for you).

To get you started we’ve put together an online strategy with the following objectives:

1. Craft the right message
2. Get your message in front of the right groups of people online
3.  Package the message so it is enticing and gets people to act
4.  Impress the heck out of and convert the leads you get 
5.  Keep them coming back for more

1. Crafting the right message(s)

If you’re scratching your head and wondering just what your message is, you are not alone. Many businesses focus so much on their product or service offerings (or those of the competition) that they can’t condense what they do into one short sentence that communicates a lot about their business.

To help you develop or refine your message you can use a popular method called the ‘lift speech’. Picture this: you step into a lift, and the person next to you asks you what your business does. You’ve got just a few floors or thirty seconds to impress them. Try it sometime – you’ll be surprised at how many questions this will bring up. When developing your lift speech, think about where your business has come from, the type of clients you work with, your competitive advantages, and the final outcomes your products or services deliver.

In addition to the one core message that you want to communicate, you’ll have lots of other messages that are more specifically related to your products or services. To make your messages compelling, focus on the specific problems you can solve. Make sure there is no ambiguity or vagueness in your messages – this can be achieved by using plain language.

2. Getting your message(s) in front of the right people

The right people are obviously the ones that will be interested in your offer – it’s as simple as that. What is not so simple is finding out just who these people are online. Sometimes it is an age thing (swishy bars that mostly appeal to the 20 – 35 crowd), but some products and services transcend age groups and are more needs based (gyms attract anyone looking to get fit/lose weight). Targeting your message online to a specific age group can be achieved quite easily using social media websites like Facebook. With Facebook everyone with a profile has to enter in their demographic information (sex, age, education, etc). Advertisers on Facebook can therefore target market very effectively, for example, to all ‘females born in 1969 who have a university level education’.

With needs or ‘interests’ based targeting, ranking highly in Google for your keywords is one of the best ways to get your message in front of people. When someone searches for ‘Christchurch gyms’ in Google, they have a very distinct purpose in mind (‘find a gym I can join’). If you show up for this phrase then the chances of getting them to your website are quite high. Ideally, you really need to be on the first page of Google for your specific keyword phrases (you might like to brainstorm with your team as to what these are or check your website statistics for this information). You can get a top position in Google through buying your way in with Google AdWords (the ads in the right column or at the very top of the page), or you can rank for free in what is called the ‘organic results’ – these are the main results that most searchers focus on. Getting higher rankings in Google equals more clicks and more eyeballs on your website with a genuine interest in what you are offering, which ultimately means more sales.

Some other ways to get your message out there online include:

1. Links from other peoples websites (paid web directories, reciprocal links)
2. Buy some advertising on an email list
3. Be discovered on social media sites for free (via Facebook pages and groups)
4. Have people find your blog RSS feed through their RSS reader
5. Have people find your podcast through Itunes
6. Have people find your videos through YouTube (either on YouTube or embedded within a social media site or someone else’s site)
7. Have an online forum that has lots of people contributing to it

The methods you use will largely depend on the content you have. ‘Content is king’ is a popular saying online, and with good reason. Good content draws people to your site through search, links, and viral marketing. Make sure you are making the most of your content and have a strategy in place to generate more of it. For example, if you are a fitness studio, you could develop videos on proper exercise techniques that can be published to YouTube, embedded into your website as part of a ‘blog’, published to your Facebook page and syndicated to other websites for even more exposure.

3. Packaging your message so it is enticing and gets people to act

Your message might be clear and concise but it also needs to be attractive and compel people to act. Messages are more compelling if they solve a problem, assist people in gaining something, or stop people from losing something they value. Basically, you need to focus on ‘what’s in it for them’.

After spending so much time working on your message, coming up with your competitive advantages and honing your offer, the last thing you want is to have your message delivered in such a way as it gets lost or diminished by some extraneous factor.

One factor that can negatively impact on the delivery of your message is the design standard of your website. A click from Google to your website takes 2 seconds and within 2 seconds those visitors can be back at Google looking for someone else. Web users are highly influenced by the look of your website, and they have a subjective ‘credibility test’ that they measure all websites against, weighing up if they can trust the business behind the site. No matter how compelling your message, if your website is not up to standard the only message you’ll be sending is ‘we don’t really care’.

So here are a few tips to help you package that message nicely:

• Your website needs to be uncluttered with a good use of space
• Content should be presented in a hierarchical order with the most important information at the top (your logo/branding, byline, and opening introduction)
• Your web copy must be free of typos, spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes
• Use simple English and aim for a reading age of about 12 years old
• Make the most of your headings – they must grab attention and draw visitors into the rest of your content
• Use ‘calls to action’ such as asking people to click on a graphic for an offer, sign up to a newsletter, etc
• Integrate your offline marketing with your online marketing so that a cohesive and consistent message is being sent through all of  your marketing channels

4. Impressing your web leads to a conversion

Time is of the essence with web leads. Reacting quickly will impress potential clients. If you are checking your emails every 5 minutes and an enquiry comes through try calling them right then and there as they may still be on your website. Trust us on this – it makes a stunning impression, especially if the other companies they email take a day or even worse a week to get back to them. If you only check your emails every few hours you can still use immediacy to your advantage by setting up an auto responder that emails them back straight away. The auto responder can be as simple as ‘we’ll be in touch with you as soon as possible’ or you can attach a report they might find useful or direct them to a hidden link on your website that has valuable information on it.

Once you reach the point where the prospect is weighing up their alternatives you can pull out all the stops by using attractive and vibrant Outlook emails to ‘touch base’ as it’s an excellent method to use when you need a more passive way to keep selling to them. These emails could be forwarding an article you’ve found, an event that’s on that you think they’d like, or you could attach one of your free guides. 

5. After-sales service and keeping them coming back for more

Once you’ve made the sale make sure you add your new client to your email marketing list (and make sure someone is in charge of writing the content for this list). We know it can be hard to come up with content, but you really don’t need to write a lot and it doesn’t have to be every week or even every month. In fact, every 2 months is probably frequent enough (8 weeks can fly by these days).  The goal is to impart some important information and to be a gentle reminder of the other things that you can do for them.  You’ll be surprised at how long an email newsletter can keep on working for you – so expect to get phone calls months after you send an email out.

Blogging
Blogging is another great way to keep your clients informed about what you are doing or to inform them about topics they need to know about to help them along in their business. If you are an early adopter of web technologies then you’ll have to educate a good number of your clients to a certain extent about the technologies you use. Send out an email campaign introducing your blog, what your intentions are around it, and explain how they can subscribe to your blog and be notified of new blog updates using RSS. Your blog and your email marketing can work in tandem, with your email newsletters mentioning content from your blog with a link through to the full blog post if readers are interested. We recommend you always layer your information like this, unless you know for certain that all of your clients will read a long email. Generally, people skim read emails and if something takes their interest that’s when they look for more information. You can layer the information even more by linking your blog post to an offer on your website or to a PDF download with more detailed information.

 
Use social media to your advantage
Social media is not just for the teens or generation Y anymore.  Facebook is a phenomenon with all ages signing up to connect with friends and family. There are over 400,000 New Zealanders with Facebook profiles, so if you have given it a wide berth before now or put it into the ‘too hard basket’ it is time to give it another look and come up with your Facebook strategy.

Conclusion

Research has shown that the businesses that maintain their marketing spend (or increase it) during a recession recover much faster than those that cut their spending. Economists are predicting that things won’t pick up for at least another 18 months. So use the web during this time to mitigate the effects of the recession as well as helping to put your business in the best possible position when the recovery happens.

Need help?

We can develop a full online strategy for your business; just contact us for a consultation. We’ll start by helping you to refine the messages you want to communicate and show you the best way to get the message out to the right people online.

Around this time we also commenced development of a multimedia CD-ROM – even though many personal computers didn’t even have a CD-ROM drive – in fact we looked back at our marketing materials from this time to find that “50,000 CD-ROM drives are currently in use in New Zealand”. Clearly we were looking ahead to the future. And that future has always included emerging technologies. We’ve seen a lot since the early days – the rise and fall of the Netscape browser (relegated to history thanks to the ‘browser wars’), the dot.com boom and bust, web 1.0, web 2.0, the rise and rise of the Firefox web browser and the growing sophistication of open source web software.

Thanks in large part to the open source movement we can now offer you a suite of web design packages that are full of fantastic features and functionality and the latest web technologies.

We’ve also put you in the control seat of just about everything to do with your website – from uploading images to online photo galleries, to adding new pages and publishing a blog. We know there are many other ways for you to manage your own website, and we’ve seen a lot the content management systems that are out there. We also know from you, that most of them are just too darn hard for regular folk to use. That’s why the content management system we use and recommend is WordPress – which was developed as an open source project 5 years ago by a 19-year old American college student called Matt Mullenweg.

WordPress took off in a big way as a blogging tool, and it’s now used around the world as a web publishing platform for all types of websites – even e-commerce. There is a core group of international developers that are constantly developing the next version of WordPress and literally thousands of independent programmers writing software plugins for WordPress.

So what does this mean for you? It means your website can be run off a system that is both rich in features and functionality yet stunningly simple to use. You can take full advantage of the programming grunt work that happens every day around the world. Never again will you be locked into a proprietary content management system built by one developer who could get run over by a bus.

With one of our web design packages you can run your own blog with an RSS feed that your web visitors can subscribe to, hook your website up to your Facebook page or account, publish your YouTube videos, and make it easy for your visitors to add your site to their social networking profiles and bookmarks.

We’ve entered the age of the ‘mash up’ – pull content from here, push content to there and make it all look good. We can’t think of a better way to do this than with WordPress and the clients we already have on the system were also quick converts!

So give us a call on 03 366 3340 and find out just how your business can benefit from the latest web trends.