Many businesses are well aware that they need to have an e-marketing campaign to be successful these days but they are not quite sure how to do it. Essentially there are two pieces that make up your online presence. To be successful you will need two things.

1. A good looking, professional, conversion oriented web site
2. Traffic

Professional Website

Having a professional looking website is important because today it is your first impression. You want to convey your business in a well organized, great looking manner to the people that are looking for you. If a consumer goes to a website that looks like garbage then they are going to expect your product/service to be garbage, and that is a recipe for failure on the web. If you are failing on the web you are probably failing as a business. With that said, there are a few ways that you can go about having a great website.

1. Hire a professional company to do your website for you. Be sure to have a budget set aside for the project because a good looking website that captures the essence of your business can be expensive depending on what you have built into it.
2. Staff someone that is a developer or can use a do it yourself service and make something look great. Obviously over time option #1 is more ideal because it will save you money.

The site needs to be highly convertible. You can accomplish this by doing a couple of things. First you need to make sure that your contact information is featured on all pages. Also, you may want to have a short form (name, e-mail address and phone number) on all pages located strategically in the same place on each page.

Traffic

A great looking website with no traffic being routed to it is really pointless. People coming to your great looking website is just as important as having a good looking website. I will say that it is much easier to have a great looking website than it is to get tons of traffic but there are things that you can do. There really are only three ways that you can market online to generate traffic to your website.

1. SEO (see previous blog post)(All Businesses)
2. Directory (Just businesses with a local market)
3. SEM (pay-per-click, AdWords)(All Businesses)

SEO(Search Engine Optimization) is the most desirable of these three services. Over time it is going to bring you the most traffic. The only drawback is that it can take 3-6 months to see the results that you desired when you set out on your SEO campaign. I wrote an article explaining SEO in a previous post. Please feel free to refer to that article for more information.

Directoryis going to get you on the map section of the search engines (ie. Google Maps, Yahoo Local). This is a great, cheap service for local businesses. The drawback is that there has to be a geo-modifier put into the search box of the search engine (“Denver Web Design” instead of “Web Design”). This is great for plumbers. attorneys, electricians, etc.

SEMis going to be found in the “sponsored links” section of the search engine’s results pages. This is a good way to advertise for people that have high dollar items (real estate, heavy equipment, etc.). There are a few drawbacks of these types of advertisements. Only 20% of search engine users actually click on the “sponsored links section”. Though the search engines have cleaned up these advertisements, half the time they have nothing to do with the service/product that the consumer had originally searched for. This is dejecting and discourages people from visiting them. Also, people/competition can constantly click on these ads and run up your bill to be quite steep.

Where to start

All companies should have SEO done to their site. It is the best and most cost effective way to market online over the long run. Although it can be costly up front, my experience is that it always pays off in the end. Really, a combination of all three is the best approach, and that combination is going to be unique to each and every business. Need a professional to take a look at what you have and where to go? Give us a shout, we would be happy to help with no obligations! Check our website out for additional information at http://www.webforce-1.com !

Rand LeMarinel

Partner & Sales Manager

Web Force 1

720.276.9351

rand@webforce-1.com

SEO?

There are many businesses that understand it is important to get found on Search Engines but they do not understand how to get there. Realistically it is a very complicated process. The purpose of this blog post is to help you understand (in lehman’s terms) what SEO is, and how SEO works.

What is SEO?

SEO is the acronym for the term “Search Engine Optimization”. It is the process of making two things happen when it comes to search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

1. Making sure you are getting found by the search engines
2. Making sure that you are well ranked for the keyword phrases that are pertiment to your business.

To help you understand how it works, it is important that you understand how the search engines work and output your website’s ranking. For the purposes of this post I will use Google as an example. Google is the most popular search engine (about 80% market share), and pretty much sets the bench mark for technology. The others like Yahoo and Bing just follow.

Everyday, 24 hours a day, there are “spiders” that Google sends out to “crawl” the Internet. The spiders go throughout all of the Internet and basically look at everything that is out there. They are looking at images, text, pages, forms, video, and pretty much anything else that you can think of that would be on a website. These spiders collect hundreds of thousands, if not millions of bytes of information in any given time period. Once the spider has collected the information that it has been assigned to collect it brings it back to Google and is stored in a database. Google then runs an algorithm on the database. The output of that algorithm (algorithm= extremely complex mathematical equation) is what you see when you type something into Google, a ranking. In short, that is basically how it works. The problem with most websites is that they are missing the boat on at least one of the two above mentioned pieces (See #1 and #2 above).

How can I make sure that I am getting “crawled” and “ranked well”?

There are really two important phases that make up a successful SEO campaign.

1. The on site optimization
2. The maintenence phase

On site optimization is important to any SEO campaign. It is the act of making sure that Google is finding you, and when I say finding you I mean, they know you are active on the internet . There is alot of work that goes into the on site portion of an optimization. A few of the most important ones are listed below (not in any particular order).

1. Meta Data
2. Image Tagging
3. Head Tags
4. Content writing/linking
5. Site Mapping

These five things should ALWAYS be considered when doing an on site optomization. This will ensure that the website is getting indexed properly and that the site and business is getting found for the keywords that you want it to get found for.

The maintenance phase of an SEO campaign is arguably the most important. This is where you start to take off. This phase is where you do your linking and article campaigns to create some buzz around your business on the Internet. There are four key components in this phase. See below.

1. Inbound Linking
2. Outbound Linking
3. Article Writing
4. Blog/Social Networking

Inbound linking is the process of getting other sites to refer traffic to your site. Google looks at this as an important piece of your ranking. If other sites view you as relevant and they are ranked well, then you must be relevant as well, therefore you are going to rank better. The more sites that are referring traffic to your site the better.

Outbound linking is the same as above except your site becomes the referring site to others.

Article Writing is the most misunderstood and least used techniques of SEO. Article writing is very simple. You, your webmaster, or a staff writer writes an article about something that you may know as an expert in your field but that the common Lehman may not know. That article is tagged with your website’s information therefore it is indexed as an inbound link to your site, hence creating a better ranking and more traffic. Typically these are posted as a part of a directory and early on you may see that the article outranks you website. Do not be alarmed all will be well with time.

Social Networking is an obvious. Use social networking to get “likes”, “friends”, “comments” and so on. This will generate buzz about your business and also help your ranking.

How can I get started on an SEO campaign?

Realistically an SEO campaign should not be attempted by your average small to medium size business owner. It takes a whole lot of work (50 hours labor initially depending on the site) and knowledge. That leaves us with a couple of options.

1. Hire someone that is well versed in SEO. Make sure that before hiring them you follow up on their portfolio and verify that it is work that the person actually did and is not just claiming as their own (this happens all the time).
2. Hire a professional SEO company to take it on for you. Again, make sure to do your due diligence on that company and their SEO service.

Hopefully this article gives you some useful insights on how SEO works! Ultimately it takes two things to be successful on the Internet. Number one, you must have a good looking professional website. Number two, you must have traffic coming to the site. One without the other is bound for failure.

Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments that you may have about this article or visit our website for more information @ http://webforce-1.com/marketing.php.

Rand LeMarinel

Partner & Sales Manager

Web Force 1

rand@webforce-1.com

(720) 276-9351