| “Why Most Websites Don’t
Work”
Lately we’ve
noticed a preponderance of websites that are just adorable,
even nicely written or designed but simply don’t work
to get traffic or make sales. Website designers generally
don't know anything about optimizing sites to be ‘found’ by
search engines. They tell you they’ll submit your site
to hundreds of engines, but that's simply not how the process
works.
People won't find your website if it’s not properly
optimized for search engines, or if it doesn’t have information
a viewer can use. Worst of all, you’ll be losing business—a
waste of time and money. If you have a website, it should work for you!
We’ve outlined a few suggestions
below to ensure your site is optimized properly so those
who need your help desperately can actually find you;
- Have some
really helpful content. Besides
the ‘brochure’ information
about your company it is important to include something
that is useful and free. If you want ideas to adapt
to your own website, take a look at my site which gives
away some free information about how to get publicity
(since virtually everyone I talk to does it wrong)
and some low cost marketing tools besides. If
you offer useful content it gives your site visitors
a peek into your knowledge or your product so they'll
understand how you can help them.
- Add testimonials. Your
happy customers giving their third party endorsements
are way more convincing than anything you could tell
people about your products or services. Use this
technique to help sell your products or services
and you'll earn more income. If you can’t collect
these heartfelt and non-superficial testimonials
yourself, let us help you. See our Business
Evaluation Service: Knowledge is Bliss package.
- Make your
content keyword - rich. Do a
keyword evaluation with professional tools to ensure
you are picking the keywords that people are seeking.
One helpful keyword evaluator is the Overture
Suggestion Tool. Don’t
make assumptions about whether your site has the right
keywords. My
own mistake was assuming that people were searching for “Marketing
San Francisco Bay Area” to find me. When my web optimization
team did a keyword evaluation, we found that people were
NOT searching for those words at all—and that I’d
stand out if I slightly altered my keywords. [If you want
to know what I did specifically, just email me. I don’t
want to give it away to competitors!]
- Analyze your
site statistics. Find out which search
engine is driving traffic to your site. Unexpectedly,
I found that for my site the majority of traffic
was coming from Yahoo rather than Google. So, we
optimized my site for that Yahoo engine. Today, one
of my marketing tools (How to Write a Company Profile)
is #1 on Yahoo, #8 on Google. If you really analyze
the rest of your statistics you can use that information,
as we did with this Yahoo example, to make slight
alterations to drive more traffic to your site.
- Sell products
in your sleep. It’s so easy to make
passive income that you’re wasting your website
as a marketing tool if you don’t sell tools to
help your clients. If you know anything about what
you’re doing,
you could start by writing some special reports to
sell on your website (just as we do, take a look to
steal some ideas to use yourself).
Of course, we can help you get these pieces written
and find the best e-commerce application for you to
use. Just let us know if you need help. We have writers,
editors, designers, optimizers, publicists and marketers
standing by. Our own e-commerce site has paid for itself
in less than a year. More importantly, we’re
helping people get what they need to make their marketing
work more efficiently and effectively!
- Integrate
all your marketing with your website. Yep, this is where so many people go so wrong.
If all your marketing tools are working together they
drive business to you, not just traffic to your site. It’s more than having
brochures and websites use the same logo or design. The trick
is to make each tool multi-task in order to Minimize Your
Time. So, do an evaluation to see if you’re using all
the right strategies, and dump the ones that aren’t
working (often people run ads that they don’t
track thinking they are effective when they’re not).
Add in the strategies that will work for your business. If
you aren’t sure get some expert advice or spend
the time and money testing it yourself: Maybe you need
to do some speaking to get in front of a larger audience,
or generate publicity, or write some columns or secure
strategic alliances or another of the thousand strategies
that will work best for your business.
- Make sure
your site is coded properly. Often people have PDF files of content. Those won’t drive traffic to
your site, only to the PDF document, so you'll lose the chance
for site ranking. Another common mistake is incorrect
coding of meta, alt, title tags, body text and links so that
those cannot be ‘found’ or ‘ranked’ by
search engines. There are about a dozen coding errors we
see on almost every company’s site, so if you 're not
sure whether you have those errors or not, it’s probably
time for an evaluation. If you need our help to correct any
of these issues, take a look at our website packages.
- Get other
sites to link to you. If you’ve
got some great articles or reports or even tips
sheets, there are a number of online portals that
need great content. Here’s
a short list of sites that may be interested, depending
on your subject matter. It takes patience to read
their submission requirements and follow through,
but it’s a great
way to get links and educate your potential market
on your expertise:
• geocities.com
• uswebpros.com
• sideroad.com
• personnelhunt.com
• articlecity.com
• ezinearticles.com
Losing patience and need our help? Just call. 510-864-8500
We give you permission to publish this article as long as
you credit Allison as author and include a link to our website.
We hope these free marketing tips and strategies are useful
to you. If you wish to unsubscribe,
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Sincerely, Allison
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