10
Internet Marketing Tips to Make your Web pages More successful
By John Alexander
Over the years, we have always enjoyed sharing strategies with our SEO Workshop students.
Today, I want to give you a variety of different Internet
Marketing tips and strategies that you may or may not have given thought to.
Here are 10 important Internet Marketing Tips to make your Web site
more successful :
1) Web pages that are easily found by your most correct audience
and for the maximum percent of the time.
This might be defined as keyword research or a study of user behavior to ensure that the content you build into your Web site is in good demand by audiences
specific to what you sell.
Everyone has their own ideas, concerning keyword phrase research, but here are a few tips.
Look for:
- Keywords that are money phrases that are proven to convert
A good practice is to pay attention to PPC phrasing. Some PPC ads appear only for
a few days, then quickly disappear. Then there are other ads that seem to run
forever, (but since PPC is paid advertising - it's those long term ads that must
be working.)
- Keywords that reveal hidden user search behavior (keywords that tell a story.)
Examples:
"miniature doll instructions"
"golf swing instruction dvds"
"how to build secret compartments"
"building a basement in your home"
"easy build shed kit"
"How to Build an Icehouse"
"how to build custom furniture"
- Keywords that make the most correct supporting terms
These include acronyms as well as other secondary supporting terms. Remember that a search engine cannot "think" with human intelligence, but it does use a measure of artificial intelligence.
- Lateral types of keywords that are relevant and meet
specific interests of your
audience (but these are words that do not come to mind first during the research
process.)
Lateral thinking, or thinking outside of the box for your research takes practice. Nearly everyone has some difficulties with it in the beginning. But train your mind to not jump at the first (most logical) words first.
If you are selling old classic films, you can see how detailed biographies of celebrities of the past might be of interest.
If you are looking for keywords and you are a "Web designer." Then resist the urge to go after the phrase Web design. What else do you do, besides design?
-custom graphics?
-database work?
-working with logos?
-custom coding?
These are only examples, but you could research any of the above, only
also research value related phrases:
-Affordable custom graphics?
-low cost database work?
If you need help with more tips on keyword research, please
read these 15 more tips:
15 Keyword research Tips for finding the Hottest Niche Phrases Quickly
2) Creating well written content that satisfies the reason why the user first searched
The effects of Natural Language Processing (NLP) reward your pages for simply being well written with quality content that searchers value. To put it simply, it is no longer required for SE optimizers to load their pages so full of words, that it reads poorly. Everyone, including you and I want good search results these days.
Also see this article for:
Easy ways to Consistently Write Better Quality Content and Optimize Your Web Pages
3) Creating content that compels the user to respond to it.
Any time you create a new Web page, consider the objective for it. Ask yourself, "what will make this page successful?"
Obviously there are different objectives and different styles of Web sites. If it is an informational Web page or an FAQ page then the focus will be on the delivery of information. Identify the objective and it will be much easier to ensure you have a solid call to action. The same applies to a page that is offering a newsletter or an ecommerce page or even just a sales letter. Always consider your objective and ensure that the page is written, to meet that objective.
Also consider your style of writing. Are you communicating with younger people or older people or do you have a niche audience that you are aware of? Make sure you try to write for the readers first, in a style of dialog that they will relate to.
Please see this older article called:
Easy Tips for Adding some Zest to your Click Through
Ratios
4) Creating Web site functionality with the objectives of building human relationships.
There is nothing so effective as keeping all aspects of relationship building in mind. Are you in business for the long term and expect repeat business from the same customers?
Make sure that you acknowledge them and give them a reason to do business with you again.
Every time you establish a good relationship with a new customer and they are satisfied with your service or products, it creates another
future referral who may never even need a search engine because they know you and will know your
URL and can remember the positive experience they had with
your product, services etc.
Referral business is the most
powerful type of business there is. But it all begin with how
you treat your customers.
5) Having something in place to benchmark and monitor progress.
Google Analytics is a great start, but don't just quickly look at your home page traffic but dig into all the other valuable
statistics there.
- Examine your most popular pages as well as those that are not doing
as well.
- Examine which search engines are bringing you the most traffic and for which
keywords.
- Examine your customers entry
paths and exit paths
- Examine customer loyalty and
length of visits
- Plus things such as setting
goals, examining on page click data and much more.
Of course there are other tools
such as Hitslink and Webtrends, but they are paid services.
One of the great things about Google Analytics is that it is
100% free and you are examining Google data which has over 67%
of the search market share.
6) Overall design that features solid "usability."
Usability has to do with issues like:
Is your menu easy to navigate?
What grade level are you writing at?
Make sure you are writing in a way that is easy to read.
Have you ever done any eye tracking study of your page to see what others are seeing?
Which
type of photos are more effective to use on your Web site?
See this post by Jakob Nielsen
There are loads of great usability articles and tips at Jakob Nielsen's
Alertbox.
7) A means of gathering permission to communicate with your customers by e-mail.
Second in effectiveness to Internet Marketing and SEO is permission based e-mail marketing. There are complete systems that you can use to perform regular communications with your readers. Again, it's important that you write good information for readers and it keeps you in touch with them. It also gives them a way to know when you've updated your Web site or when you introduce a new product line.
These programs are sequential auto responders that
offer a variety of useful features:
Freeautoboot.com
Here is a completely free auto responder great for
beginners. But, being free
there is no export facility. Use this for building a small
list, but as soon you obtain over 300 subscribers, I'd
recommend changing to a more professional fully featured
one.
Aweber
Of all of the professional system I've tried, Aweber is my own personal
favorite. Full import export functions, great help section
and videos. It allows you to map out your customers
geographically around the world
Try AWeber's Autoresponders for $1
8) Content Freshness with regular updates.
One thing the search engines do favor is fresh content. That may be as simple as adding new articles to your Web site, doing Web site updates or featuring an RSS feed that updates industry news etc. People who consistently update their Web site each week, will experience the search engine robots visiting more frequently and digging much deeper into your site and often staying longer at your site gathering more to take back to the search engines.
9. Always use
"Absolute linking" with a plan rather than using
it site wide
What is an "absolute link" compared to a
"relative" link?
An absolute link absolutely describes the full URL and
includes the http://
example of an absolute
link: http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/testimonials.html
A relative link is a link that only offers the page name
for example: ../testimonials.html
For a relative link to
work, you need to be within the Web site
"relative" to where the page is hosted. For
example the above relative link can be clicked and it will
take you to the testimonial page on this Web site.
However, if that link is used on some other site, there is
no way it can work without the full http:// extension as
in the absolute link.
So what do I mean by always using an "Absolute
linking" with a plan?
Absolute links (as in example 1) help pass Google Page
Rank (or Google PR) to the page you are linking to.
But relative links (as in example 2(, do not pass Google
PR.
So it stand to reason
that the best place to use absolute links, are to your
most important pages that you want found.
But place relative links to far less important links that
you are not concerned about them being found (For example
your policy page or some other page that is not
optimized.) Just focusing your absolute links on the
important pages using important keywords in the text, will
help you overall link building efforts. But if you are
just using absolute links equally across the Web site for
every page, you will nullify any good PR value by not
having enough focus on your important pages.
Google's PR is not the
be all end all so don't become only obsessed with PR
thinking that it is all there is. There are lots of other
influences to your relevancy in a search (which Google
refers to as ranking signals) and remember, they all have
an effect on one another too.
10. Link Building with a
purpose
Remember there is still huge value in building links to your
Web site. Ideally, you should look at link building over a
period of time. Make sure and do your homework to find links
that are relevant to your content and ideally links that are
coming in from busy authoritative Web site will benefit
you greatly. Even links internally can be used effectively to
build your click-through traffic and your link reputation.
There is never really any need to stress over link building if
you look at it as an ongoing practice instead of a rushed
solution.
Here is an article first published in Web site Magazine
called:
Stress
Free Link Building
In summary,
these are just a few things to be aware of in your Internet
Marketing efforts. Sometimes the smallest little ideas can be
the ones that make the biggest impact. If you enjoyed this
article, perhaps you'd like get a free
SEO Tip of the Day, or perhaps you would like some
one-on-one SEO coaching. The list of local community SEO
Workshop dates and locations are here.
About John Alexander
John Alexander is Co-director of Training at Search
Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with his
partner SEO educator Robin Nobles, author of the very first
comprehensive online search engine marketing courses. John
has
taught SEO skills to people from 87 different countries world
wide. John is also Director of Search
Engine Academy with localized Search Engine Academy
training centers where the Complete SEO Mastery Workshop and 6
Month Mentoring program is taught locally to business
owners and individuals in
communities across North America and and
Internationally in Asia and Australia.
