Web Marketing
Put the customer first
Many people ask what the "secret" of ranking #1 in Google might be. I always tell
them the same thing. Tell the truth... as specifically as possible and for as many
specific questions as possible. It's a very basic principle of putting the customer
first. If you look into the history of search engines, you must acknowledge that
Google was preceded by Yahoo! which dominated the search engine space. The one factor
that I believe contributed to Yahoo!s loss of dominance was this key principle of
putting the customer first. Google delivers more relevant search results... period.
Yahoo! sells the top ranking to the highest bidder (or the best spammer) without
regard for the searching customer. This loss of customer focused relevance toppled
Yahoo! as the pre-eminent search engine and allowed Google to achieve a near lock
on the search market.
Your homepage is the least important page in your site
This comes as a shock to many people yet they invest the bulk of their resources
in their homepage. Your homepage, when marketed properly, should never be seen at
all... and when it is, it should serve only as a segmentation gateway, dividing
up the incoming users and routing them to the highly specific subpages that are
available. The reason that the homepage is so unimportant is because the vast majority
of customers will never enter there. Instead they will enter by clicking on a natural
search result listing or an email link or a referral link from another referencing
website. All of these will generally point to a highly specific page nestled deep
within your website... not your homepage (if you are smart in your web marketing).
Your webpages should be laser-focused
Every page in your site has several areas that are measured by Google. These are
a closely guarded secret but we can guess at many of them. They likely include:
- Page titles
- META information
- H1 headings
- Page copy
- Keyword density
- External links
- Internal links
- Image alt tags
- Anchor text (the text used in hyperlinks)
By ensuring that for any given page, every one of the above areas mention the "money
phrases" or keywords that will drive sales for that specific page will ensure that
your web marketing is done well for that specific topic.
Do not keyword "barf"
Pages that vomit up every possible keyword for the entire site (generally on their
overly complex homepage) is the precisely wrong tactic that even established SEO
firms use myopically. By putting "noise" into the keywords you are distracting from
the page's focus and making Google see your page content and decide that you are
less focused than your competitor pages. This is very harmful to your Page Rank
(PR) value that Google assigns (on a scale of 0-10). It is far better to take a
page that may cover a variety of topics and split it up into many subpages, all
of which are highly focused and targeted on a single, atomic topic.
Google Adwords are like fishing poles in the water
Imagine a highly specific webpage as the bait while the paid advertisement is the
fishing pole. We are going to put a lot of fishing poles in the water, one for each
specific keyword that we believe will catch a fish. As an example, I would advertise
this page using the keyword "Web Marketing" because this fishing pole will be baited
with my "Web Marketing" page. However we can't just stop there. We have to make
sure that we're going to be attracting the right type of fish.
Google Analytics is asking the fish what they like to eat
Now that we have poles in the water, we need to ensure that the fish swimming underneath
like that type of bait. We analyze our Google Analytics to find out what keywords
they are typing in to actually find our pages. If the fish are typing in "Web Advertising"
to find my "Web Marketing" page then we have learned something very important...
the fish prefer to call this page something completely different. By asking each
web user (through the invisible Google Analytics) what keywords they use, we can
learn to adjust which fishing poles we put in the water with which type of bait
in which ponds. This is critical information that will help us save money on our
advertising and our conversion rates will grow higher and higher.
Expand your web marketing channels
Building a website is a fine endeavor, but there are no fish swimming. This is tantamount
to putting a billboard in a cornfield. It may look great but nobody is driving past
it. Channel marketing is the tactic where you take your website content or product
listings and get it into all of the rest of the websites on the Internet. This can
be accomplished by opening stores in Yahoo! shopping, Amazon Seller Central, and
MSN Shopping. We can also syndicate our products through comparison shopping sites
like Nextag, Bizrate, and Become. We can continue through many other channels including
coupon sites, deal networks, RSS syndication, Facebook integration, Twitter campaigning,
and hundreds of other channels. By doing this, micro portions of our website now
are distributed throughout the rest of the Internet, all with links back to our
main site, improving our PR ranking and driving additional customers to our products
or information.
Web Marketers
We are accomplished web marketing professionals having worked on sites as large
as the official Yahoo! Sports Shop,
the Men's Professional Tennis ATP
Tour website, and Tire Kingdom
national tire chain website networks.