Gene Crawford of Period Three: Web Strategy
By Gene CrawfordUnlike Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, just because you build a web site, doesn’t mean you’ll get the visitors you want. I often ask my clients when we are starting a new website project, “what are your plans to let people know about your website?” Almost every time they have never thought about it. Hey, it’s hard enough to come up with a good idea in the first place, I know. But you have got to do something about driving traffic to your website otherwise, what’s the point? So let’s take a look at what some of your options are:
Search Engine Marketing
Search engines are by far the best way that people find your website on the Internet. Think about the way you seek out information on the web; where is the first place you go to find something. Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask are the top 5 starting points or search engines for millions of people on the internet today, but there are thousands of others. How you get your website noticed and where your website’s pages return in someone’s search are called “results” in web lingo, and the higher your results’ ranking, the better off you are. In short, the closer you get to number one, the better off you are.
There are many different things that go into your website’s search engine ranking. The way your website is constructed can actually harm a search engine’s ability to review and catalog your website. It needs to be clean, accessible code and is best when it is standards compliant (which is to say it’s built up to code, like a building has to be.) Key words and accurate descriptions on your web pages factor into a high ranking, as does the freshness of content. - Update your website often.
The key to good search engine results is relevancy. Your web page(s) needs to be the most relevant answer for what a person types into a search engine. If the search engine doesn’t return relevant results, then your site runs the risk of not being seen. Remember that you need to be working with key words in any way you can to make your page the most relevant answer for any specific search you would like your website to fall under. While search engines will eventually find your website, they routinely “scan” the internet and attempt to catalog every page out there. You can really get a lot of mileage out of the free submissions, but you have to do your work up front preparing your website for ”relevancy”.
Paid Search Engine Advertising
Another way to help boost your website traffic is to pay for inclusion. Several search engines will give you higher relevancy for paying to be included in their results. Then there are the Google AdWords campaigns you have probably already heard about. This is the paid advertising section on the Google results page (the far right side of the screen when you use Google.) There are other places to participate in this type of search engine advertising, but Google is the cream of the crop. The way these campaigns work is much like eBay, where you bid for a specific keyword and the highest bidder gets displayed first, second highest second and so on. You need to do your research here to ensure your getting the most bang for your buck Remember the key is relevancy, so if you are an insurance agency in Columbia, SC, then trying to compete on the search term “Insurance” is going to be, by far, more costly than competing on the search term “Columbia, SC Insurance”. The more specific you can be the better.
Strategic Linking Opportunities
Another factor that lends heavily to your overall online visibility is linking. That is, who is linking to you and to whom do you link. Sharing links is as old as the internet itself, but strategically linking and in some cases paying for the link can have very generous effects on your overall website traffic. It can even help you rank higher in search engine results (which are links themselves, see how it’s all interrelated?)
Email Marketing
Email is a highly effective way of getting your message out. Branded email newsletters or messages can be tricky, but they can yield pretty good results fast. The key to email marketing, as with search engines, is relevancy. You need to make sure the message you are sending is relevant to the end recipient otherwise it’s wasted effort.
You also need to make sure you have permission to message a certain group of people; thus the term “permission marketing”. I define “permission” as whether or not the recipient has given you the right to send them an email, as in they signed up to receive your messages, or you currently do business with them, or they gave you their business card (like at a trade-show.) This permission to send an email is called an “opt-in.” It’s widely regarded that an opted in list of recipients will open your messages more often and be more loyal than recipients that have not opted in. It is also against the law to send unsolicited bulk email to recipients you have “collected” from various places without first receiving their permission in one way or another.
Gene is a designer with more than 10 years experience creating simple, user specific, and elegant web sites and applications. He graduated from the University of South Carolina with a degree in Art. Currently he is President and co-founder of Period Three (www.period-three.com) a full-service web-design agency in Columbia. Period Three provides all the services you need for a successful web site, including design, programming and Internet marketing and keep three things at the core of their development process; Keep it simple, make it measurable, get powerful results.
