This is a brief recap of a poignant presentation I made at a recent conference. I crammed a tremendous amount of information into a roughly 16 minute period. Brief, quick hitting…and admittedly, cursory.
Here it is in a nutshell.
In developing your website you need to take a number of things into consideration before going to market.
One of the most common questions I am asked is, “How can my site rank highly in the search engines?”
Rarely have I been asked the most important question, “What can I do to improve my website?”
Before you begin to market your website, you must consider the following things:
Do you offer quality, relevant content that a member of your target market would find useful?
Are you offering things which will help them plan a trip and learn about your area and offerings? Or are you busy telling them how you are the “best” and the “greatest”? If you are going to make superlative claims, you’d better back it up as people’s BS meters are more sensitive than ever. Make sure you are providing useful information on the visitor’s frequency, WII.FM. (what’s in it for me?!)
Make it immediately clear what you do and who you are
Make it easy for people to find what they need, to do what you want….you do know what you want them to do don’t you?
This is a component of what is termed, ‘usability’. Steve Krug has written a great book on the topic and the books title provides us all with a mantra to put into use when developing and designing our websites, Dont Make Me Think
Provide thoughtful, intuitive navigation systems for people to move about your site in finding information to help them. With smaller sites, this is a rather easy task, however when you have a wide variety of products, trips, or lodging options, you must implement a thoughtful navigation schema using a practice known as “Information Architecture”.
All too often I see homepages with dozens and dozens of links which confuse and intimidate the visitor…..remember, make it intuitive, logical and consistent. As Mr. Krug says, “Don’t Make Me Think!”
Compliance and Availability
Ensure that your website works on all browsers, is not entirely dependent upon technologies such as Shockwave, Java and Flash, and ditch the intro pages.
All too often I see over-designed websites that have a great number of visual cues and are “cute” …yet in the end are just junk in a fancy wrapper.
Use technologies such as Flash, Shockwave and Java as a component of your website, not its basis, and keep them at least one version behind the most currently available. The overuse of animations, and video can clutter your site, cause your visitor to lose focus and distract from the primary goal of converting them into a paying guest.
2 no-no’s…auto-play video and embedded mp3’s. People at work don’t want to be found out and if people want to watch your video, they will….when they want to.
Make sure your designs work in at least Firefox and Internet Explorer and begin taking mobile devices into consideration. If you are starting a new project, insist on a CSS based layout which will help eliminate cross-browser issues.
Provide a site that works on all browsers and put the emphasis on substance over superficial fluff and eye-candy.
If you have a website that contains these basic elements you have a website ready for market that will be a success.
There are a number of effective methods for marketing your quality site. I am going to provide some very quick overviews of two of the most important ones.
Organic Search
Holy Grail – free clicks based upon the relevance of your content to the search terms used.
There are a number of things which you can do, in addition to providing quality content, to help in this regard. However, ALWAYS, build your sites for people, not GoogleBot.
You can however, leave a mint on the pillow for GoogleBot by making sure you have quality, unique page titles, H1 tags and keyword rich text links within your site. Do not keyword stuff your titles…it is no longer 1997 and Alta Vista no longer cares how often you can stuff in a keyword.
Also, eliminate duplicate content. If you have multiple domains which “mirror” sites or you utilize tracking links you are creating multiple sets of the same pages and you are confusing the search engines. Use what is known as a 301 redirect, NOT a META redirect and eliminate your duplicate content.
Build quality inbound links. Stay away from link farms, FFA links pages and links from casino, pharma or porn sites. Obtain links from topic relevant sites.
Keyword research is paramount.
Pay Per Click Campaigns
Pay per click campaigns are a great way to increase traffic, extend your online footprint and reach new markets. However, if you are uninformed, utilize poor tactics and bid on the wrong keywords you will walk away disappointed, with little return on your investment and a lighter wallet.
Done correctly, you can realize a tremendous ROI.
Utilize your keyword research your organic campaign and craft quality ad titles and descriptions and test them using A/B and A/B/B methods until you find the best possible combination.
Utilize the new tracking and conversion features available from the major ppc engines, including Google and Yahoo! search marketing.
Do not fall into the set it and forget it mindset. You need to monitor, adjust and be careful not to fall to the temptation to bid the farm for the upper-most, top-level terms. These are people just entering the buying cycle…you can hit them when they get closer to the purchase by bidding on drill-down terms that are more relevant to your specific area of trip offerings.
Other important marketing considerations include email marketing, social media marketing, and article marketing.
Great presentation! Lots of good information on a very understandable level.