Figuring out how to get my web-sites noticed.

• Being searchable and marketing productively.

  I’ve just seen another “new blog post” tweet. Allied with “i’m online” that has been annoying me for a while, I have been jolted to action.

  Your website needs to find its place on the Internet. It needs to be known for something. The Web Marketing Universe

  An extension of this quote is that all the dots need to be connected to make marketing effective. The bottom line on the internet is that you need to be found. What makes the difference to all your marketing efforts?

  1. Your name
     katestrong – if people are going to look for you by name and you already have an identifiable brand in the market you are looking to reach.
     psychicaine – gives an indication of what the person is marketing.
     pureearthnoosa – gives location and an indication. The location may not mean much outside of that country, which is fine if that is the market.
  2. Your blog titles
     new blog entry – 162 million search results
     Smart Cause: Support Bright Starts™ to Support Pink Power Mom! – from Smarty Pants Mama
     ~TAROT SCOPES FOR THE WEEK OF 6/7/10~ - from Brigit Whispers.
  3. The tweet or blog entry relates to your business.
     For your work to be found a search engine needs to find something to index. Then it can return useful results to people conducting a search. If your post does not use words relating to your business the chances are that it will never be seen in a list of results, never mind the first page. Even if your keywords are correct, your actual text needs to support those keywords, or your work is less likely to be indexed.
     Internet Based Home Business e-Books / Review: Learn How to Build and Sell Niche Blogs eBook on Bizi mums Tagged With site flipping, websales for sale. One theme with related keywords, very searchable with keywords – website, sale.
     The Tools of a “Healer” on Divine Timing – no keywords but strong central themes of healer, development, aura, meditation.

  Increase your synergies by getting all your efforts working productively. Marketing your business if no one can find it is wasting your time and not bringing you deserved rewards.

• SEO and email marketing.

  Did you know that hotmail.com’s adding their signature to every email sent through their services hauled the creators, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith $400 million in 1997?

  Are you using your emails to generate traffic?

  1. Always include a signature with a clickable link. It may never make you another hotmail, but why not try?
  2. Set up your mail identity so that the recipient can easily identify who the email is from.
  3. Make sure your subject line agrees with your email. If you have got the recipient to open the email you want them to read it.
  4. Keep the subject line short enough so that recipient are likely to see the whole message. The first 45 characters approximately count the most.
  5. Cater for a preview pane. If the recipient only sees the first two lines of the content is it going to make them read more?
  6. While not all recipients are going to have html enabled email readers, compact colorful images increase readership.
  7. Send yourself the message first to ensure it is correct.
  8. Do you have links in the email to make it easy for the recipient to follow up on the message given?

  Questions and feedback are welcome.
  Marcelle

• Facebook - getting some interest.

  Social networking is all the buzz, and going around meeting people can be fun. A time comes, though, when there is not enough time to meet and greet personally. So how do you get new fans? Facebook advertising is one way, but it is costly, you need to keep the ad fresh, and your landing page needs to compelling to induce the reader to sign up with you.

  Classically one of the most successful viral email campaigns was Hotmail’s campaign. It resulted in them being bought by Microsoft in early 1998. The reason they got big enough to be noticed? A single line attachment at the end of each email that had a link to them. People clicking on that link in emails from friends garnered Hotmail nine million users in less than two years.

  Is it possible to do this on Facebook? I have seen a fair amount of advertising, and many applications and pages. The ones that get more initial interest and keep my interest for longer are those that friends have highlighted. And what do friends do in their idle moments? Take a quiz.

  Take a look at the application, not mine, ‘What tea do I need’. The maker of the quiz owns a herbal tea business. They have used their knowledge to create an intriguing way to give the quiz taker a short answer and to lead them into a more personalised service. And a way to get their advertising to appear on more facebook walls.

• Keywords.

  My web-site is tuned to my customers. I am suitably colourful, easy to read, and well defined. What do you mean there is more?

  Beyond getting a web-site tuned for customers, busy small business owners need to be aware of keeping those sites tuned to maintain visibility. What can be done for this? Reviewing keywords and ensure they bring the right traffic. Apart from just getting the traffic, if the searcher only spends .01 of a second at the site the keywords that matched are not working.

  For instance, if the keyword is psychic reading the link will be one of a million returned results. The likelihood of being on the first page is low if you do not already have a solid traffic stream. Now making the keyword “psychic readings”, an exact match in Googlese, knocks out one quarter of the competition. Added to that it is not likely that you will to get people who are actually looking for bible readings will not see the link. This is because with a broad match, no apostrophes, the readings word would have caused a match. Thus you have increased the likelihood that the viewer is looking for your site.

  Enhance the keywords to “psychic readings” -free. The -free means do not include those people searching for free psychic readings. Another half a million links disappear. The possibility that a click on the link is actually going to get the person to the site for them to spend enough time to read the opening is increased.

  So, if your site is handcrafted there will be a line on the pages

  <meta NAME=”keywords” content=”database, design, … “>
  

  each keyword, a keyword may be more than one word, is separated by a comma. Ensure they are working for you.
  

  Just make sure that opening paragraph matches what was displayed in the search results to the searcher doesn’t feel they’ve reached the wrong place, they will be gone in an instant if they do, and your hard work is for naught.

• 22 Things You Don't Know About Your Customers | Internet Marketing Strategy: Conversation Marketing

  22 Things You Don’t Know About Your Customers | Internet Marketing Strategy: Conversation Marketing

  Posted using ShareThis

  This excellent article reminds us that our web-sites have a function. Whether it is to generate business, make sales, or generate interest in a cause, none of us are web-site owners just for the hell of it. To summarise the excellent article:

  It is the customer.
  Let them know as soon as possible whether this site is going to meet their needs. Yes, it is fun, or ego-rewarding to think up nifty lead ins, ways of exciting interest, etc. But that is for the advertisements and promotions. Once they are at your site, confirm their interest and let them make the purchase.

  It is not your name, it is your product.
  Too many sites that I maintain concentrate on using key words based on their name. Unless you’re a Fortune 500 company, people don’t remember the company name. Further, the reason you’re advertising or thinking about search results is because you want to reach new audiences. Tune your key words, based on the content of your site of course, towards what your potential audience will be searching for.

  The design can hurt.
  Less is more. Developers and marketers can be all too keen to add the latest gadget, pump another ad into that bit of free space, or use product placemenet to help with affiliate sales. Well, you may say that if it is separated out, they won’t click. If it is not, they may click but they don’t come back. So in the long run it is better to get them to came back because they are interested in something you’re offering and you have put so much effort into getting them there, than to loose them. Returning customers are the bread and butter of long standing businesses.

• SEO

  
  Can you be found often enough to make it worth it?

  SEO, or search engine optimization is the most important item to get your website earning for you. This blog post reminded me of a recent critique I had done for a client. The most important points are:

  Know your competition. Who owns the sites in that are your close competition, what are they doing, and how are they doing in the search results competition.

  Keep your site current. Web technology changes constantly. Every new thing is not necessarily for every site. Every year or so a significant shift is achieved. So review how many of your competition are moving with the times. If it is enough of them, you don’t want to look like yesterday’s news.

  Be unique but not out there. People, and searchers are not different, like something special. This is not the same as liking a site that behaves in ways they have never seen before. Unusual search behaviours or purchasing procedures put people off. If it makes them uncomfortable or distrustful, they are going to leave without committing to you.

  Have a descriptive blurb. Have you read the search results for your site? Does the blurb make you want to click your link?

  Track and interact with your visitors. Do you know who is visiting you and when they visit? Even the most basic statistics can show you which state or country the visitor is from. More sophisticated statistics will also show when they visit and how they got to your site. Providing the visitor a means to interact with you increases your list and provides you with an opportunity to learn something more from them that is important for your business.

  The end is to have a site that encourages visitors to look around and come back to you. Over optimization may take more work than the results are worth, but ignoring where technology and search engines are at will leave you with less and less visitors.