Why do you have a website?

Most businesses will have a website to promote their business online. For many business owners the aim is to provide new leads and generaly generate more business.

So they have a website designer come in and describe to them what they want this site to look like. The designer creates a beautiful image, you like it and it gets turned into a website. The site looks great.

Except… hardly anybody visits it. Sure, you will have the people that go to the site directly because they got your business card or saw your offline advertisement in a magazine somewhere.. But the site cannot be found by anybody else and you are getting very few new leads from your own website.  You may buy advertising in directories or traditional media, as you will feel that the internet does not work in providing leads. Perhaps you will turn to Google adwords and spend lots of money in getting leads but even that (in the wrong heads) gives you a low return on investment.

It’s not the Internet though that does not work it’s the way your website was created

However, a lot of the time many businesses do not realise that the reason their website presence is not working for them is because they had a poorly created website. Sure, it may look great, but search engines don’t like your site at all. What causes that?

• Your site is created in such a way that search engines like Google cannot ‘read’ it. For example the text is not really text but is created as an image or a flash movie.
• The search engines cannot follow any of the links on your site because they were poorly coded. If the search engines cannot even find your pages, how are they supposed to index and rank them?
• Google can read your site and sees all your pages but they have been so poorly labeled that none of these pages gets even a top 50 ranking in their index. Basically, if your site is not on the top page for your keyword phrase you will get very few traffic.
• Google can read your site, see the pages, and has ranked some of your pages but you are not getting top listings because Google considers your site to be of low authority. No-one links to your site and therefore your page has no pagerank.
• Your site does get a few top rankings for a few keyword phrases but since no-one actually searches for that keyword phrase your site still does not get any traffic.
• Your business does not engage with any of the social media on the internet and does not create any online connections or get any linkjuice.

A search engine optimised website and a web strategy can make all the difference!

The Internet can be enormously powerful in providing you with new business and new leads if you use it and interact with it to your advantage. So here is what you can do.

• Learn SEO or search engine optimisation and understand how Google and other search engines rank websites.
• Know what your target customers are looking for. What keywords would they type in the search engines to find you? Make sure you do some thorough keyword research and find those phrases that get some good traffic but are still not that competitive so you can achieve a top ranking.
• Make sure that you make your website search engine friendly.
• If you can’t or don’t want to make changes to your website then start building links or create an alternative (free) search engine friendly website at one of the blogging or networking sites. You can then use that website to drive traffic to your beautiful looking but SEO unfriendly website.
• Create a video or write an article and submit to directories and You Tube. Videos can get a top 10 ranking pretty quickly for your keywords on Google and you can use them as little ads for your business to drive traffic and new customers to your website.
• If you really don’t want to get too much involved with all of this hire an SEO or web strategy consultant and let them take care of it.

When used correctly the Internet can be a very powerful tool to get high quality qualified leads to your business. As the internet becomes more important every day (have you seen the new Apple IPad making it even easier to browse the Internet at any time!) you cannot afford to ignore it.

Related posts:

1. How to rank high in Google with the use of SEO
2. Why you should not separate your blog and your website
3. How to get listed in the major search engines?

So how can businesses use Twitter in an effective way?

Twitter is an excellent way to deliver customer service. Even if you don’t use Twitter on a regular basis you can still set up an alert that notifies you whenever someone mentions your brand name or service.

For example: a few months ago I reviewed and tweeted about a software product (Dim Dim) I liked. Almost immediately I received a thank you from someone at Dim Dim, thanking me for the review. It is always be appreciated if someone mentions your product or service in a favourable way and you acknowledge that. It creates a lot of good will.

On the other hand when someone complains about your product or service on Twitter or needs support you could supply that straight away. It could help with avoiding customer dissatisfaction and you can keep updated on what’s happening with anything related to your product or service.

Twitter allows for direct communication between consumer and producer and can really help you with monitoring your company’s reputation. It may be risky for any business to ignore Twitter altogether.

What about facebook?

Facebook is now used in a similar way. Although you can’t setup alerts, you can have your own facebook page. It is quite easy to accumulate some fans through good posts or (inexpensive) advertising. Once you have a reasonable amount of fans interaction takes place on your ‘wall’.

It is very beneficial way to announce new product launches, specials, or interesting facts. Many customers now enter their concerns or enquiries directly on that fan page, as a direct response to your post or just because they were reminded of you while spending time on Facebook. These are customers that you may have otherwise missed if you did not have a presence on Facebook.

Even if you post just 1 new short message every 2 days, you can develop a very active community on Facebook. If you link your posts to your Twitter account, these posts will go out as tweets at the same time.

The bottom line

Setting up a profile on Twitter and Facebook takes fewer effort than you may think and apart from the benefits mentioned above it can also increase your search engine ranking for your business and increase your visibility on the web. So if your business targets consumers Twitter and Facebook are definitely worth considering as part of your web strategy.

Related posts:

1. How can traditional marketing help you online
2. Web marketing essentials – What you can do to be seen on the net
3. Using newsletters for your business

What is Google Adwords?

Adwords is Google’s advertising program. It allows you to create small ads that will be displayed next and above Google’s organic search engine results. Advertisers only pay when someone clicks on their ad. The cost per click is determined by the keywords popularity and the bid of the advertiser.

Who uses adwords?
Adwords is used by companies and individuals who want to draw attention to their products or services. It is an effective way to draw instant traffic to your website. As every click is measurable you can determine the return on investment for every ad that you pay for. You can track conversions and goals both in Adwords and Analytics for a particular keyword.

Adwords is also an effective way to test the keywords that you are thinking of targeting. As Search Engine Optimisation can be costly and time-consuming, measuring your keywords performance with Adwords can be an effective way to determine the right keywords to target.

Why is a good initial setup so important?

Google assigns a quality score to each ad that is submitted. Your ad will be more effective, placed higher on the list and the cost per ad will be lower if your campaign has been properly setup and gets a high quality score.

When it comes to your ad text, some of the things that have an effect on price and performance are:

• Are the keywords you are targeting included in your ad?
• Does your ad stand out of the crowd?
• Do you have a good and strong call to action?
• Is your destination URL targeted towards your keywords?

One way to test if your ad is effective or the most effective it can be, is to do some split testing. Have several ads show in your ad group and check which one converts better. You could also try out a different format, like an image.

When it comes to your keywords pay attention to the following:

• Make sure to choose specific keyword phrases that match or are similar to your ad and landing pages. Google’s excellent keyword tool can help with that.
• Don’t just target the keywords with the highest searches per month but focus on those that will generate the most conversions.
• Send your customers to the most relevant page with keywords in the url.

Keyword targeting

Google also offers several ways to target your keywords. You are able to control when a user’s search triggers your ad to show. In general, the more targeted your keywords and ads are, the more likely you are to reach potential customers.

These are just some of the options your can apply to your keywords:

• Broad match
• Phrase match
• Exact match
• Negative match

Tracking conversions

The great thing about Google Ads is that you have very sophisticated reporting tools to track the performance of your ads. You can set several goals like: customer filled out customer form, customer subscribed to newsletter, customer visited a certain page etc. If you then set a value to each of these goals or conversion, not only can you track these conversion, you can also measure the cost per conversion.

Are Google Ads worth it?

If you run your Google Ads campaign effectively you should see a good Return on Investment. As you can always adjust underperforming ads or keywords you can tailor your campaign in such a way that it should bring you a healthy return on investment.

Want to know more?

For more info check out our page on Google Adwords management services.

Related posts:

1. How to find the right keywords for your site?
2. How to get traffic and generate new leads with your website?
3. How to get listed in the major search engines?

But how do you get listed in those search engines?

The search engines will need to find you. And the easiest way for that is to add a link to a site that Google spiders regularly.

Some sites that Google spiders a lot (because the content changes all the time) are social bookmark sites.  Examples are:

• Delicious
• Stumble Upon
• Digg

Bookmark your site at one of these sites and Google will most likely pick it up. However, you will also want to list your site in one of the other search engines. Yahoo and now Bing are getting increasingly popular and it’s also very important to get listed in these.

Webmaster tools

All 3 search engines have what they call Webmaster Tools where you can register your site and your sitemap if you have one. It’s a very good idea to register for this, as not only do you notify the search engines of your site, you can also monitor any errors (broken links, page not found errors) that they pick up. You will need to have access to your website to authenticate that you are the owner of the website and if you want me to do this for you then please contact me.

Here is where you find the webmaster tools for each search engine:

Google

Yahoo

Bing

Google Analytics

In order to monitor if you have been successful and are getting traffic from all search engines be sure to add Google Analytics to your website. It’s free and it’s one of the best website analytics around. You will find out where your visitors are coming from, which sites referred them, which keywords they used to find you and which search engine they used. You can even track how many conversions (for example product purchases) you got.

If you want to get help getting your website indexed,  setting up analytics, or if you need help with search engine optimisation of your site then feel free to contact me.

Related posts:

1. How to rank high in Google with the use of SEO
2. How to get traffic and generate new leads with your website?
3. Web marketing essentials – What you can do to be seen on the net

Today I received an announcement of a new website and blog. When I went to check them out, I was surprised that the website and blog were actually 2 separate websites and were not integrated into one. This really is a missed opportunity as an integrated blog can do wonders for your website’s traffic and popularity.

Not surprisingly, this wasn’t the only thing that was wrong with the website.

What could have been better:

• The website was written with outdated code using lots of tables
• The website was newly designed but is using frames
• No attention had been paid to search engine optimisation, making it very unlikely that this site will be found in search engines
• Conversion seemed to be a low priority as there were no sign-up boxes for email newsletters and hardly any links that went directly to the contact page
• There is not even a mention (or it is very hidden) of the blog
• The blog was wordpress.com hosted blog which means that it doesn’t have its own domain name
• The blog looked completely different from the main website and it was difficult to find any connection between the 2

Why is it so important to include your blog into your main site?

Including your blog into your website can dramatically increase the number of visitors to your website but it also helps with search engine optimisation, which is the process of improving the likelihood that your website gets a prominent position in search engines for your chosen keywords.

Benefits of integrating your blog into your main website:

• It tells Google (and other search engines) that your site is active and frequently updated. This will cause Google to come back to your website more often to rank your pages
• Your blog posts will get picked up by online alerts and spiders and will direct traffic directly to your main website
• If someone links to your blog posts this will increase the link popularity of your main website which will improve your search engine ranking and your page rank
• An integrated blog will look a lot more professional
• You will only need to maintain one website rather than 2

So how can you you get an integrated blog?

Both systems that I now mainly use to create my websites come with automatic integration of the blog.

Wordpress.org

Wordpress.org is wordpress.com’s big sister, which allows you to run Wordpress on your own server. Wordpress was setup as a blogging application but it is increasingly growing into a full fledged business CMS. You can create a website that seamlessly integrates the blog into your main pages. Check it out at Wordpress.org. If you need our help setting this up for you then contact us.

ProntaCMS

ProntaCMS is content management system that includes a blog into your main website. You can seamless integrate the feeds into your design. You can try this easy CMS for free.

I wish you good luck with your new website and if you need any help then please let me know. If you find these posts interesting then don’t forget to subscribe to the article updates by email or RSS.

Related posts:

1. What is the difference between ProntaCMS and Wordpress?
2. How to get traffic and generate new leads with your website?
3. 10 tips for a successful website

How can we help you rank high with the use of seo?

What are some of the things that an experienced SEO and internet marketing consultant like Escala Singapore can do for you in terms of SEO?

• We can do some research as to what keywords are frequently searched on in your target area. Sometimes these keywords phrases are completely different from what you think people will search for when they want to find your business. You will need to make sure that you are targeting the right keywords. There is no point being number 1 for your keywords if noone searches for that particular phrase.
• We look at your website and determine with you which keywords you want to target. You can target different keywords phrases on each page of your website.
• We can change some of the page titles (the titles that you will see at the top of your browser) so that they are more descriptive and will include your most important keywords. Page titles are crucially important for SEO and it is easy to do.
• We can improve your meta tags for keywords
• We can improve your meta tag desciption. This is the text that often appears in search engines when your website comes up in a search. It is important that it is both keyword rich but also encourages viewers to visit your site.
• We can improve the keyword density within your text
• We can analyze why your competitors are ranked higher than you. We can see which keywords they are targeting and which sites link to that website.
• We can create links to your site. We can target the same links as your competitors but can add many more. Links to your site are an important factor for achieving the highest spots in the search engines
• We can advise you on and implement link generating strategies, like creating profiles in social media, writing articles for article directories, getting alerts of posts in your area and then commenting on those blog posts.
• We can monitor that all is well with your website with Google’s webmaster tools and add redirects to pages if Google identifies page not found or other errors. We can also add a sitemap which makes it easy for Google to spider all pages of your website
• We can add Google analytics to your site. This is the best analytics software on the web and it is free! It will give you very detailed information about the visitors of your site, where they can from and how long they stay on your site.
• We can advise you on how to use your website to get optimum results in Google and other search engines. For example you may consider adding a blog to your website. A blog keeps your website current and if you place a feed on the frontpage that page will be updated on a frequent basis. Google will pick up on the fact that your frontpage gets updated frequently and will keep coming back to your site to increase the pages that it indexes for your website.
• Although this is not SEO we can also setup a google ad campaign for you. This will give you instant results. All your click throughs can be monitored through Analytics and as you can adjust your ads and campaigns as often as you like you are completely in control over how much you want to spend on advertising and which areas you want to target.

Does you website need a bit of SEO love then contact us today for a free quote. We can provide SEO services in Singapore but also around the world! Please check out our pages on internet marketing and search engine optimisation.

Related posts:

1. How to get listed in the major search engines?
2. How to improve your pagerank
3. Why you should not separate your blog and your website

Design to sell: 8 useful tips to help your website convert

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1. More useful tips to convert your visitors into customers
2. 10 tips for a successful website
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With so many websites currently on the web today it is important that you pay attention to the marketing of your website in order to be found. What are the essential tasks you will need to do to ensure that your website gets seen?

Optimise your content for search engines

Everything starts with your content. Make sure that you know which keywords you are targeting in the search engines before you write your content. Start your pages with your main keywords featuring in the first few sentences. Make sure you have good descriptive page titles and headings and add your metatags. The more quality content you have for the search engines to chew on the more likely you will be found. It is also a good idea to submit a sitemap to Google through Google’s webmaster tools.

Don’t forget to optimise your images as well

A lot of people now search for images. So make sure that you give clear descriptive titles to your images and add short and long description tags.

Don’t duplicate large sections of content on your site

Google and other search engines do not like duplicate content so make sure that an article is only displayed once. If you have a site with many articles, archives etc make sure that your front page and archives only display excerpts of the posts.

Improve your pagerank

In order to improve your page rank try to get links to your website from other reputable sites. Also avoid having too many unnecessary outbound links on your own site. Another thing you can do with some of the links on your site is to add no follow tags which basically tell the search engines not to follow and rank that link.

Email newsletter

If you already have contacts or a customer base send them an email about your website and any new features on it. Keep using your email newsletters on a regular basis to remind your contacts about you.

RSS feeds

On many websites you can subscribe to an RSS feed. With rss feeds your readers / customers can receive articles from your website when they become available. They can then read this in their email programs or readers whenever they feel like it and without having to give you their email address.  So having a section on your website that is regularly updated with new articles that can be subsribed to through RSS is a good way to remind your customers about you. You could even do podcast feeds!

Use social networks

Encourage visitors to hook up with you on social networks like Twitter, Linked in and facebook. It is another way of reminding people about you and your business website. Twitter can be very useful to engage your visitors on a frequent basis. If you are new to Twitter then stay tuned for an upcoming article.

Send out press releases

Grab every news opportunity to send press releases to blogs, magazines, local newspapers, and other media to draw attention to your site. Many websites and magazines are constantly on the look-out for news so they may be more than happy to publish your article.

Even if you did everything right, it still takes time

You will need to realise though that achieving good results will take time and effort. Good rankings are not something you can achieve by just getting your descriptions and metatags right first time. It is a constant process of adjusting, monitoring and promoting. Google will also take time to rank your site and new sites will sometimes have to wait a few months before they see any good results.

Related posts:

1. Why you should not separate your blog and your website
2. How to improve your pagerank
3. How to get traffic and generate new leads with your website?

A newsletter is a good tool to use in your online marketing campaign. A newsletter can put you in the perfect position in a one to one marketing environment. Of course we do not encourage you to spam and send e-mail newsletters unsolicited but there’s no harm in having a “subscribe to our newsletter button” on your website to offer potential customers or interest groups the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter.

So in summary what are the advantages of sending out newsletters on a regular basis?

• A newsletter stablishes Trust: Publishing an ezine helps to establish you as a reputable business dealer and over time, inspires trust.
• It brings Visitors Back: Statistics show a customer needs to see your advertising message six or seven times before making a purchase. When someone signs up for your ezine, the mailing itself will serve as a reminder to revisit again and again, eventually turning your subscribers into paying customers.
• A newsletter establishes you as an Expert and Builds Brand Loyalty: By publishing a newsletter and writing your own articles, subscribers will come to see you as an expert in your field. This and the familiarity they feel from reading your newsletter will reinforce brand loyalty to your site, turning many of your current subscribers into future customers.
• It keeps Current & Potential Customers Up to Date on New Products & Services: Your publications allow you to share this important information with current and potential customers keeping them up to date and possibly bringing them back for a new sale.
• A newsletter builds Relationships: Relationship marketing is important on the Web and publishing your own newsletter will help you do just that. The truth is, we’d rather spend our money with someone we like than someone we don’t know.
• It Allows You to Build an Opt-In Email Marketing List: Repeat after me: Spam is bad, opt-in is good.
• Keeps Your Website Fresh in Visitors’ Minds: The technique of “reminding” someone about your site is important; it really helps to keep a constant flow of traffic returning to your website.

Ezine publishing is one of the most effective marketing tools online today. Not only is it powerful, it’s probably one of the most cost-effective tools you can use in promoting your website.

For more information on having a ’subscribe now’ form on your website, e-mail lists for easy distribution or more information on how to send a html newsletter, contact us.

Related posts:

1. How to turn your website visitors into customers
2. how to get your business online
3. Are Twitter and Facebook really necessary for business?

Even though you may have achieved a top position in the search engines with your targeted keywords, you still do not get a lot of traffic. Why is this?

Most probably it’s because you are targeting the wrong keywords. If no one searches for the keywords you are targeting on your pages, then your customers will not find your site in search engines.

So how can you make sure that you are targeting the right keywords?

Here are some techniques you can use to make sure that you target the words that people use in their searches.

1. Brainstorm with your team. Place yourself in the position of a potential customer and write down as many words that come to mind that are associated with your business. After that make a selection of the best and most common ones and then select the most appropriate keywords for each page.
2. To check if you have selected keywords that people actually use on the net, or to give you new ideas about keywords combinations for your industry, you can use a tool like Wordtracker. You can enter the keywords you came up with and check how often people search for them. Wordtracker will also predict your chances of making it to the top ten for those keywords.
   Google adwords keyword suggestions will give you alternative keyword suggestions for your chosen words.
3. Although it is important to choose keywords that people actually use, there’s no point in selecting keywords that are too general, for which it is almost impossible to get a top 10 spot. You can assess the supply of a particular keyword combination by typing it into Google and see how many (good) results are returned. If you want to be very specific you can only search for the websites that have the keyword in their website title by using: intitle:”keyword”
4. Check your site statistics frequently so you know which keywords are working for you and and which aren’t.

If you follow these steps carefully and then optimise your web pages for the chosen keywords (a service offered by Escala) you will find a lot more traffic coming your way!

Related posts:

1. How to rank high in Google with the use of SEO
2. Creating effective adwords campaigns
3. How to get traffic and generate new leads with your website?