The Internet–Love it or hate it, it’s here to stay
If you hate it, get over it! Every day someone tells me
We spent a lot of money on the Internet, and never got any business from it.
I’m sorry someone ripped you off–really I am; but place the blame where it lies, with the ‘expert’ who didn’t get you any customers–not with the Internet!
If you love it, or you just got over hating it, great! Here’s how you use it to get customers:
The new yellow pages; directory, map & all-in-one research tool
Stop for a minute and think about how you use the Internet:
- If you need directions, you don’t get a paper map, you look it up online
- If your toaster breaks, you search for ‘how to fix a toaster’
- If you want to go out for dinner, you search for ‘local restaurant reviews’
- Theater times, ‘local movie times’
- Weekend weather forecast, ‘local weather forecast’
You search for information, not for a sales pitch; your customers are doing exactly the same. If you want to attract people to your website, post useful information, not an online an sales brochure!
While searching for information, users are shown paid advertisements for products and services. These ads are usually related to their search. Ads like these are sold to the highest bidder and you, the advertiser, pay-per-click. Since they go to the highest bidder they’re usually very expensive, so expensive, in fact, that it’s very difficult to run a pay-per-click campaign profitably. Several marketing consultants, myself included, refer to pay per click (ppc) as opium; you can make some useful drugs out of opium, but it’s very likely you’ll get hooked, then it’s a very expensive, hard to break habit. Never use ppc if money is tight! Use ppc only if you have a well funded campaign and need to kick-start it with lots of leads quickly and temporarily.
Being Findable
Once you’ve written useful information and posted it on your website, the search engines will do a good job of categorizing your site and presenting your site to searchers–if, and only if the information is well written and published correctly to your site. That’s a huge if! You must make sure that information can be found once it’s posted.
The Three Biggest Web Page Mistakes
- Search engines can read text but not graphics. It’s dangerous to build a website that contains too many graphics. Graphics may improve the appearance of your website but it will rank low in search engine results. Adding alternate text to your images does help, but it cannot take the place of good old-fashioned text content on your site. Content is king!
- Make sure that your website does not have any broken links. Test the status of all your site links to ensure they are functioning; there are tools to make this chore a snap. A website with badly maintained links will not be ranked highly by search engines.
- Do not create a flash (or similar animated) website. Search engines do not recognize flash any more than they do graphics–less in fact. Graphics and consequently the website will not be ranked on search engine listings. Having the coolest looking site is not always best. Don’t even make an opening animated flash graphic, the search engines will not see the text page that it needs to see. Note: there are exceptions to the ‘no animation’ rule–keep reading.
Error Free (reasonably)
Search Engines are machines, and if you’ve learned anything about these computing machines you’ve heard the expression “Garbage In–Garbage Out.” You must write properly, build the web pages properly, announce the existence of your website properly and attract attention to your site properly. In short, this stuff is harder than it looks! Lots of businesses have awful web sites that attract no customers. If you want a lousy web site that doesn’t attract customers it’s easy, just type ‘free web site’ in any search engine and follow the instructions.
The first trick you’ve already learned; write useful information, not an online brochure. The second trick–well, let’s call in a step, not a trick because there’s really no trick to it. Build or pay for a reasonably attractive site. Now you can do this yourself, for very little money, or you can spend thousands for custom artwork. Notice that I said a “reasonably attractive” site. That’s because unless you are an artist, no one is going to judge the artistic quality of your site–unless it’s really ugly. If you are an artist (photographer, designer, painter, dancer, musician etc.), then yes, it’s important to have a site that reflects your style. But all the rest of us just need a functional site that’s reasonably attractive. You can use traditional web pages, or you can use a blog (web log) if you like. Combining the two is a good, popular choice.
Functionally, sites need to be reasonably error free–not perfect. Perfect is great, but not necessary. There are free web site validation services that will check your code and explain each error. Some errors on a web page is usually OK if the site looks correct on all the major browsers. 100 errors on a page is not acceptable, and there are lots of sites like that. Sites that only look correct on some browsers is also completely unacceptable.
There are some technical aspects that need to be error free as well. Every site should have a machine readable sitemap (usually sitemap.xml) that tells search engines where to find things on your site. Every site should also have a robots.txt file which tells search engines where not to go snooping around. There are meta-tags that need to be correctly formatted, these include things like site and page titles, keywords and descriptions. These absolutely must be done, and done correctly, because they are critical to helping the search engines drive customers to you.
Generate online leads
Find some information you can ‘give away’ on a mailing list, both email and real mail. Get a list of subscribers going. The more valuable your information, the more subscribers you’ll get, and these become your in-house lead list. Start promoting (politely) to these people. Don’t email daily to this list! Monthly is plenty, mail too often and they’ll all unsubscribe. There are services that will handle all the subscription stuff for you, or your webmaster may be able to do it in-house.
Submit Your Site Information
Now that all this is correct, go to each search engine and find-out how they want you to submit your site information. Each site is different, and has their own rules and preferences. Avoid sites that say they’ll submit to 50 or 500 different search engines or directories. There simply aren’t that many useful ones, in fact there are less than half a dozen search engines worth bothering with. The directory listings aren’t much help unless they are in your town or specialize in your field, but those few are worth doing.
Links
The final–but never ending part is to build relevant links to your site. There are hundreds of way to do this:
- Get reviewed by your customers
- Write news releases & articles
- Get your vendors to link to you
- Join trade associations that link
- Join social media sites
- Have all your employees make social bookmarks to your site
You name it, this list is endless–here’s where you creativity and imagination count. You need to build links to keep ahead of the competition on the search engines, not just so that potential customer will stumble upon your site. There is no such thing as “enough” links.
