Basics of marketing your business Web site

  A beginner’s guide for small business and local business owners and their advisors, this article by Hasnain Zaheer introduces its reader to the world of online marketing.

Please note: This article is written in an Australian business context but has substantial global information. 

Location does not matter

A Web site is akin to a shop situated at the end of a no-through road. If a real shop is located in a busy market then its owners may be assured that when they build the shop, customers will come.

Marketing your Web site is essential

But if your Web site is your shop then you need to deploy effective Web marketing to attract customers to your site and then convert them to paying customers. This article provides a few tips to attract customers to your business Web site.

Natural search results in search engines

Search engines, of which Google is the most important, are a major source of traffic to your Web site. In fact, more than 400 million search queries are entered each day by users globally, according to an estimate. Many of them are potential customers looking for products, services and information that you deal in.

To tap this huge traffic potential, you should ensure that your site is search engine friendly. Search engine bots are programmes that visit Web sites periodically to collect information. It analyses, ‘indexes’ and stores the information. It may map keywords to Web pages and determine the importance of a Web page by the number of links it has attracted.

When a search engine user types a keyword, its ‘algorithm’ matches the keyword with its database and presents the results.

Because very few searchers bother to view results beyond the first 1-2 pages of SERPS (Search engine results pages), it pays to be listed in the top few results. And it pays even better when you are in the top three ranks for the most popular keywords in your industry. Example: Keywords such as home loan, mortgage, cheap home loan, low rate home loan, mortgage loan are some of the popular keywords in home loan industry and attract thousands of queries every day (even after credit crunch!).
If your Web site’s listings appear in the top ranks for these keywords, you receive massive traffic for virtually no cost, except the cost of optimising your Web site to appeal to the search engine.

Search engine optimisation

On-page optimisation is what you do on your own Web pages such as re-writing or optimising meta-tags and Web site content. Off-page optimisation refers to efforts to gain quality links from external Web sites, that often improves your Web site’s PageRank.

On-page optimisation

You should ensure that you feed the right data when the bot visits your site by maintaining good meta-data on your Web site. Meta data is "data about data". It describes the information that each HTML page contains and is in the form of meta-tags. Update meta-tags of each page (or at least all major pages if the site is too large) with titles, descriptions and keywords. Ensure that the titles and descriptions are concise and keywords are relevant to the content of that page. To be able to write good meta-data, you should be clear about the profile of site visitors and the information that you want to present to them through each page.

Off-page optimisation and link building

After your site is ready for the search engines, submit it to them. Avoid using services that promise to submit your site to hundreds and thousands of search engines. Remember that the top search sites account for most search traffic. So focus your efforts on top search sites such as Yahoo!, Google globally and may be local search engines such as Mooter and Ansearch in Australia.   Also remember to submit your site to major directories. A directory classifies its information about sites in categories. A user can browse these categories to find relevant information. Examples are Yahoo Directory, Open Directory Project globally and HotFrog, Dlook and AussieWeb locally in Australia.   Exchange of links with other sites also helps you to get traffic from sites that are visited by your potential customers. Such an arrangement helps sites that complement each other to benefit from the traffic of link exchange partners. To exchange links, make a list of partner sites, link their site from yours and write to them to do the same. Commenting on blogs, participating in forums and linking from social networking Web sites are some other methods to gain links from outside. The above are just a few tactics to improve your search engine position in natural search results.

Pay-per-click or paid search

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising helps you to let your Web site appear as a sponsored result when a searcher types a keyword that is relevant to your site. Since sponsored results appear at prominent locations on the first page of search results, you may use them to get searchers to your site by paying for each click that leads to your site. That’s why the name pay-per-click!.   Examples of such search marketing services are Google Adwords to help you advertise on Google and its network of search engines including Sensis, and Yahoo! Search Marketing that helps you advertise on Yahoo!, NineMSN and other sites in its network.

Display advertising, pay-by-impression and ad networks

Now that search engines are taken care of, it is time to run a few attractive banners or text ads on Web sites or pages that are frequented by your potential customers.   Whereas in PPC, relevant listings appear when a searcher types a keyword, in contextual advertising, a listing or banner is presented to an Internet user when the content of the page matches with a relevant theme of the advertiser. You can run contextual advertising from within your Google AdWords account.

In behavioural advertising, ads are served on the basis of a match with the online behaviour of the user. For example, a user who frequented auto Web sites will be presented with car ads even when they are browsing a cooking Web site.

Ads are also served on the basis of user profile and other parameters and you generally pay by number of impressions served. Similarly, pop-up ads (open in a separate browser window) and pop-under ads (remain behind the open browser) can also be served but you must consider any inconvenience that such ads may cause.

To serve contextual ads, you may deal directly with a Web site or media group such as Sensis MediaSmart that advertises on Sensis network sites or Fairfax Digital Network. Often, they publish their rack rates as a media kit. Ad networks such as Yahoo! Right Media and 24/7 Real Media are in the business of matching advertisers with publishers.

E-mail marketing

Promotional e-mails are also very effective. You can rent lists that correspond to your customer profile. They send e-mails to these customers on your behalf. However, you need to ensure that these lists are opt-in lists i.e., the e-mail owners in the list have agreed (opted-in) to receive offers and advertising e-mail. Preferably, these lists should be of people, who are double opt-ins (have requested and also confirmed their agreement to receive advertising and offers). If the recipients are not opt-in users, then your e-mails will be considered spam and reduce the credibility of your business.

Blogging and social media

Blogs and social media such as Twitter and Facebook have transformed the Web to Web 2.0 which is all about interactions, not static Web pages. Businesses now run blogs and participate in social Web sites to engage with their customers outside of their normal points of interaction. The above are just a few methods by which you can bring quality traffic top your Web site. Using these and other methods of Web marketing can help you bring quality traffic to your Web site.

Further reading

Check out all categories in Market It in Web Business Age:  

• E-mail marketing
• Search advertising / PPC
• SEO
• Social media marketing\
• Display advertising and advertising networks
• Multi-channel marketing

 

Do you have any any other ideas to market a Web site? Write your ideas in comments and continue the discussion.

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Posted in categories: Web business and marketing strategies   Email marketing   Search advertising   Natural search engine optimization   Social media optimization   Advertising networks and technologies   Multichannel marketing and full service  

Tags: search engine seo optimisation on page off page link building ppc paid search display advertising blogging social media website marketing basics

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