Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

Are you thinking about designing a new website or revamping your current site? Think about your overall web strategy and what tactics you will use to accomplish that strategy. I like to use the analogy of your website being your virtual office.

Web design & development

• Remove clutter from your office and make it comfortable for your guests. Use design elements like color and images that relay a welcoming feeling, so people want to visit your site, and hopefully stay a while.
• Do people have a hard time finding where they want to go? Display signs clearly so visitors can navigate their way seamlessly throughout your office. Ensure the traffic to your website can find information easily – if they can’t, they will leave your site to look elsewhere and you lose a lead.

Content

• When guests come into your office do you bore them with the history of your company or do you give them the information they want? If you have an idea of what guests want before they come, you can tailor the information to them – like using landing pages.
• When guests come back multiple times, don’t tell them the same thing each time they visit, give them new information and insight. For example, write a blog that is updated regularly.

Organic Search Marketing

• When people are looking for services or products you provide – make sure they find you! Putting signs up in front of your business, having a good reputation and word of mouth, and being able to be found in business listings are just like ensuring you have a good organic search plan in place.
• Respect expectations. If you sell oranges but you put up a sign that says you sell bananas just to get people to come to your fruit stand, people will be turned off and turn away. In terms of SEO, use keywords that pertain to what you offer and who you are offering to.

Paid Search Marketing

• This is just like paying to put an ad in the newspaper or a commercial on television. You want to make sure the content you put on the ad relates to what you are offering. The ads should direct people where you want them to go to receive the service – call a phone number, visit your office, go to a website, etc.
• Geographical targeting is important to think about too – if you sell snowmobiles, you are not going to put your ads on Hawaiian television. It’s better to have a smaller target to attract more quality leads than to have a large target and attract mediocre leads.

Connecting with people

• As a businessperson, you attend events and communicate with your clients on a regular basis. You can do the same thing online by becoming involved in social networking. Connect with others in your line of business to stay on top of industry news and be available to your customers to get their feedback and ensure their satisfaction.
• When you connect with people online, use your website as a resource for them to go to learn more about you. Similar to how you want your website to be your virtual office, you want your online personality to resemble your professional persona.

Evaluate and Assess (adjust if necessary)

• Can you tell how people feel when they come into your office? Are they buying your products? Are they telling their friends? Do they come back? These are all questions you want to ask about your website too. Check your analytics, set up goals and track them. Pay attention to make sure your calls to action are being completed and forms are being filled out.
• Don’t wait for negative feedback; be proactive about acquiring positive feedback. Try to be one step ahead by monitoring your traffic and trends occurring on your website. If something isn’t working, adjust and then reevaluate.

It can be helpful, when planning your web strategy, to think about your website as your virtual office. As much preparation and detail should go into your website as does choosing and designing your office space, deciding how to market yourself and who to conduct business with. Overall, you want to guarantee you give your visitors a good experience that makes them want to come back and do business with you.

Photo credit: The talented Mr. Natty Graham

Google Wave was announced back in May of 2009 (eons ago) and then we all waited for our invites with anticipation. Then we waited some more and we heard about other people that got them. Fits of jealousy came over us like the kid who got the lame doll while their neighbor got the whole He-Man Castle Grey Skull and you had to sit and listen to how cool it was, but I digress…

Then FINALLY you get your invitation! You login and… what the heck are you supposed to do with this thing?

The nice people at Google have described Google Wave as an ‘online collaboration tool’. Ok? Cool. So… now what am I supposed to do? The interface is confusing, there is no step by step ‘get me started button’ so what do I do?

My Google Wave experience started with a dozen or so of my geek friends (I mean that in the nicest way possible) starting waves that were titled:

‘You figure this thing out yet?’
‘You doing much with Wave yet?’
‘How does this work?’
and then just silence for a few months.

As time passed, my Google Wave collected dust until I found a project that fit with what Google Wave was created for: collaboration

Collaboration Waves

Here is a thought: We didn’t know we NEEDED the iPhone until after it came out. Now I am concerned I would not be able to live without mine. I didn’t know I needed the functionality of Google Wave until months later. We are in a world with less business meetings and more GoToMeetings, less phone calls and more emails, less internal emails and more Instant Messaging et al.,  perhaps we (some of us) needed an online tool that was 100% a joint effort and in real time.

Do you use Google Docs? It is a little like that but in real time.

What does it do?

• Real time conversation – As you type (no really, like AS you type) the people in your wave can see your text. You can edit and add notes to parts of the conversation. I only know my experience, but I have heard that this interaction is one step ahead of email in prioritization but the response does not need to be immediate if you don’t want it to be.

  One Example: – Imagine taking notes in a meeting but everyone can add to them. Add comments or links for more information and then everyone has access to the meeting notes after the meeting is over.

  Another Example: – Ever have a group email going to multiple decision makers? Some people on the email are right on top of replying back quickly and you continue a big back and forth. Then someone else replies to an email from hours ago answering a question you resolved this morning. With Google Wave it is all documented in order and you can go back and answer a question from hours ago or get right back in on where the conversation last left off.

• Images and Documents – As you build your content you can easily add documents, photos, even video and maps to your wave. As necessary, you can send these files and resources to your team in less time than it would take to email it to them.

  One Example: – When planning an event, the organizers can share all their resources like maps to the event, photos of the location or attendees and so much more.

• Document the process: – When collaborating on a document sometimes we loose how we got to the final product in the first place. With Google Wave you can have a record of how you got to the end result.

  One example: – Putting together an eBook or a real book? Perhaps some of your good content was left on the cutting room floor? Now you have it documented in a place you can refer to at anytime to make a sequel or Part II.

  Another idea: some of my favorite parts of movies are the outtakes. Maybe your content outtakes could be fun and useful as well.

• Organize by Content – Not only can you organize your collaboration by time of posts but you can make offshoots of your waves by topic and keep organized that way. Example: – Working on a book or eBook again? You can organize your thoughts and resources by chapter and not just in one stream.

I still don’t get it

Good news! You don’t have to! Just because a new form of technology comes out does not mean you have to be an expert in it. Perhaps if this makes no sense to you, that is because you aren’t in the target market for Google Wave. Nothing wrong with that.

If you think you can work just fine with email, the phone, IM, Google docs etc. then go for it. Nothing wrong with that either.

I do think it is important for you to get an understanding of what you CAN do with Google Wave and if down the road you see a collaboration opportunity that could use these features, you know where to go.

Now that you perhaps have a little bit more of an understanding, I hope that takes some pressure off if you weren’t amazed with Google Wave.

Need more information to form an opinion?

Here are some more resources and opinions on Google Wave if you want to know more:

• About Google Wave from Google including demo video
• Posts by Chris Brogan tagged with ‘googlewave’ including tips and uses
• My Take on Riding The Google Wave from @adjustafresh
• Google Wave: A Complete Guide from Mashable
• Google Wave Versus the Rest, Feature by Feature by Lifehacker

There are many different facets of SEO that help search engines navigate websites and figure out what they’re about. We’ve previously discussed many of the on-page elements, such as title tags, H1, meta descriptions, alt image attributes, etc., which are items where keywords are used to help a site increase relevancy and rank for those keywords. However there are other technical areas that also play a part in organic search.  Here are three items to consider that will help your site “be seen” and get indexed by  search engines:

1. Generate an XML Sitemap

Think of an XML Sitemap as the road map to all of the pages on your site.  It’s basically a list of all your site’s urls, which helps ensure that the search engine knows about all of the pages on your site that might not be discovered during the normal crawling process.  Google, Yahoo, and Bing all have information on how to create and submit a Sitemap to their search engine – and they’re all nice enough to accept the same format so that only one has to be generated.  Your webmaster (or whoever maintains your site) should at least be using Google’s Webmaster Tools for Sitemap submission and as a tool to diagnose problems that Google is having when accessing your site.

2. Use a Robots.txt File

The robots.txt file is a set of instructions that a  search engine looks for and follows when it gets to your site.  This is an opportunity to tell the search engine which parts of the site that you don’t want it to crawl, so it can focus on the pages that you do want to be shown in the search results.  This file is useful for areas such as login pages, images, include files, etc. – anything that you don’t need to show up in a search engine for.  It’s a standard best practice that we use, and part of any SEO audit I perform on a site.  Google provides more in-depth information on this file to instruct your webmaster on how to create one and add it to the appropriate area of your website.

3. Create a www/non-www Forward or Redirect

Isn’t it great that we don’t have to type the “www” in a web address to get to a website anymore?  Now that there are two ways to type in a url, it’s important to make sure that a redirect or forward is set up to resolve to  “www.site.com” when “site.com” is used to access your site. Without this, the search engine could potentially index two copies of your website (both www.site.com and site.com), which means that you’ll have duplicate content issues.  This may force the search engine to determine which page is more relevant, and possibly remove pages of your website from the index altogether.  You can use this tool to figure out if this redirect is in place on your site, and if not, have your webmaster implement this as soon as possible.  It can be done through either a 301 (permanent_ redirect) or in the A record.  Oftentimes, your DNS provider can set this up for you with web forwarding.

How Does This Affect SEO?

Have I left you wondering what these technical aspects have to do with SEO?  Think about it this way: if a search engine can’t crawl and subsequently index all of the pages of your site that you want it to, or pages are being omitted from a search engine’s index due to duplicate content, how will you ever have a chance to compete for your keyword rankings?  Making your site as hospitable as possible to the spiders that come trolling along will ensure that all of your on-page SEO efforts aren’t in vain.

Welcome to our new weekly Facebook Fanpage Blog Series! Every Friday, we will discuss strategies, technical development and layout of your company Facebook Fanpage.

It is 2010 and by now, surely you have a website for your business! If not, you should definitely consider it. Your online marketing strategy doesn’t begin and end with just a website. Generating inbound links to your site using social media and networking sites can be a beneficial way to increase traffic, generate sales leads, build your network etc.

Facebook, in its recent popularity, has developed a platform for companies to produce a Fan Page. A Fan page is a business oriented profile, much like a user profile, but with some specific features. It utilizes a special language called FBML, similar to HTML to interact with modules and applications.

There’s a vast amount of interactivity between other social networking sites (YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter) to connect your networking profiles. There are also some cool visual capabilities such as; adding graphics to your profile, navigation structure, landing pages and video implementation (most of these we will talk about later on in the series).

Let’s get to the good stuff, you must have a personal profile on Facebook to have a company profile, you will be the administrator (you can also designate others as an admin, more on that later).

First, sign up to Facebook and said hello to your family and friends

Next, you can goto Facebook’s Pages section and begin your journey to a new fan page (click “Click Here!”).

Create New Facebook Page Category section :

1. Select from 3 different types of business categories. Whether you are a local company or a small to large brand/product/organization there are a wide variety of industries to choose from.
2. Name your company page – This is a little more important than you think. In terms of SEO, these pages are index-able (meaning they are able to be found through search) Definitely have your company title!
3. You have the option to make the page publicly visible, whether or not you want people or fans to see this work in progress before we turn it into a masterpiece is up to you.
4. Click the Create Page button

Now you’ll be taken to something that resembles an empty profile. Congratulations, this is your company’s new Fan Page!

Filling out Company information

1. Click on the Info Tab
2. Enter text for “Founded” under the Basic Information section
3. Next, Fill out information under the Detailed Information section
   • Website Address
   • Your Company Overview (What do you do?!)
   • A Mission Statement (Why do you do what you do?!)
   • Whatever Products you may sell

When you’ve completed your basic and detailed information, save your changes and click “Done Editing”

Changing Your Profile Picture

1. Hover your mouse over the default profile picture
2. Click Change picture… it comes with options
   • you now have the option to upload a picture
   • take a picture
   • choose from album (even though you don’t have one yet!)

If you already have a photo on your hard drive, you can browse for it and it will upload

You now have an identity on your Facebook page! Tune in next week as we talk about adding content to your Facebook Profile with Boxes and Photos!