Make Your Website Pop!

The first of three steps, is to start blogging. Here are 8 reasons why you need to sharpen your pencil.

1. You get to write about what you know, your business specialty, and as a result your website will always be fresh and changing.
2. Your blog can be part of the menu on your website, so when people go to your blog they will get a chance to look over the rest of your website. And that’s the point; its all about keeping people’s interest and getting them to tell their friends about it. Like a giant leads group.
3. Search engines favor blogs. Every time you write a post that’s another page for Google and Bing to index.
4. Because you are writing about your field you will gradually become known as an authority. Everybody wants to go to the top dog in the field. Think how useful this could be to a mortgage guy or an investment adviser. You become the authority in your city.
5. You don’t have to pay anybody every time you want to add content or edit it. You become the master of your web world.
6. Blogs give visitors the opportunity to know you before you hit them with the sales pitch. Give them useful information and they will start looking around your site to see what else you have to offer.
7. The blogger culture encourages reciprocal linking, so as a blogger, you are more likely to get linked to. People get psyched about helpful or entertaining information and want to share it with their community. Make sure you link to the blogs you like as well.
8. If people start linking to your site, Google will push your rank up, maybe even to the first page. It all depends on how cool your content is and how often you post.

Objections?

Let’s deal with objections first:  if you don’t have time to blog, have an employee do it. If that doesn’t work, hire someone to do it for you. But make sure you start. Have New Energy or someone else to create an optimized WordPress blog for you and start ASAP.
Objection number 2: What does a phone system installation guy need a blog for? Answer: What does a phone guy need a networking group for? Ask yourself this: If you could be on Google’s first page and be seen as your city’s number one authority on phone installation, wouldn’t it be good for business?

A little known fact: Google is trying to dominate the information business; all of it. They want to provide you the best possible answer for everything you need. They would love to recommend you, but you have to help them out a little.

Step two: Be nice to your friends Bing and Google

Help Google out by making sure your website is search friendly: Google got to be the best search engine by acting like a very efficient librarian. Their job is to give you the most relevant answer to your search question. Notice I did not say most accurate. Accuracy can get you into trouble because frequently what you ask for in your search is not what you want. Google is the best at understanding what your really want. They frequently even ask you questions like ” did you mean to search for golf clubs?” when you actually typed in “Golf cubs”.

Bottom line: Google does a great job, but if your website is not set up correctly, it can’t find you and neither can your customers. Don’t be like the bad teenager who puts a book on the wrong shelf just to play a joke on the librarian. 90% of the websites out there make it hard for Google. The ones that cooperate are the ones you see on the first page when you do a search.

So here are three rules for making your website friendly:

1. Rule number one: Make sure each page has a unique description. This description is what Google uses when it brings up your site in a search result. It is the reason people click on your website instead of another one. So make it sound interesting. If you have a unique description, it will be a tempting click but more important, visitors will remark about it –– tell their friends about it.

2. Rule number two: Make sure each page of your site has a unique title that refers to the page’s content. Most of the sites I see have only one title for all the pages. The title is the sentence or phrase at the very top of your browser. It is not your web address. Doing this incorrectly is a grave mistake because it is one of the two clues that is most important to search engines. Mess this up and you are invisible. I have an SEO client that is huge in their industry, but they don’t show up in the SERPs (search engine results page) when I search logical keywords for their industry.  They don’t show up because the titles of their pages don’t refer to the actual content of the page. And in some cases they have the same title for several pages. I am changing the title tags on all their pages so they have a chance of getting found.

3. Rule number three: Decide what you want your visitors to do and give them an incentive to do it. On the web there’s a lot of free stuff and your website has to compete with all those free goodies. Figure out how you can afford to reward people and make sure it’s offered on your website. Most small business sites don’t ask visitors to do anything. Small wonder they don’t get results. I ask all my clients to have a measurable call to action, like a form where visitors can provide their email address. This has three benefits; first it gets you a mailing list you can use for email marketing; second it allows you to measure whether people are responding to your site. If people aren’t doing it, you know you need to make some changes. The third benefit is that by completing the form and providing a reward, you and the visitor are now in a business relationship. You are no longer complete strangers; you have completed a transaction even if no money was involved. By delivering on your promised incentive you proved that you are honest and reliable. The next transaction could be for money.

The third crucial step:

The third step is to sign up and participate in some form of social media –– Twitter, Linkedin, or Facebook.

Unless you are a nut like me, it’s better to concentrate most of your efforts on just one, so you can really take advantage of all the ways it can help you leverage your business. My personal choice has be Twitter although I belong to Facebook and Linkedin as well. I have about 1400 followers on my photo page and over 3000 on my web marketing page. I recently started a fan page for New Energy Communications and have been participating for a while in the Linkedin groups.

So what has this gotten me.?
1. I’ve met a lot of interesting people who have taught me a lot about the web and photography and even how to run my business. That’s the great thing about Twitter. People help each other.

2. I’ve been offered the chance to be a partner in starting a new web portal which I turned down.

3. I met a graphic designer who runs an online magazine, and he asked if he could publish an interview with me about my photography business. The interview was posted and got more interest than any other person he has interviewed. It also landed me photo job with a local ad agency where we flew down to Florida to do the shoot. And just last week it led to a job with one of the top five annual report companies in New York.

4. The design magazine interview with me is now the featured article on that site.

Finally, the interview gave me an idea to start interviewing people and posting to this website. I’ve already interviewed one  web marketing great,  Zeke Camusio, which dramatically increased traffic to my site, and it received visitors from 11 different countries. In addition I am in the process of interviewing another luminary who has 65000 followers on twitter.

So the beat goes on: Using the principles I’ve mentioned has helped me get ranked  the number one internet marketing company in Hartford, according to Google.

So jump in, start blogging, fix your website and push the social media. It works if you take the three steps and make it easy for search engines to find you. In the meantime, if you have questions about any or all of this let me know. I would be happy to answer questions.

What steps do you think are absolutely necessary? Are there ones I’ve left out, or ones you like to hear more about? Let me know.