Before you can consider how best to create a strong online presense you must start with the basics. The first and most important aspect of creating a great online presense is having a great web site.

Here is what makes up a great web site that performs:

1. Content
1. Unique content
2. Call to action
2. Web site coding
3. Layout / usability
4. Domain Name

 Content is King!

It has been said and I will say it again content is king. I don’t know who first coined that term but I can’t stress how important it is. Whe I first got into this business I thought the domain was everything. Then loading it up with keywords even if they weren’t integrated into the content was the best way to do it. Well, that doesn’t work now days. To be relevent more relevant than your competitors you have to have compelling content that your visitors will refer to again and again and will either link to it or tell their friends about it.

Unique Content

About 90% of the problems I run into when helping someone get a better presense online is that they don’t have any content. They aren’t writters and have no idea how to write good content. They have a few pictures but no articles or tools that really put meat on the bone. If they did have articles it was stuff provided by manufactures that all their competitors are also using.

To create great unique content you need to get into your customers mind to find out why they are buying and what are the primary deciding factors in the purchasing process.

I will use one of my previous clients HD Installers : Home Theater, Plasma and LCD Installation company that can be found at http://www.hdinstallers.com/ as an example of unique content. When I first started talking to them they had a 3 page web site and could not be found anywhere on the internet. The content they had was the same basic content that you could find on any television installer web site. It had prices, email address and local number on how to get in touch with them. They had been doing some Google advertising to offer their product nationally but hadn’t seen any sales from their efforts. I sat down with HD Installers and asked them the following questions:

1. What questions do your customer ask you when on the phone?
1. When the customers ask a question what answers are hard to convey in words over the phone?
2. Would they (the manager at HD Installers) purchase a local service like installation by calling a long distance number?
3. Who are your competitors?
1. What is different about the services you provide vs. your competitors?
1. What is the mission statement of your company?
2. What awards have you won?
3. What do customer say about your service?
4. Why shouldn’t a customer use one of your competitors?
4. What are all the products and services you sell?
5. How are you priced vs. your competitors?
6. When customers contact you what do you tell them about your company?
7. How does someone order / schedule their service with you?
8. What are some upcomming technologies that could change your business?
9. What are your goals for your web site?
1. Drive sales online or drive phone calls?
2. Educate customers or have keep them guessing?
3. Create a unique brand identity or stay sort of generic just one of the crowd?
10. What’s your budget?

Each of these questions you will need to ask yourself, your employees and to some extent your customers. Here is why each question is important:

Question 1: What questions do your customer ask you when on the phone?

Why ask that question: Listing all the questions your customers typically ask and answering them on your web site is very easy to produce content that is very extremely relevent to your industry and will help your rankings on search engines. Futhermore if you provide great answers customers are going to get a better sense of trust to work with your company. An example of the question often asked is “is it safe to install a flat panel Plasma TV or LCD TV above my fireplace?“. HD Installers added that question to their FAQ and eventually created a dedicated page to fireplace installation that is now showing number 1 and 2 on Google. By taking this common question and placing it on their site HD Installers was able to create value that their competitors overlooked and drove more traffic to their web site by providing relevant content that potential customers are looking for the answer for on Google.

Question 1.1 When the customers ask a question what answers are hard to convey in words over the phone?

Why ask the question: If you can answer hard to answer questions on your site by using graphics or simple programs without giving away secrets that make your customers use you then you’re going to get a great response from customer and show up great on the search engines again if you provide the textual content arround the question. An example of something HD Installers did was they answered the question “How close can I sit to my big screen LCD TV or plasma television without impacting my viewing experience?”  HD Installers created a program (it cost them $125) that let customers type in information that showed them how far or close they could sit from their big screen television and by creating this page that answer this question HD Installers got listed #1 on Google and has seen benefits from this content in new customers order from them.

Question 2: Would they (the manager at HD Installers) purchase a local service like installation by calling a long distance number?

Why ask this question: HD Installers only had a local number listed on their site. Even though they provided nationwide service and where paying for traffic to their site from customers all over the U.S.. By getting a 800# from AT&T and placing that number on their site customer where going to call in because they didn’t have to pay for the long distance. Having the 800# helped show that they where a larger company that could answer all their questions. In my experience you could always go with someone else like Vonage and you might save a few dollars but the quality of the voice signal could cost you a few sales so its best probly to still with your traditional phone carrier.

Question 3: Who are your competitors?

Questions 3.1 What is different about the services you provide vs. your competitors?

3.1.1 What is the mission statement of your company?

3.1.2 What awards have you won?

3.1.3 What do customer say about your service?

3.1.4 Why shouldn’t a customer use one of your competitors?

Why to ask the question: Know your enemies and know yourself and you will never be defeated -Art of War by Sun Tsu. You have to know your strengths and weakeness vs. your competitors. Then address both as honestly as possible on your site. This is a great source of content. The purpose of these questions are to help create your complete marketing message. Your marketing message should include the answers to all those questions above. Here is how you use those questions above to create the marketing message for your site:

The difference between your competitor and you is your key marketing message. Customers online are going to shop arround their concerns about shopping online should be addressed in your messages.

The mission statement should be something along the lines of what your going to do differently in the market place. For HD Installers thier mission statement is to always be certifed, insured, prompt and proffesional with installers in every major city.

What awards you have one help you differentiate yourself vs. your competitors.

What customers say about your service helps in three ways. First by gathering this information you can identify weekness in your service and address them. Second you can get great customer reviews and from your customers perspective it isn’t a marketing message. 3.) Using this content is great for relevency. What else could be better than customer talking about the services you offer and how great you are. I highly recommend advertising on Yellowpages.com, I have a forthcomming article that talks about the ROI provided from that site. That site also includes a customer reviews section. If you take my advice and advertising their then you should tell all of your customers to post their reviews on Yellowpages.com. Then you can take those reviews and post them on your web site.

Telling customer why to avoid your competitors does 2 things plants a seed of doubt against that other customer and helps the customer see why you are different than the competitors. Do it in a tactful way and when writting the article write about it from a 3rd party perspective.

Question 4: What are all the products and services you sell?

Honestly six out of ten sights I visit for customer doesn’t clearly indicate what services or products they sell. People assume that the customer know them somehow and that the name of the business somehow leads the customer to believe what it is they use exactly.

 Question 5: How are you priced vs. your competitors?

Why ask this question: It’s extremely important to know if your positioning yourself from a pricing perspective as the cheapest or the best value based on some other criteria as your content needs to support that positioning. If you say your the cheapest and your not then where do you go next? If you based your marketing message on some other value, quality of service for example, what happens if your competitor offers a better warranty or has better customer reviews? Understanding your pricing and placement in the market is a must.

Question 6: When customers contact you what do you tell them about your company?

Why ask this question: Simple answer is that you want the message to be consistant. You don’t want to say one thing online and something different over the phone.

Question 7: How does someone order / schedule their service with you?

Service based business typically cannot use Ecommerce effectively because of the need to co-ordinate an the schedule with the service. If your selling a commidity product then you might want to have the customer call in to get the best rate. So understanding how you want your customer to order and how it works with your business is very important. If you have a product that customers can only get from you or you have it at a price that is extremely competitive then I would suggest using ecommerce. If you are in a competitive market place I would suggest having the customer call in to give your sales team a chance to close them based on the value you provide. In either instance I always recommend giving the customer a way to contact you over the phone.

Question 8: What are some upcomming technologies that could change your business?

Why ask this question: If a new technology is comming out that can change your business then start writting about it now. Use whatever information you can find out about it and write a big and as long an article you can on your web site. The benefits of posting an article like this is that it helps customers see you as an industry expert and starts getting you listed in the search engines well under those keywords that you use in the article. An example of this again using HD Installers is SED TV Installation and OLED TV Installation. Both SED TV and OLED TV are new technologies comming out in late 2007 and 2008. HD Installers has the #1 and #2 keywords for both key word terms and is in a great position when the technologies come out to be the main provider of choice.

Question 9: What are your goals for your web site?

9.1 Drive sales online or drive phone calls that turn into sales?

9.2 Educate customers or have keep them guessing?

9.3 Create a unique brand identity or stay sort of generic just one of the crowd?

Understanding the goals of your web site will help you understand how to achieve those goals. If you want to drive phone calls then you want to make sure people can find your phone number and that you tell customers to call in.

Either educating the customers or keeping them guessing both have benefits. If you want to keep the customer guessing that may drive calls but you have to have a call to action to let them know someone is their to help them. If you want to educate them that good also as long as you don’t give away to much information on your secret sause so they think they can do it themselves. Educate them on why the should use you do not give them ever aspect of what it takes to provide your service. For those offering products you can never provide to much information about your products.

Question 10: What’s your budget?

If you don’t have a real budget for marketing, maintaining and supporting your website I would recommend not even getting a site. People ask me all the time what a good budget should be for a web site. That’s sort of a trick question that is completely depending on the margins of your business.

If you don’t have an in-house web master and network IT professional I recommend outsourcing your web site completely. The last thing you want is to build a web site that is crashing all the time or that doesn’t have good usability. For a completely designed web site that is managed with support for changes to be made to it I recommend spending between $250-$500 per month. People have told me that price is too high. My response is how much money are you willing to lose in your marketing efforts for a site that is not professionally designed by a reputable company. I would only suggest using a large company that is properly funded and that has the customers best intentions in mind and is not going to go broke if you’re running late on your bill or if for some reason they need to give you a credit.

I’ve looked at and worked for several hosting and web site design companies and I recommend Yellowpages.com Web Site Plus Package.  It comes with 5 Completely custom designed web pages with 3 DIY additional pages that come with unlimited support and free advertising on Yellowpages.com. The free advertising is what makes it stand appart from anything else in the market place. Can you get a site done cheaper, sure, will it be as good, probably not, will it come with free online advertising drive traffic to your site? No. Only Yellowpages.com Plus site offers that and that is why they are my choice for the best hosting value on the Internet.

Call to action

When I first start talking about call to action most people know what I’m talking about but not everyone. So just to make sure we are all thinking of the same thing here is my diffinition of what a call to action is:

Call to action: The action the customer is directed to take after getting to your web site.

Studies from industry leading usability experts like Jose Acosta from Junita Usibility Research Labs say that once someone gets to your site you have 10 seconds to get their attention and to have them do something to contact or buy from you. It needs to be something compelling like “Call 123-123-4567 today for your free estimate!” or “Limited time 25% off this widget order today!” that grabs their attention. So having a “Contact Us” page with a number on it is not going to work. You might get a handful of calls a year taking that approach but you’re missing out on the much larger market.

Bottom Line: When someone gets to your web site make it clear on what you want the to do next, purchase, email or call. If you don’t do that they will feel a little lost and go elsewhere.

 

Web Site Coding

First of all it’s important to note that not all web site code is the same. You could have a very nice looking web site but very bad code. I’ve never seen a very bad looking web site with very good code.

Here is an example of a site with some very bad code: http://www.partyanimalsga.com/

They put the phone number towards the top like I asked but prior to that they didn’t have it anywhere on the web site. Some of the navigation buttons don’t work, some images aren’t linked properly and it looks horrible. But that’s not the worst of it. This guy is paying some company over $200 to help him with SEO and he they don’t even have some simple things that could help the site tremdously that cost nothing. This company is ripping the guy off and now the guy has a bad taste in his mouth on SEO. I would too. Remember that not all SEO experts are experts and some are just con artist. If your SEO expert doesn’t give you any recommendations to improve your web site walk away from them as they are obviously clueless.

Here are some simple things you can do to help improve your web site code. This isn’t an all inclusive list because if I gave the milk away for free you would never buy the cow.

1.) META Tags: An element of web site page coding that is used by search engines to index a web site. Most meta-tags are included within the ‘header’ code of a website and the most important tags are the title, description and keyword tags. Rules used by different search engines govern how such tags are used, how many characters they should contain, and how they should be formatted. Some say they are dead other say they still perform well with the spiders from the search engines. I say it can’t hurt so use them.

Here is what a meta tag looks like:

1.  meta name=”resource-type” content=”document” 
• describes that it is a document file.
2.  meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html; charset=US-ASCII” 
• tells the search engines the text incoding
3.  meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en-us”
• tells the search engine the language used on the site
4.  meta http-equiv=”author” content=”Myles Rothacker”
• tells the search engine the author of the site
5.  meta http-equiv=”contact” content=mailto:content=myles@improveyoursearchresults.com
• tells the search engines the contact email address of the web site author
6.  meta name=”copyright” content=”Copyright (c)1997-2007 Myles Rothacker. All Rights Reserved.”
• Post a copyright notice. I don’t believe this provides any legal coverage because it is not visible to people on your site. Always post your Copyright notice on the site.
7. meta name=”description” content=”All about SEO, SEM and how to build web site that perform.”
• Provide a brief 1 sentence description about your web site.
8. meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO, SEM, search, engine, optimization, marketing”
• These are the words and phrases that your telling the search engine you want to appear when when someone search for them. Do not put more than 256 characters otherwise the search engines may discard the site.

before each meta tag you will need to have “<" without the " " and after each meta tag you will need ">” without the ” “ 

Since this isn’t a meta tag tutorial I won’t bother you with all of them. But their are lots of them. Some provide value because they allow to provide the search engines with more information about your site while others I think are just junk.

2.) “ALT” Image tag: Alternative text tags appear in place of images when the browser preferences are set for text only (image viewing option is turned off). Including them on your site enables visually impaired user reader programs (speech synthesizers) to read the alt tag aloud. On a PC, when a user mouse’s over an image, the alt tag becomes visible, it appears as text. For instance, Alt tags are not generally visible on a Mac unless the images are turned off. Search Engines also read this information when the spider your web site so by properly naming your images you will get better relevancy in the search engines.
3.) Title Tag: An HTML tag with text describing a specific Web page (but not visually displayed on the page). The title tag should contain strategic keywords for the page and be constructed following specific guidelines. The title tag is important because it usually becomes the text link to the page found in search engine listings, and because search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing pages. This is the name accross the top of your browser. For this web site you should see “ImproveYourSearchResults.com”

Those are just a few of the simple things people don’t get right when building their web site. There are typically arround 50 other things people don’t get right but that’s part of the secret sause I was talking about earlier. Those listed above are a good first start. Get those right and your site is better than 80% that I’ve seen out in the market.

Layout and Usability

I’ve seen sights with black backgrounds and navy blue text. Do you think that the visitor to that web site is really going to use it or go elsewhere? I’ve seen sights with the navigation at the bottom. Do you think the visitor would ever scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the other pages? Usability is pretty straight forward. Just build a web site where it is easy to see everything (no light on light colors or dark on dark), easy to get arround (easy to find and understand navigation), easy to read and understand what it is that your trying to communicate (call to action) for a 3rd grader. Follow those simple rules and you will have a very usable site. Get the youngest person you know that can read well and have them go to your site for 2 minutes. Then ask them if they understood what the site was about, ask them what pages they found and what they site was trying to get them to do. If they answer all the questions correctly or with enough good information then your on target. Do this everytime you change your web site. As an FYI.. I just taught you how to have your own usability study and saved you thousands of dollars that it cost to do usabilty study on your web site by a professional usability  company and you would end up with the same results.

Any good web design company incompases good usability. The problem is that most good companies cost to much. I recommend Yellowpages.com Web Site Plus Package. they use good techniques in building their web sites for a fraction of the cost of those companies that “incorperate SEO”. One company I came accross spent $30,000 for his site and had Yellowpages recreate and manage his site for hardly nothing.

If you have questions about how to get your web site to perform better contact me at myles@improveyoursearchresults.com
   

Domain Names

 

  

  There are three things that are important factors you should consider when selecting your domain name. The first thing is to consider in selecting your domain name is to make sure that it is something your customers can remember. The second thing to consider is it hard or easy to spell. The last thing is to consider is if possible to have your service or product name in your domain name and ends in .com. A good domain name incorperates all 3 factors.

  There are three things that are important factors you should consider when selecting your domain name. The first thing is to consider in selecting your domain name is to make sure that it is something your customers can remember. The second thing to consider is it hard or easy to spell. The last thing is to consider is if possible to have your service or product name in your domain name and ends in .com. A good domain name incorperates all 3 factors.Here are a few examples of what a bad domian name would look like:

drragnadavoidi.com

electroline4u.com

imaginx.com

articledashboard.us

longtermhealthcarefortheelderly.info

calibrex.com

audionmotion.com

All of those web site don’t adhear all of the 3 important factors you should use when selecting a domain.

Good domains examples are:

Yellowpages.com

Childcare.com

hdinstallers.com

Shopping.com

ownhdtv.com

bugbegone.com

Fantasyfootball.com

psychotherapy.com

gotvmail.com

Other domains like Google.com, Yahoo.com, Ebay.com, Amazon.com have spent millions of dollars to create brand awareness. If you don’t have millions of dollars to spend on creating brand awareness on a unique domain name then going that route of doing something unique that is not associated is not recommended.