Marketing a New Website

If you've just launched a new website you are hopefully prepared for the marketing effort that will be necessary to build traffic and sales. Oddly enough we still encounter people who were 'sold' a website and had little or no understanding that the actual design of a website is only step one of a long Internet campaign. And yes, many people come to realize this the hard way and simply quit, after spending $100's often $1000's on the design stage.

At Connect Online Svcs the thing that we work on the hardest at the pre-contract stage is making sure the prospective customer has a clear understanding of what to expect. In most cases this is easy, people nowadays generally come along with some knowledge of how things work, but occasionally we see newbies looking to get online for the first time, and it's imperative that we coach them in the early stages and ensure they know exactly what they're getting into.

Here are a few words of wisdom for people in the early stages of planning a website, not necessarily in any order of importance -

Sandbox and domain aging affect

This is a simple enough concept but it's important to understand what this means. In simple terms, Google will look at any new website and determine how old the domain name is, or how long it has been in use. Aged domains are processed without impediment to ranking, whereas new domains can often see a short-term boost in rankings, followed by a drop then a longish wait in the sandbox. The principal is under some debate but most people consider it a way of filtering people/businesses looking to make a quick kill online, those who haven't really shown any longer term commitment. There are also websites/businesses that try to jump on new trends/ideas as soon as they're released, and sandboxing their domain will result in fewer fly-by-night operations and more stable companies along for the long haul.

So expect to spend time in the SB with any new website, it can be 3-6 months before your rankings start to improve.

Where best to put my marketing effort?

This is a great question that we get asked from time to time. The short answer is really to diversify and cover as many areas as possible. But what if time is critical and you're looking for ways to prioritize your marketing efforts?

A quick way to get traffic, and we've talked about this elsewhere, is through PPC - Pay-Per-Click marketing. For those who don't already know, this is a system operated by Google and Yahoo whereby you -

• Create an account (with either Google, Yahoo or both...and there are a couple others, maybe even some that are specific to your industry)
• Research and form a list of keywords and keyword phrases pertaining to your products/services (both Google/Yahoo provide research tools)
• Write Taglines and descriptions for each of your chosen keywords
• Set a bid amount for each keyword/phrase, which is basically the amount you are willing to pay each time Google/Yahoo send a visitor to your web page.

The amount you pay per click will determine where you rank against your competitors, who may also be bidding on the same keywords. For example, this website www.thenaturalshopper.com sells products with 'royal jelly' amongst other things. Lets say that there are other companies bidding on the search term 'royal jelly' and company A appears in position #1 for the search term and Company B appears in position #2. For The Natural Shopper to appear in #2, they would need to bid an amount higher than Company B, who would then be pushed down to position #3, and lower than Company A, who would remain at the number one position. That's the basic principal. They key is to managing your campaign so that you are getting a positive ROI (return on investment). If your bid amounts are so high that you spend more on marketing than you achieve on sales, then that may not be the right thing for you. If your website is within an industry that has a good repeat order rate, then it maybe OK to loose a little on the first order, since you'll get the repeat order essentially for zero marketing effort, with a net gain over the two orders.

If you find that the ROI isn't working for you with PPC, then before you abandon this strategy make sure that you've researched keywords that are less competitive and therefor cheaper to bid against. They may yield lower traffic, but as long as they convert, and you maintain a positive ROI, then they're going to be good value for money.

So you'll need to experiment with PPC and see if it's right for you.

Much of how you approach marketing your website will be determined by whether you choose the DIY or DIFM (do it for me) route. If you have some basic skills on the web there's no reason why you can't adopt the DIY approach. Let's look briefly at the skills and tools needed. Assuming your website was produced with a combination of HTML and CSS, you're going to need some form of HTML editor to make the necessary edits to your code. You won't be doing anything complicated, just locating the lines of code known as Meta tags and editing the Title, Description, Keywords tags and perhaps one or two more. Then you'll be adding ALT tags to images and Heading tags to page texts. So it's mostly basic and you can get away with a free HTML editor in most cases.Then you'll need some way of loading modified files back to the website, either via your HTML editor (like Dreamweaver) an FTP software like CuteFTP or through the hosting control panel.

If your website was created in a CMS like Joomla or Drupal, you'll need to learn the basics of working with Meta tags within your CMS. If your designer didn't do this already, you'll want to install the SEF module in Joomla, which can be a little tricky depending on how your website is hosted.

So by acquiring the basic tools and skills necessary, and by researching the topic from reliable SEO websites, you can affect most changes and basic optimization tasks quite easily yourself.

PART II

JOOMLA AND SEO

There is no reason whatsoever that a Joomla website should NOT be search engine friendly.

Many people believe in the old myth that unless the page filename ends is HTML or HTM the site will not rank well with popular search engines like Google and Bing. That is not the case. As web design technology has advanced, so has the indexing technology used to rank pages.

Having dynamic content on a website does not mean it cannot be indexed.

However, there are ways and methods of improving the way your site looks to a search engine, and Joomla lends itself well to generation of site content in a search engine friendly manner.

Inside of Joomla there are a group of settings in the 'Site' - 'Global Configuration' area, that allow for the setting of SEF URL's. On an apache web server it is necessary to install a custom .htaccess file when using SEF settings, we've found that on many host servers, the .htaccess file that Joomla creates with it's SEF setting results in "Page Not Found" errors when navigating the website.

Once installed, the SEF URL's will be composed from the path name and the alias entry on the Article title field, so you have full control over how articles are named and how sub-directories are named (the latter requires a bit of figuring out). When you create articles, if you leave the 'alias' field empty then the page file name will be constructed from whatever you enter in the Title field, stripped of non-standard characters with hyphens placed between words. So if you want to call your page something other than what's in the title field, remember to use the Alias field and insert hyphens between words.

The resulting page filenames will be suffixed HTML and treated like any regular HTML page designed in Dreamweaver / Expressions etc.

CH

BUILDINGS LINKS TO ESTABLISH VOTES FOR YOUR WEBSITE

An incoming link to your website can be looked at like a vote for your products/services from a referring website. Search engines look at incoming links as providing clue as to the value of the content on your website - if other websites are linking to you, you must have some worthy content.

But not all links are created equal. First lets look at the different types of links -

Reciprocal / Link Exchanges

This is the most common form of links found on the web. Basically, you place a link to another website on your website, and in return, the other website links back to you.

There are two ways to approach this form of linking, manually, and having some level of automation to manage the exchange (Link Exchange Software). A typical manual scenario would be you scouring the web and finding non-competing websites in a related industry, placing a link to the website on your links page, then emailing the website owner and asking that they link back to you. Why add their link first? - since you are making the initial approach for a link exchange, etiquette dictates that you should already have their link in place. You could skip that step and word your email/approach in a way that promises to add the link once they've agreed upon the exchange.

You can see already that this could be a time consuming process with a very low ROI.

Using software to automate part of the process can help. There are various link exchange software tools available along with some networks that not only provide the mechanism for the exchange but can help source compatible link partners too.

But what do search engines make of 'link exchange programs?' - well it's not absolutely clear, but it would certainly seem that the operations designed to provide fast and easy link partners (networks) my not be in favor at present. Using software automation to help manage your link exchange program is fine, so long as you follow some basic rules. Unless you are a directory, stay clear of adding links to/from websites that are off-theme from yours. Focus on building link partnerships with sites that have some compatible content. They're harder to come by but the extra effort can be worthwhile.

Summary - fully manual exchanges are hard work. Some automation via software is fine, but avoid link farms where links are built automatically.

One-Way Linking

These are hard to come by since there's no real incentive for a website owner to link to you unless you link back. But in some cases you might have content that is of use to the other websites readers and they may choose to link to you without reciprocation. It will largely depend on what your website has to offer and your method of approach.

Paid Links

You can purchase links from other websites. Many directory websites offer paid links, put there's some evidence that the value of the link may be low. You may in some cases even be penalized for using too many paid links, so tread carefully here.

In all cases, be sure to supply the linking text to the other website so you have control over what is within the link back to you. Don't send everyone the same text, vary the text so that it doesn't look to 'staged'. Use keywords but don't overuse.

There's strong evidence that incoming links are very useful in getting your website ranked well. With a good linking campaign, a well-aged domain and good site content, you should be able to make changes to your web content without loss of position. I'll expand on that last comment soon, it's quite important and I've been doing some research into the subject which is almost complete.

The Holy Grail of SEO is having good content -

Write as much descriptive text about your products and/or services as you can, and keep it fresh with regular updates and additions. But there comes a point where the text/pages start to impede the user-experience. Too much going on, too confusing, too many navigation buttons etc etc. One way around this is to create an 'articles' section or even a blog. That way people can access that area of your site if they need to, but it won't interfere with their browsing experience. Content attracts SE's into your site and gives them plenty to feed on. Keep it original, 300 words plus, and on theme as much as possible. Make it a part of your life to develop more and more content and you'll start to reap the benefits of your efforts. Consider article writing services (like ours) as an excellent way to build content at  reasonable cost.
If you go it alone, keep it sensible and write your texts for a human reader not a search engine. Use all of the HTML tools at your disposal such as -
Heading Tags, Alt Tags and Internal Links. Try to map out your site structure on paper, then show the links on paper before you start to code them. It will be a great reference tool when you begin writing new pages. For example, if you have a page somewhere that's really strong on the subject of apples, a month down the line, when you're writing a new article and making reference to apples, it's great to be able to see visually on paper that you have an optimized page on the subject, and you can add the page filename as a link in your new article without having to go looking for it. In doing this you'll constantly be re enforcing the theme of your important pages.
Avoid duplicate content and avoid mirror websites.
Use keywords in your page filenames, your directory filenames and your image filenames, but keep it sensible.
Make good use of anchor text, again using keywords.
Page file size should be less than around 160kb before images. There are programs where you can check loadspeeds on different internet connections, use them to try to attain a page load time under 10 seconds. When designing, you can take steps to have your textual content appear quickly and images later, this is better than having the entire page blank then everything appearing at once after a 10 second wait. Keep the user in mind!