| 1. Develop a complete marketing plan. Brochures, ads, events and websites are all useful individual elements of a marketing strategy. But often these pieces are considered individually. But in this way the marketing plan remains unconnected with many small units. But consider each unit as a part of the composite whole or a larger picture with a common goal that each unit fits together to achieve increased revenue. |
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| 2. Consult the experts. We all like the web copy that we write and when we ask our friends for their opinions, they may simply nod their heads or smile before shuffling off to their own works. Why then is there no noticeable impact on sales or inquiries when the materials go out? Objective insights are both rare and valuable. Working with expert marketing consultants will involve making an investment, but it makes a difference between a powerful strategic and well planned marketing plan as compared to a mediocre marketing map. |
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| 3. Use the right tools. Just putting up a flat, static website does not qualify as integrating the Internet into your marketing. But it needs to have a more dynamic website that will allow users to find and register for events and newsletters or enter their requests for information means that you’ve got to have the right tools in place. You need a database to manage contact lists, software to easily create and manage newsletters, and most importantly, a tool to manage, edit and update the content of your site. |
The moment you are ready with a full marketing plan, get it reviewed by experienced marketing professionals and select the right technology tools, you’re ready to put them to use and integrate the Internet into your marketing strategy.
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| Building the Website that ranks high |
| Building the very essence to a web presence permeates a set of questions in the mind. So before kicking off the smart build for virtual establishment you need to make a sneak review of these essentials: |
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What does your company do? |
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Who is your market? |
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What messages do they respond to and why? |
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What is the goal of your website? |
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What do you need to achieve this goal? |
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| How will the site be managed, updated and maintained? |
After answering these key questions regarding a website, you need to delve into much greater detail for other critical considerations. Good marketing consultants could help you to not only articulate what to do, but also help you to identify markets and reach them. Usually, the goal of the website, like any component in a marketing plan, is to impact revenue and support sales. After this begin to map out the website. First develop a “sitemap” of the pages, followed by the content (both images and words) that will go on each page. Finally, integrate any special applications or features, such as contact forms, newsletter signups, etc. Each of these steps can be studied more precisely as under:
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SITEMAP
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This is a skeleton of the website. It begins with the home page and shows all secondary pages. Creating a sitemap as a starting point will help you reign in your site, so that it’s neither too sparse nor too confusing for your viewers to navigate. Simplicity reigns supreme in this process. A very simple sitemap might look like:
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CONTENT
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Brochure copy sounds great for brochures. But your website should be something more interactive. Well-written content is very important to search engine placement and maintaining repeat traffic to a web site. Even though search engines vary and use their own criteria for ranking web sites, there are some general characteristics that can be used in order for higher rankings and repeat traffic.
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Uniqueness – Don’t Duplicate |
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Content should be written uniquely for each page of your web site. This enables search engine spider to index each page, constantly searching for any patterns that matches known spam practices.
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Don’t Misrepresent |
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If you optimize for keywords that have little or nothing to do with what the visitor will see on the page, you're asking for trouble. For help finding the appropriate keywords to target, there are a number of services offered that can help.
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Don’t Stuff |
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If you stuff too many keywords into your page, you could get in trouble for spamming. Repeating the same word multiple times in a row is the worst offense. However, over-use of your keyword can cause your ranking to drop. What's the magic number? That varies by the area of the page and the search engine. In general, 4 to 15 keywords are suggested for a page as a whole.
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Fresh Content |
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Search engines always look for web sites that offer “useful” information to their users. If Google found new content every time it indexed your web site, your site would instantly gain credibility because this would indicate that your site is constantly evolving. As a result, your site has a better chance of obtaining better placements and maintaining the positions gained.
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Relevant |
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It is extremely important that when you create the copy for a web page you try to maintain the overall relevance of the topic. The first 25-30 words of your home page are what the each search engine will use for the description of your web site. Try to utilize your target keyword/s within this area but be certain the resulting sentence is legible and descriptive.
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Content Visibility |
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Seems simple right? Well, there are many ways to unwittingly damage the visibility of your web site’s content to the search engines.
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Optimize the Title |
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The title of the home page can be optimized quite simply by placing the keyword or keyword phrase that you have chosen to target first and then finish with the name of your company or web site. The search engines place a great deal of weight in the title of your home page and the keywords within your title will likely be chosen as the title of your listing on the search engines.
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Alternative Navigation Options
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Most sites employ a graphical navigation method which provides a very attractive and often functional method of navigating a web site. By ALT tagging each of the menu buttons with a topical summary of the destination page, graphical menus can even be effective for search engines. There are other things you can do to increase your ranking:
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Bottom Navigation |
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It includes a mirrored text menu (main navigation in the form of links or hyperlinked text) at the bottom of the page. Hyperlinked text is more credible than a linked graphic. This is because the text within the link can be read by search engines (as it is html code) and, if properly designed, the menu's text link defines the topic of the destined page. Also, since this text is visible to visitors (unlike less visible ALT tags) there is less likelihood that you are trying to fool the search engines (adding further credibility).
The website, like any marketing piece, should be able to stand on its own. To be an effective “search engine friendly website and to rank high, it needs to communicate in a language that resonates with your clients. It must clearly convey about you, your area of work, your products and services and how can it be beneficial to them. But it also needs to play into the other activities that are going to be conducting. |
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