mkLINK Website Tips Newsletter
Tuesday 20th December 2005- Issue 2
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Well folks, just 11 days to go until 2006 and yet another year has flown by.
All of us here at mkLINK hope that it’s been a good one for you and wish
you a very merry Christmas and of course a prosperous New year.
In this issue we’ve attempted to focus on the 3 key areas of you’re your online business and every 2 weeks highlight a subject that relates to these 3 areas.
1. Increase Your Visitors
Search Engine Marketing Part 1
2. Convert more of your Visitors to Sales/Leads
The power of online competitions
3. Website Management
Start planning today to ensure online success next year.
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Increase
Your Visitors
Search Engine-Marketing Part 1
The importance of keeping your website optimized for all the
major search engines in 2006.
Did you know that more than 80% of all Internet users find new websites through
search engines
(source: Georgia Tech/GVU survey)
Furthermore, 75% of users never look further than page one.
(Source: Georgia Institute of Technology)
Most search engines list ten results on the first page. Very few potential customers
click on to view the second and third pages.
“Being listed 11 or beyond means that many people
may miss your website” says respected Search engine Columnist Danny Sullivan.
Consider this...
With 5 to 6 million new web pages being uploaded
every day, Google announced it will take them 300 years to index all the information!
Therefore, a Search Engine will only index the pages that have the correct information
in the right place and that they consider to be of high value to the searcher.
Did you know for instance that Google uses over 100 different criteria to rank
your site!
So Why is optimizing your website so important?
You MUST tell the Search Engines what your site is all about.
Search engines must be able to establish what your site is all about, fast.
If, for instance, the search engines cannot find out that your site is about
"stunt kites", they cannot give your website high rankings for that
key word.
How do Search Engines rank your web pages?
They use mathematical formulas to determine the rank of your site. These are
called "Ranking algorithms". These ranking
algorithms are the best kept secret of the search engine companies.
Some Important Factors...
When Search Engines software indexes your pages, it analyzes
the HTML code of your pages:
• Document Title
• Meta keywords tag
• Meta description tag
• Body text (Relevant content is the most important factor.)
• The first sentence of your body text
• Headlines
• Link popularity
• Your domain name itself e.g."www.stunt-kites.co.uk"
• H1 Headline text
• H2 Headline text
• Same site link text.
• Outbound Link Text
• Website page Names e.g. "www.stunt-kites.co.uk/flying-tips.html"
• Outbound Link Names. I.e. link to sites that have relevant names.
• <ALT> i.e. Alternative Image tags. Name your jpegs with care!
• HTML comment tags.
...and much, much more.
The right strategy is crucial to the success of your search engine optimization.
In the past it was enough to simply submit our sites to the search engines and
hope for the best. This might have worked, to a degree, a few years ago but
certainly not now.
Good search engine optimization takes some time but the results are well worth
the effort.
The process of optimizing your web pages is termed search engine optimization or (SEO)
The Key to High Search Engine Ranking is to do the right things in the right
order
1. Find the right keywords for your product
or service.
• Use keywords phrases that consist of two to four words
• Avoid very competitive keywords.
• Be specific
• Only use Keywords that are important to you
Checkout www.wordtracker.com
for example.
2. Optimize your web pages for these keywords so that they can get high search engine rankings.
3. Submit your web pages to all important search engines
and directories.
• Don't
skimp here - your time will be well invested.
4. Get links from other associated and relevant websites.
• Making
sure these links contain your keywords
5. Monitor the results at least once a month.
• Keep
an eye on how your site is performing against certain key phrases and you can
take action when necessary.
6. Update & add relevant content as necessary.
• Google
now archive & refer back to the history of their indexed sites. Therefore,
sites that are regularly updated stand a better chance of higher rankings. Try
blogs, news, bulletin-boards etc.
As search engine marketing is such a crucial way of generating high quality
traffic we will be focusing each one of the steps above in future issues to
give you more quality information on how to best action the above and lots of
useful resources.
Refer http://www.mklink.com/appendix_search_engine_optimisation.html
Convert more of your visitors to Sales/Leads:
The power
of online competitions
Again, here we will extol the merits of capturing email addresses of your visitors
in order that you can market to them very cheaply over and over again. The challenge
here is to offer something that your visitor will want in exchange for their
personal details.
As its Christmas, one topical idea would be to offer a free Christmas prize
draw that would appeal to your target market.
You will of course have to consider how much to give away in order to capture personal details. Some of the best leverage can be gained from offering a product or service that is free or relatively inexpensive to you, but has high perceived value to your marketplace.
For example, if
you sell photocopiers, then you could offer a year's service free of charge.
In this instance, then only real cost would be mostly time and any time spent
with a client is a sales opportunity.
Put the link to the data-capture page(i.e. the free prize draw page) in prominent
position(s) on your website and specifically in areas that your visitors will
notice an extra link or icon - otherwise it may get missed.
Lastly - have a look at your web-stats. It can be an invaluable source of information
seeing just how many people visit the free prize draw page, how many people
enter the draw and which pages they visited from.
For an Example - look at our free prize draw - Click here
Website
Management
Start planning today to ensure online success next
year.
The beginning of the year is a great time to use to evaluate the effectiveness
of your website and to look forward to where you plan to be 12 months from now.
Ask yourself the following 3 questions:
“Where is my online business now?”
“Where do I want it to 12 months from now?”
“How am I going to get it there?”
Step 1-
“Where is my online business now”
Some of the key performance indicators you could use establish were you are
today are as follows:
• Total number of unique visitors to the site
• Total leads produced
• Total sales produced
• Total value of sales
• Total investment made into marketing your site
• Cost of a lead or sale
• Size of your email database
Other indicators you should look at and record:
•Your
sites Google page rank (this will effect you Search engine ranking)
• Alexa toolbar ranking
• Number of links to your site
• Run a Search Engine Ranking report to see where the site is.
If you want to get really clever then Goggles analytics can provide a wealth
of information and compelling insight into just how visitors are using your
website.
Click here to see an example of the form we use to collate information for our sites
Once you’ve sat down and established the above information it will give you an overview of where your site is today move to step 2.
Step 2-“Where do I want it to 12 months from now?”
The next step is to set the goals based on the above criteria and then determine
what price either in time or money it is worth paying to achieve your sites
goals.
To give you an example of our online business one of next years goals is to
expand our email database from 2,200 to 10,000 small to medium sized businesses.
We know from the information collated over the last 12 months roughly what it
costs us to gain a new email address and the return we can expect in terms of
future marketing opportunities.
From here we can now go to………
Step 3- “How am I going to get it there”
This is the point at which most of us don’t apply enough time or thought
yet it’s this planning process that can mean the difference between online
failure or success especially in today’s frenetic marketplace.
The great thing about this time of year is the week between Christmas and New
Year take some time out and put together your plan of action ready for 2006.
Having established the goals for your online business, now create a step by
step action plan to attain these objectives and of course the price your prepared
to pay.
(Below is an example of a document we use to help us do this)
If you need any help or advice on this process please go to www.mklink.com or
give Paull or Mike a call
on 01454 613888/852414. Why not
email us a question or request the documents discussed to mklink.com
We hope this information has been useful and we look forward to keeping you
all up to date with our online experiences throughout 2006.
Here’s to a fantastic online 2006
Best wishes & HAPPY CHRISTMAS
The mkLINK team
©mkLINK Ltd. - 01454 852414