Website Marketing Strategy – Prep the Destination Page

When working with an online marketing firm, you’ll hear a lot about landing pages.  Why aren’t they just called website pages?

We call them landing pages because it’s a more definitive way to convey the purpose. Someone may land on the page you told him to visit.  Maybe you can secure a link from another website and point it to a particular page.  Maybe you should buy some ads through Google and designate a page that you hope is persuasive enough to generate a lead or a sale.

It’s unlikely that any page on a website will be as compelling as the next.  Sure, you can add your phone number on every page.  Or, sometimes you may see a response form throughout the website.

But a landing page in the strictest sense has a very limited role.  Its job, if designed well, is to convince someone to do something.  Many companies make the mistake of designing a website and then driving traffic to a page without adapting the page to achieve established objectives.  In other words, the page should be designed to accomplish a very specific goal.  In some cases, you may not even want the navigation to appear.  If you just bought an ad on Google and someone clicks to a page, maybe he should be making a phone call for filling out a form based on that page information.  He shouldn’t have to wander around a website to make a decision.

Some executives I’ve spoken with seem concerned that they will pay for clicks and connect with searchers through the page only to have many of the new visitors abandon the page and move on.  It seems like a waste of money to them.  The truth is, if you get 100 visitors to a page, and 10 of them do something, that’s pretty successful. What’s your website marketing strategy?

CMS Tips from a Web Site Marketing Company

You have to wonder about those Content Management Systems.

In Aisle #8 of my series, “SEO Is NOT a candy Store” I look at major issues you can encounter with a CMS.

CMS technology can be a delight to any web site developer.  And why not?  It sure makes it easier to start and manage a website.  But how likely is it that creating and a website is the only objective as a business tries to market on the Internet?  Several other factors should not be neglected.  A key one is search engine optimization.

People implement a CMS and they are hurt by their own ignorance.  You might think a CMS will help you rank with search engines (it can), but in reality they can actually hurt you.  If you don’t want a CMS  to work against you, learn what you’re going to play went before you get too involved.

For example search engines may not be able to find all of your pages because of the way that the CMS works.  In other words, you may be hurting your leads or sales.

As a web site marketing company, I recommend that you look at companies that are using a CMS and find out how well they do on search engines.  You could go to Google, for example and type site:www.nameofthewebsite.com.  You will be able to see many of the pages that are indexed on google.  Does it look like decent pages have been captured by the world’s most popular search engine?

A downside to using a CMS is that it’s often not setup for search engine optimization.  For example, in the best scenario, you would want independence between the page title, the page header and the navigation.

I’ve seen systems with the same words in the navigation also appear in the header and in the page title.  That’s ridiculous.  The keyword you target in the title often is similar but not necessarily identical to the page header.  And you can’t fit all keywords into the navigation.  Take a look at the CMS that you’re considering and see how flexible it is for your needs.  Ask the right questions.

Get more website development tips.

Web SEO Tools – Tips that Matter

I put together a handy list of 13 activities that can ruin any SEO program.

Check out the piece at Web Pro News called “13 Ways to Sabotage Your SEO Opportunities.”

Of course, there is always the big one – ignoring SEO during a website development project. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

But there are a dozen other topics as well. There are lots of Web SEO tools available on the Internet. The article may not be a calculator or a subscription service, but it has more than food for thought.

At times I’m a little blunt, a little unorthodox. That’s my style. More and more, I just want to tell things like they are. One of the 13 is about business owners. If a web site has failings, if the business kind of messed up, maybe it’s time to admit the error in judgment and dig team (financially) to remedy the situation.

Sure, buy or try your standard set of web SEO tools, but it also helps to think about strategy as well. It helps to make sound business decisions. That’s not always about whether to do SEO at all. It’s a matter of who know how to do it in-house, who can be trained (and what confidence you have that they know what they’re doing), whether to go with an outside consultant, etc.

SEO and Usability – Friends, Not Foes

Complaints about SEO being opposed to good web design will never cease. Paul Boag of Boagworld – who speaks a great deal on web design – reveals his heart in a new piece, “Why I Don’t Get SEO.” He runs through the usual concerns about SEO ruining the user experience and how it’s a marketing exercise with no guarantees.

SEO works because people still use search engines to find info. Once they get to a website – if it wasn’t poorly designed in the first place – they can become propsects. SEO has challenging aspects, but the idea is pretty simple. SEO as a marketing specialty connects sellers with buyers.

Long ago I figured SEO would be an old practice once people learned about websites from their friends. And, while there are many ways people can find websites, SEO is here to stay as long as people continue to search for information. Judging by the lack of SEO I encounter, it looks like SEO has a bright future.