Roy Hunter

August 17, 2009

Florida Marketing Consultants

There are a lot of different types of web page layouts, as many as you can creatively imagine, but what are the most effective for driving conversions and being found on the internet?

I think if you ask 30 different people you will get 30 different answers.

I prefer a segmentation design approach. What is a segmentation approach you ask?

Simple.

Most businesses today are doing more than one thing. Take a piece of paper and write down all the things your business does and break them down by groups. Lets use something difficult for an example, a law firm.

Your typical law firm website will have one landing page, it is the “home” page for the site that all the traffic is driven to. This page will have information on the partners, and the scope of the services, perhaps a contact form, and that is pretty much about it.

Informative? Yes. Effective? No. What has been created by this type of page is another drop in the bucket of all the other web pages on the internet for lawyers. Makes it a little hard to compete and optimize a page for a lawyer who is really, just another lawyer.

A much more effective approach to web design and search engine optimization is segmentation of a business. Our law firm example specializes in four different fields, personal injury, divorce, litigation, and criminal defense.

Create a page for each service as if it was the only page you are going to create and optimize that page for that segment. Correlate all the pages together with one common header and footer and make those four pages your theoretical individual home page. Your default home page, the page that is reached when someone enters your URL into the address bar, should only be what I call a traffic control page. It should only be a quick introduction or flash presentation that will allow the viewer to find the other segments or categories of your business.

You say: “That is how most pages are built”, it’s not. The overall focus should be having your category pages the pages that are found in search results, not your default home page. Rather than focus your optimization efforts on a single home page, focus your efforts equally for each segment, or category page.

I have also had the experience with using separate domain names for separate categories, each page was an individual domain, the header and footer of each page was identical, the pages all linked together through that header, and if you did not pay attention to the address bar, you would swear you were on the same website. This also proved highly effective, especially when using keyword domain names.

These design considerations can prove to be very highly effective ways to optimize your business for search results. If I am searching for a divorce attorney, the page that has been optimized the best for that search term will be the page at the forefront of the search results and then all the “law firm” pages that deal with divorce and everything else will follow.

Basically, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Think of creative ways to be found on the Internet. There is a lot of competition; you need to be smarter and more creative than the rest to get the leads and sales your business needs to be profitable.

If you would like to see an example of a highly effective segmented home page, please follow the link to our website.

Florida Marketing Consultants

While you are there stop by our new marketing forum. We have a board specifically for business listings. Feel free to drop off your virtual business card there. You will get a bit of free advertising and create a one way link to your website to help with your SEO, the listing is completely free and it will remain there for the life of the forum.

Roy Hunter

www.MyMarketingCompany.com

I have written a few articles about the specifics of SEO techniques but I still get a lot of emails from people asking me what all the things are they can do to get their Internet website  to rank higher in search results and become a more effective marketing tool, so I created this list of “tips” to be a guide for someone taking a hands on approach to optimizing and promoting their website.

I would suggest you “grade” your site before you begin and try these tips, you can follow your progress toward improvement of your sites SEO by using the web site grading tool found at websitegrader.com.

Assuming of course you have created a good website with useful information and unique content, these are your next steps.

1.  Verify the code in your page using the W3c validation tool and fix the errors.

If a crawler can not easily navigate through your site due to errors in the code you could have some problems. A few errors are probably OK, but if you have 10 or more, you are probably asking for trouble. W3c also has a link checking tool so while you are there, verify your internal links to make sure everything functions properly. A broken link will stop a search engine crawler in its tracks and return an error to the search engine.

2.  Optimize your keywords for the most popular keyword terms if you feel you can compete, if not, optimize for the “mid level” keywords or the ones used some of the time by searchers looking for your goods and services.

Keywords are very important, these are the search terms that people are going to use to find you. Optimize your keywords in your title, H1 and H2 tags and have a variant or two mentioned in your first paragraph as well as the “meta title” and “meta description” in the HTML code. The “mid level” terms will be the middle-ranked keywords using the Google keyword tool. If your main keywords are very competitive, it is better to be seen by some, then not seen at all. You can use an Adwords campaign to be seen in the difficult keyword categories.

3.  Create a blog so you have something to submit to Digg, Blog Catalog, Technorati, EzineArticles, etc. Wordpress is best for the platform, make sure to use the SEO plugin for Wordpress and fill out all the SEO options for an article. (tags, keywords, descriptions, etc.)

Blogs are a good way to be found. The more sites you submit to the better your chances are that you are going to be found and get your site linked to. The more quality links you can create, the better.

4. Submit a sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and Bing (search “sitemap generator” for a free online tool that will create one for you)

With new websites, submitting a sitemap to the search engines helps to expedite the indexing process. Rather than just submitting a site, show the search engines your sites structure.

5.  Write another article for your blog.

The more content you create, the better your chances are of getting linked to.

6.  Participate in forums where the links in the posts have been tagged “index” in the metadata of the forum page.  Post comments and questions and make sure you include links to your website so people and search engines can see you outside your web page. Your posts will help to create vital links to your website which will help with your page rank value over time.

7.  Write another article for your blog

The more content you create, the better your chances are of getting linked to.

8.  Build a Squidoo lens for your website

Squidoo is a neat little site for creating a mini web page and this also helps your website get linked to.

9.  Advertise your business in local magazines.

Most local magazines will also publish links to their advertisers websites on their own page. Not only is the local publicity good, you also get a link the search engines live to see, a one way link from a quality site.

10.  Submit your website to the DMOZ directory.

Though the quality of the DMOZ directory has gone down hill a bit as it is maintained by volunteers, it is free to submit to and if you get in the directory, it certainly will not hurt. Others to consider are:  JoAnt, AboutUs.org, and the Yahoo directory.

11.  Comment on some blog articles related to your business.

Go where your target market hangs out and you will be seen. Don’t forget to hyperlink your name to your website. Don’t just post an http link, use your company name and hyperlink your name to your website. Your company name will give some relevance to the link, create brand awareness, and Google will find the link by the hyperlink you created with your business name.

12.  Get all your friends to bookmark your site in Google Bookmarks and in Yahoo’s Delicious, at least 20 of them.

But make sure you tell them to tag the bookmark with a keyword. For example if you have a jewelry store tell them to tag the bookmark with the word jewelry. This will help other bookmark searchers find you and if you get enough bookmarks it is possible to end up on the popular bookmarks page and this will drive more traffic to your site.

13.  Promote your website on Twitter and Facebook.

Try to get people that run businesses similar to yours to follow you. Tweet your URL on Friday as that is the day most people follow their tweets. It is possible to get a good link this way. Facebook has groups that will be made up of people in your target market.

14.  Write another article for your blog

The more content you create, the better your chances are of getting linked to.

15.  Make sure you have updated all your accounts in Technorati, Digg, Blog Catalog, and EzineArticles

Pretty self explanatory, you need to keep your sites updated for the most impact.

16.  Make some more comments in forums.

Again, hang out where your target market does. It is possible to get some good links this way.

17.  Write another article for your blog

The more content you create, the better your chances are of getting linked to.

18.  Pay PR web for a press release

One of the good things with PRweb is your news release is guaranteed to be shown in yahoo news. A good chance for someone in your market to find you. If you are curious how good your press release is, there is a handy tool located at:  Press Release Grader it will give you some tips on creating a good press release for your business.

19.  Make sure you get a listing on the Yellowpages or Superpages website.

These sites place high in search results so it makes it easier for your customers to find you. It is free to submit your business, though I would opt to spring for their basic package. You can find them here: Superpages and Yellowpages

20.  Pay Yahoo to be listed in their directory

Yahoo is being purchased by Microsoft so it is anyone’s guess what will happen to the directory, for the time being a listing in the Yahoo directory gets you in the yahoo search results. At $299 it is a little pricey but it will get you seen and create another link to your website.

21.  Build a web page on MerchantCircle

I think this is one of the best things a new company can do to be found at the top of the search results. Keep focus on optimizing the keywords in your MerchantCirle site as this is what will determine where your MC listing will be found in search results. I would not invest in their Pay-Per-Click advertising, 80% of the money you pay will go to promoting the MerchantCircle website, not yours. Send connection invitations to the local businesses in your area, you will be able to send coupons to the businesses that accept you invitation.

22.  Write another article for your blog

The more content you create, the better your chances are of getting linked to.

23.  Submit your website to the ZoomInfo  directory.

24. Did I mention you need to write another article for your blog?

25. Include your domain name in any advertising you do. Also, if your domain name is hard to remember, this will hurt you in the long run, a good domain that is easy to remember can be much easier to brand and it also will have some SEO benefit. For example my company domain; www.MyMarketingCompany.com, is much easier for a business owner to remember than the name my company.

A great domain name can become a big part of your website and company “brand awareness”, a business owner that can remember your website domain name will contact you first when they require your goods and services.

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Different businesses will have different SEO and marketing requirements, this list of tips will be a good place to start and steer your business in the right direction.

One thing so many business owners forget, in order for your website to be an effective marketing tool, you need to market your website. Focus on getting as many people as you can to see your website, if they like it, they will link to it. The more links to your website you have, the higher your website will place in search results.

If you are looking for a new forum to participate that is new which is a good place for you to be the topic creator rather than a reply poster, you can find it here:  Free Marketing Forum with “follow links”

I created this tool specifically to help people just like you so please take advantage of it, it was a lot of work!

If you are looking for links to business development information (probably the biggest directory of its kind) you can find it here: Business Development Directory

It is also something our company created to help you as a business owner.

You can start your SEO process this very second by posting a comment to this blog. Looking for other articles you can reply to that relate to to this subject? You can find them here: Florida Marketing Consultants Blog

So go ahead, what are you waiting for! Promote your website!