Tag Archives: optimizing

How To Market eCommerce Web Sites

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web marketing and pr marketing strategiesAfter your company has developed an eCommerce web site, you now need to attract people. Not an easy task. You probably learned the hard way, the web company you contracted doesn’t do optimizing, or web marketing. And you spent all the budget to get a great looking site. Or worse yet, you hired what you thought was a pr marketing strategy agency to do the web marketing and that turned out to be a failure. A lot of traffic, but no conversions to sales isn’t what you need.

So what do you do now? First you need to understand what web marketing and pr marketing strategies are all about.

Let’s define web traffic. This is the amount of visitors to your web site and the pages they visited. It also refers to the amount of data that visitor received from your site. You need to make sure you get reports to review the specific pages visitors viewed and how long they visited each page.

Many pr clients and web marketers get confused with “hits” and “visits”. Hits are those times people will view your site, but may move on quickly because they came upon your site by accident, or were surfing and found the site, but did not stay. This is also how you are charged when you “buy keywords” from Google, or Yahoo. They don’t care if the person clicked on your ad and didn’t buy or stay. They got paid because of the “click rate”. Don’t misunderstand these types of visitors.

Learn how to measure the visitors. For example, a) the number of page views for each visitor, b) duration of the visit, c) duration of page viewed, d) most viewed pages by the visitors and e) the source of links that lead them to your site.

Develop a solid pr marketing strategy for you eCommerce site. Here are a few tips to improve your web traffic. It should include links to and from your web site. Create promotional programs as well. Establish a newsletter for visitors to register. This can build a database of potential customers.

If you need help with any of these areas, of want to discuss your eCommerce needs, give us a call. We’re ready to help your company grow.

Web Site Marketing Lesson #12

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Publicity is Everywhere series

As we enter the end of this year, I want to make sure that many of you are taking advantage of the web site your company, or pr client has. If you haven’t checked your site lately, within the past 6 weeks, then it’s time to take another look.Web Marketing and page ranking

This time you need to look at where your site is ranked. How is it positioned with the search engines? Does the site appear when you type the different keywords…near the top, or way down past the 100 other companies listed? Do you even show up? How many layers of keywords do you need to type before your company appears?

If your site is not getting high rankings, don’t call your pr agency, or the IT department, or the web designer. The search engines are again re-structuring how they rank and search a site. It’s time to get smarter on how you market your pr client’s web site.

That is why I continually recommend pr clients and web-marketing companies to re-visit their web sites at least every 6 to 8 weeks and do updates to re-fresh the site. Many times this re-fresh will require some additional optimizing to meet the new demands set upon sites by the SEO’s. It is a good idea to take advantage of checking your pressroom, contact info and make sure your products and services are current.

If you want us to check how valid your links are, how valid your site is with the search engines, just give us a call. The service is FREE! Yes, free. No strings attached. It is our holiday gift to you.

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How Can Optimizing Be Bad?

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Know what you are doing first

optimizing web sitesEveryone who builds a web site claims to know optimizing. The same is true about those small startups saying they can get you listed at the top of SE’s (Search Engines). How is this relating to publicity? Because “Publicity is Everywhere!” If you direct the media to your site, but they forget the URL, they probably will type specific keywords in the SE to locate the web site.

Ok, first let me say not all these companies are out to make a fast buck. But it appears that most of them are selling software or just doing a blast listing to all the SE’s out there. How can these really help? Well, you won’t see any progress for weeks, maybe a couple of months at best. That’s how they get your money and then you just shake off that bad experience when nothing happens and your still listed 348 on Google, or Yahoo.

Web Site Optimization is more than placing a bunch of keywords into the HTML of your site. It isn’t the key phrase either. Because if you do this incorrectly, the search engines will pass you by!

The keywords you selected…how did you find them? If these are the most popular, then you are going to get zero traffic for a long time. Knowing which are the best keywords and what people are using is completely different. Plus, using multiple words can be even more productive and generate traffic. Ok, stop for a moment. Is traffic what you want? I hope not. Because I can get you thousands of people a month easily, but they won’t be qualified to purchase your products or services.

Qualified buyers are what you need. The number of visitors is important, if they are qualified. Keep that in perspective. We can give you the optimization to get listed at the top of Google, Yahoo and MSN among other search engines.

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Web Marketing and Publicity

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The do’s and don’ts

optimizing for publicityThe blog I wrote on "Publicity is your web site" is one of several parts to taking advantage of a web site as another pr tool.

An overstated word is "optimizing". Since I cannot think of a better word to describe this process, let’s start with these steps:

  • Optimize each page

Pr clients and businesses do not realize it, but some web marketing companies only optimize the Home Page and maybe one other page. You need to do all the pages.

  • Optimize your Page Titles and Content

In addition, look for keywords that are relevant to your company and industry. For example in the PressRoom page use words that are in the press releases or articles.

  • Create inbound links and label your images

This is a great place to have links to published press releases or articles about the company. Or place links to service organizations in your industry.

  • Your Website needs to be spider friendly

Search engines use spiders to read web sites. If the site contains flash, you need to address this in the html codes and modify them so spiders can see the code.

  • Keep the site fresh

Just like sending out new press releases, you need to keep the content fresh in the text (body). Every quarter have the content be updated, but don’t use a string of keywords, or phrases or hidden text, that will only make the spiders angry and get you on the "bad" list.

Having a good web site that can be found is good publicity. Why? Because when the editors, reporters or other media look at your site it will be easy for them to find you and the products you offer. Keep reminding yourself that "Publicity Is Everywhere".

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Branding Through Search Engines

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Build your image with SEO’s


Traditional branding is something a company, a pr client or advertising agency will do that may include a corporate identity program, collateral materials, and possibly purchasing media.
The media can be print (newspapers, magazines) or broadcast such as radio or TV.

Branding is the building of a name, a product or the overall company’s image. It is the consistent use of the brand in all the different areas of communication. As clients and customers become familiar with the brand, it makes them become loyal to that brand. Therefore, it takes time to build this loyalty among customers and clients.

With Search Branding, we see a new era of marketing and how we use the branding tools. Clients and potential customers now use search engines to seek the information about a product. When you optimize your site correctly, and have a solid web marketing campaign, that should include a good blog site, you will begin to establish a branded image. The buy-cycle is different on search engines than traditional branding, because people now can collect the information they want to make a buying decision sooner. That means you need to get your company listed in several areas so the potential customer feels good about your brand when making the decision to buy.

When people see your brand two, three and four times when searching, they become familiar with the brand making them more loyal to it. So as you can see, by using search engines as Google, Ask.com, Yahoo and many of the other specialty engines, it can make your brand a winner.

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Getting Listed With Search Engines

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Publicity is everywhere, even on the net

Just about every traditional (brick and mortar) company has a web site. Beyond the fact that you need to have a web site today to be recognized as a real company doing business, clients and customers want the ability to gather information or place orders via the web.

With that said, we need to now see how publicity coupled with marketing can make good things happen.

Web sites are only as good as the marketing that supports it. Just because you have a site doesn’t mean it will be picked up and listed at the top with the major search engines. It requires strategic planning and implementation to make things happen.

To begin, you need to have the site optimized. That’s an overused word, but it still needs to be said. This alone is not enough. The SEO’s are battling again for power and that means more challenging times for web masters and programmers. You now need to include a plan that includes “back end marketing”. This can be a series of things like a blog site, eNewsletters, and above all a strong publicity plan.

Yes, publicity is a major element in getting listed higher. There are two methods used to see a sites value. Page Ranking and Site Listing. Page Ranking shows how you are rated (ranked) on search engines, like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Alta Vista to name a few. It is based on a scale of 10. Sites with anything in the 5+ ranking is excellent. Even with a 3 you are doing fine. Remember, that there are over a billion pages, and several hundred million sites. Even in any vertical market, there are at least several hundred thousand sites.

Listings are where you are positioned on that search engine. Everyone wants to be on the first page of a listing, and not further than the third page. But again, with hundreds of thousands of sites, not everyone can be on top.

Once you get there, you need to be more aggressive with press releases, keywords added and updated, keep daily blogs going just to maintain a solid position (listing) with the engines. No guarantees can exist. The only way to stay near or at the top is to have an on-going plan.

A couple of our clients are getting their time in the spotlight. Partition Specialties now has a solid listing using several keywords such as modernfold, tate access floors and skyfold. They are listed with the various SE’s in either a #5 or #12 position with Google and Yahoo, MSN, etc. That’s out of 1,500,000 other web sites in a specialized industry. We are using several marketing tools with the publicity to maintain this.

Foundations Financial in only 6 weeks got a high PageRanking with Google of #3. We are using the blog site and a lot of publicity releases, TV interviews and links on the site to gain this positive momentum. Keeping this will be an on-going battle that we plan to win. Within a few more weeks, they will enjoy the high listings as many of our other clients do.

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