How do I make myself visible?

[Rudi]

FrontPage 2003

[Chatmaster]

FrontPage 2003 is good, although it still has issues with dirty and badly structured HTML it is much better than it's predecessors. Rudi I am truly sorry I haven't added more effort to your request yet. But I have had a pretty busy day. I am still working atm, but will give you some proper pointers a little later when I am done with my current crisis.

[Rudi]

Please do not prioritize my requests. This is an open forum and I am already blown away by the pointers and advice I have recieved.

I will certainly appreciate any more tips and ideas, but please Roelof...at a time that is convenient and suitable for you.

Many tx

Rudi

[Chatmaster]

Just a final question for when I start. Do you have ANY budget available for marketing?

[Chatmaster]

Rudi before I start, please understand that I am completely honest with you and rather tell you what you need to hear, it might not be what you want to hear though…

It is very important that you understand that internet marketing consist out of everything, from the site design to the actual marketing methods. You cannot do one without the other! You have ultimately build an online salesman. You didn’t put a brochure or information pamphlet live, you actually designed a salesman that must be able to sell to all the visitors that it meets.

That being said here goes…

First of all lets define your current situation.

You have been tasked to obtain exposure for your company’s website. As a webmaster it means that you have a fair amount of restrictions to deal with. You probably cannot write content for your site or publish articles on the web and therefore you need cooperation from the other role players within the company. You cannot go onto forums and contribute because you are a webmaster and not necessarily knowledgeable in the subject.

A note before I take you through the steps is to ensure that the website address is clearly visible on all company stationary and promotional material.

Step 1

Get some kind of commitment from the role players within your company e.g. marketing department, public relations department, trainers and other people that can assist you in obtaining content and an understanding of the product. This is important even if you are only the webmaster because you have to ensure that your website is designed correctly for the purpose it serves.

Step 2

Do keyword research. Get some help here from people that understand the product or service to contribute. It I important to note that the main objective will be to establish a marketing strategy for your website rather than doing keyword research only for SEO purposes.
Keyword research is done in 3 steps.
· You ask the knowledgeable people in the company to provide you with a list of 10-20 keywords most descriptive of your product.
· You go to Dictionary.com and get alternatives for these keywords.
· You go to Thesaurus to get antonyms and synonyms of these same keywords.
At the end of the day you should have at least a hundred keywords available to you. The sole purpose of these keywords is to determine your target market. Nothing else just that! Now you can start planning your marketing strategy!

Remember! Your site is currently a little spot in the middle of nowhere. Unlike a conventional shop or office it is not next to a busy highway or road. It doesn’t have cars or pedestrians walking past. It has no roads to it and it certainly doesn’t have ANY feet walking past the shop to see the front window and create interest enough to make people have a closer look. (BTW, that is why your home page should go, it is truly very bad for conversions, believe me it must go)

So your main objective will now be to create roads to your site from other sites within the same theme. Just picture how you are going to build these roads and how the traffic will start flowing

As with any road in normal life, the more in roads you have the more traffic it will generate. Just imagine having highways, hundreds of them running past your website! That must give your site traffic.

Step 3

Now place your keywords in order of preference, in other words, the most important ones first and the least important last.

Step 4

Use Google.com and Google.co.za local to find other sites that are ranking for these keywords. Now these sites you will have to list in an excel sheet where you will categorize them into the following categories. These words will be added to the single keyword phrases in your list to find resources where you can create some roads (links) to your site.
· Communities
· Articles
· Social media
· News
· Press releases
· Portals
· Directories
· Classifieds
· Calendars

These categories will have sub sections that you will tick or indicate in some way
· Free listings
· Paid listings
· Reciprocal
· Ranking above 20

First lets make sure you understand the categories
Communities
These are normally forums and can even be blogs groups where there are several contributors to the same blog.
Articles
These are sites where you can publish articles. A site like Articlecity for example
Social Media
These also include blogs, social sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, Technorati, Squidoo, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Flickr, Furl, MySpace and Yahoo! Answers.
News
These would be sites where you will be allowed to publish news relating to your company. News can be defined as almost anything. Having 5 people attend a training session is ok but having a record of 10 people attending is news. If the CEO bumped his car, it is an accident, but having a new graphics designer appointed is news, I think you get my point
Press releases
Very similar to News but you will have to search it separately when you are trying to find these sites.
Portals
These are huge sites, normally covering all topics related to your business, it also normally have several sections like forums, blogs, news sections blah, blah, blah, it is a big site
Directories
This does not include search engines. It will be sites like Ananzi and Dmoz where a directory o sites related to your industry is located.
Classified ads
Sites that allows you to ad classified ads for free.
Calendars
Sites that allows you to list events, like this site, Bizcommunity etc.

Now you have several marketing avenues to work with.

[Chatmaster]

Step 5

This is probably the most important step of all. It is ensuring that your site design is fundamentally done right! This means that on page SEO factors are done right and that keyword research is applied to your site structure and site layout. It is to ensure that in terms of site layout the maximum conversion rate is obtained and that the home page indicates the most possible information relating to what the user can expect when hitting the site. In other words usability.

Now lets look at your site from a critical point of view.

SEO onpage factors for www.maxima-training.com

Page Titles
Page titles like Welcome and Home needs to be fixed.

When looking at your site layout you need to utilize your keyword research and plan it before you continue any further. I will use a real estate site layout as an example.
Lets say I have a real estate portal site. My main keyword is real estate. Therefore my homepage title will be “Real Estate – my company name”
My following keywords that I will target will be related to Real Estate and will form the first level of depth of my site. For example, Real estate news, Residential Property, Farms, Empty stands, Business etc.

The second level (depth) of the site will be pages located under their different categories. Eg Residential Property will have the following pages under it. Property in Gauteng, Property in Limpopo, Property in Mpumalanga etc.

The third level for Gauteng will be, Property in Johannesburg, Property in Pretoria, Property in Heidelberg etc.
And so forth. I think you get the idea. Now these keywords will be your page title. Unless you wish to rank for welcome and home

Meta tags
Meta tags are only used by directories like Ananzi.

The Meta tags should be unique for every single page in the site. Currently they do not exist and I suggest that you fix that ASAP.

Keyword meta tag only contains keywords that are actually present on the page. Do not put other keywords in there. If you have only 4 or 5 keywords in the keyword meta tag that is fine. The same rule applies to the description tag except that it will probably only contain the main keyword as is in your page title.

NOTE: Never target more than one keyword phrase per page! This also goes for the content of each page. If need to target another keyword, create a new page!

General
Remove all onpage style sheets and link to them externally. The same goes for JavaScript.

Remove all spaces from your URL’s and replace the spaces with Hyphens. These links will be read or published as dead links by some directories and search engines.

Use H1-H5 for page headers and avoid using class to assign specific styles. You can modify H tags just as easily in the style sheets but it will tell the spider this is a header and this is what the page is all about.

Use <Strong> or H2-5 for sub sections of your content.

Ensure that you have a robots.txt file in your root. Even it doesn’t exclude anything, it ensure that your site stats shows real indexing errors and not a SE looking for the file not finding it. The same goes for a favicon.ico

Utilize contextual links from inside your site context to link to relevant external and internal pages.

There are more stuff here, but lets just focus on the basics first

Conversion strategies and usability

Enough said about your home page?

Lets look at the current page saying home in the page title.
* Ask yourself what is the conversion indicator. Is it a registration of some sorts, perhaps it is a booking? What would you define as a conversion

* Now look at a standard website’s hotspots.
- They normally run from under your page header top to bottom in a zig zag formation from left to right. So your most valuable information that will lead to a conversion milestone must be located at the top left under the page header.
- Your site’s page header is located in the middle which will cause confusion to the visitor. This would have been fine but you have a search that is very prominent on the left and a contact us which is very prominent on the right.
- Prominence of areas of your site is also very confusing. Almost everything is equally prominent meaning that the visitor is not guided specifically to conversion milestones. Although this is bad for conversions it is extremely bad for the visitor, who immediately feels overwhelmed by everything being equally important and there are so many of them, that he will choose to leave. I am sure that your site analytics tool will confirm this.
- Main navigation is located at the far top, this is particularly bad as it has major usability issues especially with the current design of the site. The visitors normally expect a main navigation menu underneath the page header and the contact us link at the far right corner.
- Left navigation menu is cramped and it seems like all the links are in bold. This plays a major role in terms of emphasizing conversion factors on the site. Make it softer and les intimidating.
- Avoid using bullets for the navigation. Bullets should exclusively be used to highlight conversion factors within content. Users normally scan through a page and would read bulleted lists with more attention. They should be short and act as the salesman would act in a shop. Highlighting sales pitches.
- The main content area of every page is the center part. Especially on a home page. This should summarize the main sales points to the visitor. Remember a visitor scans through a website, they do NOT read everything.
- Internal pages are loosing the framework of the site, this is particularly bad. A site cannot continuously change its appearance as the user needs to quickly be able to find his way. You will definitely loose your visitors after the second click, guaranteed.
- In terms of your refer a friend functionality, I highly recommend you place that up higher and to the right side of the page. Hiding it at the bottom right is disempowering it completely.



I think this is enough for now, I really do not want to make it tougher on you.

I would love to give you more information and there is a lot more that you can easily do, but I seriously recommend that you look at the above first.

In the mean time if it is at all possible also get approval from your boss to purchase article submission software and news and press release software. I also recommend that you submit your website to directories as soon as you have fixed your site. I seriously doubt it that your site will be excepted into Dmoz or similar human edited directories the way it is designed atm, so rather wait before you submit to them, only until you have fixed the issues I pointed out.

[Dave A]

Absolutely gobsmacked! Roelof - you are the master - we're not worthy!

[IanF]

Roelof
I echo Dave's comments. How much do you charge to analyse a website and give a report.

[Chatmaster]

Ian, my normal rate is R450/hour. However I am more than willing to do it for TFSA members at R250/hour. The amount of time taken to do an analysis however can be in the region of 30+ hours. All sites and market segments are different and it also depends on the size of the site and the amount of competition you have.

I am not cheap to be honest but I am certainly not going to do something like this, half heartedly, I do it proper and then you know exactly where you stand and what to do to improve your Internet marketing. I also check for issues in terms of your hosting and server all the way to the retention of your customers. I also analyze your competitors to see what they are up to, to measure exactly how much money and effort you should put into kicking dust in their eyes. Although the report you will receive will only contain information that you need to focus on and not all the stuff I gathered.

Part of my service will also include some suggestions on free or low cost conventional marketing techniques that you can use if I see some opportunities there.

If you take in account that you pay lets say 12k for your website to be designed, my services comes in relatively cheap I think!

[Chatmaster]

For some reason my earlier post dissappeared

Dave and Ian, thank you for the compliments. I am in good company though and surrounded by people I learn from everyday. Me being a master? I am not sure how to define a master. There are many people I look up to in this country that I know is a lot better than me, so please do not think I am special! Thanks again you guys have no idea how much this means to me!