DIGITAL MEDIA

Hello website owner. You’ve just spent a lot of time and money developing or redesigning your website. It’s sleek, simple to use, has shiny buttons, and it even has a great call to action on the front page.

Fast forward two weeks, three even. Your web developer will receive a call from you. “Hi John, I was just doing a search for (insert your product/service here) and having a look through our statistics. How come I’m not ranked on the first page in Google? Why don’t I have many hits to my website?”

Your web developer will close his eyes, purse his lips and shake his head, “Hi Rebecca, as mentioned during the development process, we need to work on search engine optimisation and marketing the site before and after it goes live. Would you like to make an appointment so we can talk about what this entails?”. How you handle the rest of this phone call will be telling for the future of your website. Let’s have a look at some elements that drive traffic to your site.

Titles tags and meta keywords. By definition the title tags are the words that appear at the very top of your browser (in the blue bar) and they tell the search engine what the page is all about. Meta keywords and descriptions further aid the search engine by informing them what they can expect to find on your website. The descriptions are how (organically) the search engines place a relevancy rating on your page. Some SEO experts believe that the search engines don’t place importance on these areas as much as they used to while others hold their hand to their heart and swear by its effectiveness. Whichever way your developer swings, I think that not having them there is the biggest travesty of all. Make the title tags and meta keywords easy to read and don’t cram the title bar with too many phrases. It’s called keyword spamming and your site will get knocked down some notches or removed altogether from the listings.

Content is king. The search engines love the stuff and go to great lengths to seek out quality content. Ensure you have enough of it, change it frequently and make certain that it’s written by people who know what they’re talking about. If you don’t change your content there will be a time when the search engine bots decide it’s not worth their while to come back often. New content, while time consuming and expensive, will keep your site above the rest.

Inbound links. You need other sites to point at you and say, “Go to Rebecca’s fashion store, she sells cool stuff”. Make sure that these links are from trusted and relevant sites that have a high page rank (PR 4+). Forums, blogs and select link directory websites (like DMOZ) are very good referrers of traffic and will earn you a higher ranking. I would recommend that you stay away from link farms as the search engines liken their tactics to match-fixing. On the surface it all seems good but a few corrupt players could let the whole team down.

Site maps. The search engines have finally agreed on one standard. They accept a common format (aka XML site maps) so that ‘them spider things’ can navigate your site, figure out its structure and index it accordingly. It’s an easier and quicker way for them to go about doing their business with your site listing benefitting.

Blogs. This could be the new, expressive you. Used by some to LOL, ROFL and post pictures of their cats, the blogging revolution has swept the corporate world too. Used correctly, it’s a place to speak openly about issues (good and bad) concerning the company, let customers post their comments and allows you to develop an online community base hungrily awaiting your latest post received by their RSS enabled browsers. Topical (and controversial) subject matter will fuel debate and have your articles linked to by citizens of the blogosphere in no time at all. Evaluate whether a blog is something that you need and don’t get one just because all your friends are doing it.

Newsletters. Repeat after me, “I have to be top of mind”. Users can have only one homepage on their browsers and chances are it’s either Google or their company’s website. They won’t just visit you out of some bizarre compulsion. It’s in your best interest to remind them that you exist so don’t be the quiet kid in the class and put your hand up once in a while. Newsletters are cost effective, immediate and a measurable means of generating new leads and reminding current customers that you have something new to offer. Moreover it’s relevant information that has been requested (subscribed to) by the recipient. Send these out regularly and you’ll enjoy a return on your investment.

Pay per click (PPC) advertising. Get this. Get it now. You need to look into this today. Pay per click advertising is the quickest way to get you to the hallowed front page of the search results. It’s a win-win situation and you can pull out of the running whenever you want. With PPC advertising, you only pay when a user actively seeks out your service or product. You pay nothing for ads that don’t work, and can budget exactly how much you’re willing to pay for ads that do. PPC advertising is however, a science and in a way, an art. So leave it to the artists (known as Google AdWords Professionals or Yahoo! Ambassadors) to get their masterpieces right. When you’re busy with normal work affairs the last thing you want to do is figure out how to reduce your CPC while keeping the CTR level high on the fifth ad group in your second content network targeted campaign.

Surveys. You think you’re so fine ... but your customers may not. And you’ll never know if you don’t ask. Is there some room for improvement? The answer is almost always yes. Be it in your sales, business process, delivery or after-sales support. The quickest way to get feedback is to ask a few direct questions to existing customers. Entice them with a free gift for the best answers. You’ll be surprised how many are happy to help you become better at what you do. And when you place that free iPod in their mailbox for the effort, they’ll thank you forever.

Rich media. Start thinking about utilising videos, images and audio in a more interactive manner. This does not give you license to request the theme from Chariots of Fire as an opening to the website to “set the scene” nor does it allow the request of sound when clicking menu items to make them go “zing-zing”.

What I advocate is the use of interactive ads and elements of Flash purpose built to keep your users engaged and to deliver information in a clever manner.

Search engines track how long people stay on sites and apply the length of time to a quality rating for your content. Google and (I believe) Yahoo! and MSN are offering incentives to place interactive media on websites so people can now seek you out not only by plain text but also via high quality media searches. If you’ve read this far you’ve probably realised that you need to budget for online marketing. Set some cash aside and invest in spreading the word about your website. Talk it over with your web agency and see which ones will suit your site best.

Rishad Sukhia is co-founder and Victoria state manager at Imagin8.

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