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by Mike Pontius
VP/COO Ulanji, Inc.
Website success revolves around qualified traffic. If no one visits your site it cannot meet its objectives. If objectives are not met the site fails to provide a return on investment. With no return on investment your Website is a waste of time and money.
Internet Marketing Truisms
An ugly site marketed effectively will out perform a pretty site left to its own devices. Useful content beats attractive design. Well-written copy will draw more traffic and convert more visitors than fancy graphics and state-of-the-art animations. A content-rich site with intuitive navigation and speed conscious design is a Web marketer's dream.
Marketing Begins with Website Development
Every successful Website has a purpose. That purpose is relationship building. It doesn't matter whether the site is a portal site offering an organized information gateway, a lead generation site intent on developing new business contacts or an e-commerce site focused on online sales, effective Websites must attract and engage the visitor. Their offering must be useful or entertaining, and, ideally, they should provide information or functionality beyond what the visitor expects.
Simply put, your site has but a few seconds to convince the visitor to stay, so follow these tried and true Website principles:
- Keep home page size to a minimum as there is no substitute for download speed.
- Let your visitor focus - don't distract with too many bells and whistles.
- State your purpose proudly and immediately - don't make visitors guess your intentions.
- Organize your content in layers, bullet points to nitty gritty detail.
Good writing cleanly displayed wins every time - this medium requires literacy, don't underestimate your audience.
- Give your visitors something they can't get elsewhere - a better way to search for the right product, more detailed information than they'd find in a brochure or a less threatening way to initiate contact.
- Copy, copy, copy - remember, your visitor is not the only one soaking in all that text, so are the search engine spiders.
Driving Qualified Traffic
Ford Motor Company doesn't care about search engine rankings but almost everyone else does. Unless you have the capacity, financial or otherwise, to drive visitors to your site without search engines, you had better observe the rules of the Information Superhighway:
- 3 of 4 searches begin with a search engine - unless you don't need the traffic you had better keep up to speed.
- Search Engines don't care about Website owners - they compete fiercely for the loyalty of Internet users, in their world "relevancy" is king.
Deal with the top 10 search engines and the others will follow - there may be 500 or more, but past 10 and you are wasting your time.
- The Web is paved with text - if your Web pages aren't full of good, meaningful copy, your site will not be found.
- Be Patient, Keep focused and Keep Trying - no one tactic works in every situation.
It can take 4, 6, even 8 months to work your way up the relevancy rankings, and once you arrive it's all too easy to slip back down. You are in competition with every other site, with the winners being those who just keep working at it.
Content Management
It's been said over and over again that "content is king" of the Internet. If so - and it is - then how you manage that content will determine how long your king will reign. Search engine spiders index every 6 weeks or so. If your site is not changing at least that often, you start dropping like a stone. What's more, if your content isn't updated on a very regular basis, you can kiss those valuable visitor relations goodbye. Here are some content criteria that will help you with spiders and visitors alike:
- Let the depth and breadth of your offering make a positive first impression - visitors come to your site in search of something, let them know what you have to offer.
- Develop content modules that require time sensitive information - anything from newsletters to sales events are good because they force you to create new material.
- Treat your home page more like a table of contents and less like a magazine ad - don't force a visitor to click around blindly, provide a little detail with that link. [Note: spiders follow those same links]
- Speaking of spiders - learn how to write for those voracious little software beasts, then correspond frequently.
Keeping Score
How can you tell the winners from the losers? Your traffic logs can help. There are many Website tracking/traffic analysis tools on the market, some free some very expensive. What you need depends on your overall objectives. At the very least, you need something that can tell you if you are trending in the right direction. Here are some statistics to watch out for:
- Page Requests or Page Views should be your base traffic statistic - "Hits" or file requests are only used to make site owners feel good.
- The number of visits is worth noting - unique visitors is even better, if your analyzer is up to it.
If you're interested in knowing where visitors are coming from geographically, be aware that all AOL users will appear to hail from Northern Virginia.
- Pay attention to which pages people are partial.
- Spend more time discerning trends than in trying to anticipate specific numbers.
Generating a Response
Ultimately, you need to know who your visitors are if you hope to form more remunerative relationships with them. To do this don't overlook the small things:
- Provide a means of response - elemental, yes, but you'd be surprised.
Visitors value their anonymity - to get them to part with their names, you must provide something of value in return.
The amount of demographic/psychographic information you request must have a direct correlation to the perceived value of your offer.
- Keep order forms as simple as possible - convenience is key, inconvenience is death.
- State your intentions clearly and concisely - visitors want to know what's going to happen to the information they provide.
- Say thank you - start your new electronic relationship on the right foot by being polite and establishing realistic expectations.
- Have this valuable information feed an online database so you can properly manage it and mine it.
Paying The Piper
Successful Websites take work - either yours or someone else's. Here are some of your options:
- Do-it-Yourself - if you have the time and the inclination go for it.
- Automate it - parts of the package can be, but you still can't escape the hard work.
- Hire a Spammer - low cost, low credibility, low return on investment, high probability of reputation impairment.
- Hire a Professional Internet Marketing Firm - higher cost, higher return and higher probability of having your expectations exceeded.
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