Suggested Tags: seo, sem, web design, website design, search engine optimization, internet marketing, web marketing, local search, web promotion

Show summary:

Local search defined.
The numbers are all pointing to more and more local searches being done online by Internet users.

A 10 step plan to get started with driving more traffic to your web site through optimizing for local search.

Download and Subscription Links:
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Links to resources mentioned in this podcast:

• comScore’s Local Search press release
• Google – add your local listing
• Yahoo – add your local listing
• MSN – add your local listing
• infoUSA – add/verify your information
• Yellowpages.com advertising
• Verizon’s Superpages.com advertising
• Local.com – vertical search engine
• TrueLocal.com – vertical search engine

Hi and welcome to Drive It - Convert It!, for October 6th, 2006. This is episode #12: Getting Started with Local Search

They say that all politics is local. Is that the same for search – listen and find out.

Drive It - Convert It! is the podcast where Small and Medium Sized businesses learn the marketing strategies and tactics behind Driving More Traffic to their website and Converting that Traffic into qualified leads and sales.

Drive it, convert it.

I’m John Boulter. I’m the president of Bastion Internet. Podcasts, show notes, and transcripts can be found at BastionInternet.com/podcast. That’s B A S T I O N internet.com/podcast. Email your comments and questions to podcast@bastioninternet.com.

Welcome to the first installment of the Getting Started series. The plan for the Getting Started series is to give you a simple five to ten step plan which will get you started in a variety of traffic driving strategies. We’ll focus on the less traveled strategies, those beyond normal SEO and PPC – Pay Per Click. Our first Getting Started installment – Local Search.

Local search – it’s very hot news in the search marketing industry right now. Last week in Colorado, Search Engine Strategies had a conference dedicated to only local search. I wasn’t able to attend but I did heard is was very well received. comScore, the data gathering folks, just published some stats on local search. There was some very interesting news there which we’ll go over. And if you’re following the actions of the maajor search engines, you can see they’re ramping up their local search offerings.

But the hottest news came yesterday when I needed a Firewire cable. I quickly found the number to my local Target store. Local search in action, in vivid color.

It’s always a kick to me when my wife is climbing up on a stool to get the yellow pages to contact some local business. As she’s blowing the dust off the phone book my son gives her a printout of whatever information she needed. In the time it had taken her to get that big old book off the shelf in the closet, he had the information in hand.

Now I think she’s just faking him out when she starts heading for the closet to get the book. She just wants him to do the work.

During the next 20 or so minutes, I’m going to be mentioning a lot of links. Don’t worry about writing them down. Just visit the show notes – they’ll all be the Bastion Internet website.

Local search – what is it; why is it important; and how do you get started. I’m going to talk about that and give you a 10 step “getting started” plan.

What is local search. To me local search means physical contact. If you have something to offer that can be enhanced by a physical meeting then you are involved in local search. If your target audience will want to get together with you at some point in the process, and they’re searching for your type of offering, that is local search.

Why is it important. It’s important because people are doing it. They’re searching online for local products and services. Right now – as we speak.

There are some fresh stats just out from a comScore Networks study. comScore provides consumer behavior insight to companies. They just completed a study on local search on the Internet. This past July, 2006, 109 million people in the United States did a local search on a search engine. That was 63% of the US internet users. Local search is up 43 percent year over year.

Now for the really exciting number - 47 percent of local searchers followed through with a visit to a business they’d found while searching.

Here’s the number that surprised me the most – Yahoo and Google were neck in neck with local search market share – Google had 29.8 percent of the market, Yahoo had 29.2 percent of the market. To me that’s pretty significant for a couple of reasons.

First it means that Google has a lot less proportional influence in this category then they seem to in overall search.
Second, it means that the 2 market leaders comprise about 60% of the market, a lot less then in more general search where it’s probably closer to 75% of the market. There’s also a lot more players making up the next 30 or so percentage points. Check out the link to the press release to get more info on that. So - we know what it is. We know how important it is. Now – how do we do it. Where do we focus.

Here’s the 10 step program to get you started:

1. Add your website to the major search engines’ local search areas.
2. Update your infoUSA profile
3. GeoTarget your Pay Per Click program
4. Place tester ads on traditional yellow page style websites
5. Place tester ads on vertical search engines
6. Optimize your website coding
7. Optimize your website content
8. Create new website content
9. Add a map to your site
10. Get geographic centric links

Let’s look at those in more detail

1 ) Add your website to the major search engines’ local search areas.
Just before the show, I typed in the phrase “furniture store in los angeles”. The top result in Google, Yahoo, and MSN (aka Windows Live) were all the search engines own local search sites. Try it.

Even if you can deliver your service anywhere in the country, if someone wants to deal with a local company – you want to show up.

Now in Google, you can have many local addresses, - but they are going to ask you to confirm each one by sending you a confirmation code via snail mail to that address.

I’ve got the links to Yahoo, Google and MSN’s local submission URLs in the show notes. It does time them time to get listed, so start this going today.

2) Update your infoUSA profile
infoUSA is a large database and list management firm. When you get telemarketed, there’s a good chance the telemarketer bought their list from infoUSA. Oh well, they’ve probably got your information anyway, so go onto their site and make sure it’s the right information. infoUSA feeds a lot of directories and smaller search engines so you do want to be there.

3) Target Your Pay Per Click programs
If you aren’t already doing this, geographically target some portion of your pay per click campaign. Even if you market in the entire country, if you can do something extra in some locations – because you have physical presence there – target those locations. You can do this in one of two ways – either bid regionally – a feature within the various pay per click engines, or include geographic keywords as part of your search phrase – like furniture store in Boston.

If you choose to use the PPC feature, Google and Microsoft seem to be doing a better job at this than Yahoo’s search marketing. However, Yahoo’s new Panama release may change that. I did see a demo of their upcoming software but can’t remember if in enhanced the geotargeting functionality.

I usually prefer to add the specific keywords to my phrases, but others definitely prefer using the search engines own geographic filters. With services like AOL and other anonymizers the IP address of the searcher does not always match their geography. And I think Users are getting more used to using geographic terms in their searches. If I had to choose one, I think that using the actual keywords is the way to go.

4) Place tester ads on a traditional yellow page style websites
Go to yellowpages.com or Verizon’s Superpages.com, check out their ad prices and place some test ads.

One thing I really need to mention and that is definitely the subject of a future Drive It – Convert It episode is that of Analytics. You do need to know where your traffic and conversions are coming from. The more sources of traffic you have, the more important it is to be able to analyze the success or lack of success of each one. This is a little easier when you’ve got limited sources of traffic drivers. As you diversify, analytics is a key.

5) Place tester ads on vertical search engines
There are a number of search engines that are catering to Local search. I’m not sure whether they’ll having staying power versus the big engines.

I do think it’s worthplacing some test ads on a few of these sites. Two that I would start with are local.com and truelocal.com

6) Optimize your website coding
This gets back to showing up in the general engines but for the geographic long tail.

Revisit your page titles, metatags, h1 headings and see if you can’t plug some geographic terms in there. Often it will just add to your ability to be found for these geographic qualifiers without diminishing your ranking for the more generic terms you’re currently focused on. If you need more information on how to do on-page coding – re-listen to podcast # 4.

7 ) Optimize your website content
Take a look at your current content. Do you mention nearby cities, suburbs, neighborhoods, counties. Usually you can add a short paragraph that is very conversational in nature

“whether your planting lawns in Southlake, landscaping in Colleyville, or gardening in West Plano our Dallas based warehouse can handle your fertilizer needs” you get the idea.

Make sure your physical addresses are listed on your contact page. Consider putting your main address as part of your footer. Add your phone number to the header. If you’re solely doing business locally, that should be a must anyway.

8 ) Create new website content
Create pages for 2 or 3 key geographic terms – let’s say you’re San Francisco Bay area based – so Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose. Dedicate a page to talk about each of these cities. List the attractions, the weather, the business climate the

Now take your top 2 or 3 regular search phrase targets and integrate them into the city pages.

It’s probably going to look a little strange, so be creative. Make up a new section for your site. Call it doing business in the Bay Area. Tell why your employees like the surrounding cities. Talk about the history of your area of business within the cities. Just make sure you have some good internal links near the top of the page which will transfer Users to the business end of your site. The idea is to rank with the search engines for these pages and then quickly have those users move on to the converting areas of your website.

Make it quality, as always. And, make the pages different. Don’t just do a search and replace on the city name and leave the rest of the content unchanged. Duplicate content is likely to get ignored. If the technique works for you, it’ll be worth your time to expand it. Branch out to more cities, neighborhood, states, whatever makes sense in your geography.

9 ) Add a map to your site
Make sure you’ve got a map on your site with an Alt tag describing it. Add some directions. Tell how to get to your location from neighboring cities. Sound like good content to me.

10 ) Get geographic centric links
Finally, go get some links. Two tactics here - first, make sure the linking anchor text contains the geographic keyword qualifier. This applies especially to links from more generic directories or traditional website sources for you. Second, try to get links from directories or sites that cater to your geography. We often talk about links from good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods and same-industry neighborhoods. Now go get some links from your actual neighborhood.

There are a lot of directories trying to cater to a particular region, search them out and you’ll probably find you can get some cost effective links. Hopefully, the links themselves will drive traffic to you, but the link juice you get that ups your search engine rankings can often be a big kicker.

There we go – done! It should take you less than 60 days to work your way through those 10 steps. You’ll probably be through half of them in just a few weeks.

So like politics is all search local – nah – but a lot of it is – so take advantage!

That wraps up Getting Started with Local Search. But whether you’re local or national, it seems you can’t turn around without bumping into another Drive Traffic animal - Social Search. So join us for our next installment in the series - Getting Started with Social Search.

So if you haven’t yet subscribed, you won’t want to miss out. You can follow the subscription links on our site. Or, if you use iTunes, do a search for drive it convert it and pick us up there. I’m John Boulter, for Bastion Internet’s Drive It – Convert It! podcast.

If you just don’t like the whole RSS thing, fill out the email form on the site, I’ve got the link in the show notes and all the podcast pages. We’ll get you added to our double-secret probation opt-in email distribution list.

As always I welcome you to visit us at bastioninternet.com or Email us at podcast@bastioninternet.com. We’ll get back to you.
And for gosh sakes – link to me – because you can never be to thin, too rich or have too many quality inbound links.

Suggested Tags: seo, sem, web design, website design, web site conversion, online sales, ecommerce, internet marketing, web marketing, trust, credibility, web promotion

Show summary: SES San Jose - A little about the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose

Diversification - Be careful about jumping too soon AND jumping too late. Longevity is one more reason to diversify now, though. Think your safe with SEO or Pay Per Click - think again.

Upcoming podcasts - Switching back to the Drive side of Drive It - Convert It! Look for the new Getting Started series to help get you started with new Internet Marketing vehicles and for those that want some extra tips on doing it effectively.

Download the Podcast here
Subscribe to Drive It - Convert It! here

Read a full transcript here …

Hi and welcome to Drive It - Convert It!, for August 29th, 2006. This is episode #11: Internet Marketing Diversity

Drive It - Convert It! is the podcast where Small and Medium Sized businesses learn the marketing strategies and tactics behind Driving More Traffic to their website and Converting that Traffic into qualified leads and sales.

Drive it, convert it.

Well it’s been over a month sine the last Drive It - Convert It! podcast. Thanks for sticking with me. It’s been a busy summer. I went on vacation. They tried to catch up. Then I went to a conference. Then tried to catch up. I little more vacationing, and I’m still trying to catch up. But the podcast gods were calling my name and promising retribution if I didn’t get things going again.

Actually, I have been dying to get podcasting again. There’s a ton going on. I’m fresh from the latest Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose and clients are keeping us on our toes here at Bastion Internet. We’re pushing some limits and exploring into new territory.

If you want the details of my vacation - send me an email. From here on in, this podcast is all about driving traffic to your website and converting it once it’s there.

We’ll start by reviewing the summer Search Engine Strategies conference. That’s going to lead me into what’s hot, what are the trends in Internet Marketing. From there, the main event - I want to talk about the importance of diversity within your online marketing plan and how we’re going to get you starting down that path. Finally, with diversity in mind, I’ll give you a forecast of the upcoming podcast series.

Search Engine Strategies: I attended the summer Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. For those of you that are familiar with Search Engine Strategies you know how much information gets thrown at you over a 4 day period. For those of you who aren’t familiar with these conferences - I’ll give you the rundown.

Search Engine Strategies, also know as SES is put on by Incisive Media. It’s chaired by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch fame. It runs over a four day period and follows a pretty typical trade show slash conference type of format. There’s 5 hour to hour and a half sessions running at any given time and that’s done 4 times a day. So over the course of the conference there’s well over 70 different sessions. The sessions break down into different focuses - you’ve got ones more targeted toward beginners, ones targeted at advanced users. You’ve got a SEO track, an Advertising track, vertical tracks like shopping search and local search, you’ve got a B to B focus. It’s really got something for everybody.

The sessions are a little bit teaching, a little bit opinion, lots of Q and A. Most sessions have 3 or 4 panelists that are subject matter experts, and a moderator. Each panelist gives a 10-15 minute presentation offering their slant on the subject and then it gets opened up for questions.

Based on how people put up their hands when the moderators ask, it seems like about 60% of the attendees are in-house employees at various companies outside of the Search industry and about 40% are from Internet marketing firms of one description or another. My numbers could be way off, though, I’ve never seen anything published on that.

There’s also a exhibition floor where there’s a good100 or so exhibitors ranging from SEO companies to dot.coms to analytics software firms.

Anyway, I don’t want to make this a commercial. Go to SearchEngineStrategies.com Go to SearchEngineStrategies.com for more info if you’d like.

One of the things I look for when I go to these conferences is trends.
Where things seem to be heading. In marketing if you’re always following other companies’ leads, you’ll likely always be following others – stands to reason – huh. So if you can get out in front of the trends, you stand a better chance of success.

One of the most highly attended sessions was on Social Search. I think it was highly popular because it’s pretty new. We’re all trying to figure out how we want to play. How many resources do you put into something without having a good idea of the payoff.

Now it’s always a little dangerous because new stuff is alluring. If you’re like me, you work so much with standard SEO and Search Engine Advertising that it can start to seem a little mundane at times. So when something new comes along, you want to jump all over it. And then you step back and look at the statistics and see what an overwhelming amount of traffic is still generated by those two 500 pound gorillas – Optimization and Pay Per click

So it can be dangerous to go after the new, alluring marketing vehicles – I call them market vehicles one, because they drive traffic, two, because they are often self contained. Anyway, back to the danger of pursuing the new, mysterious strategies. But, it can be more dangerous not to pursue them. If you don’t diversify, and that even includes doing things that are new to you and not necessarily new to everyone else, you will absolutely suffer from that decision.

Let’s run through some scenarios. You think SEO is the place to be. Well it can be until you get banned or shoved down in the rankings by an algorithm change or a spurt of competition. Have you noticed that Froogle and Google’s local results have started showing up high in the rankings of search engine results pages. How’s you’re Froogle ranking. Are those Froogle results knocking you down in the rankings an inch or two.

If you rely on leads just from the natural search results, what happens when those results suddenly dry up. A lot of companies have been thrown into a panic for just that reason. Now a lot of times you can go way down in rankings and it’s just a temporary thing. You bounce back up after a week or two. But if that’s where all you’re business is coming from and it’s now gone, you’re under a ton of pressure to do something. You can’t just sit there and do nothing – which is often the right thing to do. So you’re sort of forced to take action just so it looks like you’re trying to do something. If you had some other traffic driving vehicles in place, the pressure’s off a little. You can wait it out a bit to see what’s real and what’s not in a rankings bump or shuffle.

So you think you’re safe by driving leads through search engine advertising – pay per clicks. Hey, you pay, your ads show up, people click, you get customers. Well along comes Google and their quality score. Now it’s just not a matter of price bids. Click through rates and the relevance of landing pages are affecting the rank of your sponsored ad. Plus with all the Tivo’ing going on, just how much more competition is flowing in from companies looking for better places to spend their advertising dollar then television. How does that affect the cost per click.

Here’s something to think about. Do you know what two of the highest downloaded Firefox extensions are – a script blocker and an ad blocker. Do you think that might have an affect on your Google and Yahoo pay per click business. History has definitively shown us that people like to block ads. Don’t think Google and Yahoo’s ads are immune to that. Getting a little sick of seeing AdSense on sites – yeah, me too. Where’s that Firefox extension. Maybe once I’ve turned it on it’ll block the ads on the Search Engine Results Pages, too.

I think you’re getting my point.

So if you haven’t already started getting systems in place to diversify efficiently, you need to.

Another trend – longevity. Longevity goes hand in hand with trust. If you’ve been around awhile people tend to trust you a little more. Heard of the Google sandbox. There are pretty good indicators that length of time you’ve been doing something means something in this web site marketing world of ours. It’s pretty hard to go out a get a new link that’s 2 years old. You would have had to have done that two years ago.

So the key to longevity is to get started now. It a few years you’ll have it. Meanwhile, why not drive some traffic and have some fun while were at it.

I believe it was John Lennon said that 90% of success was just showing up. I’m not sure that I totally agree with the exact percentage, but the principle does apply. You’ve got to get in the game if you want to score and if you want to win. Most people sit on the couch and are content to watch.

So, how do we all get into the game.
Well, Drive It – Convert It! is shifting back to the “drive it” side. Over the next several podcasts I’m going to talk about getting into different games - we’ll call it the Getting Started series.

What do I want you to get started with – to diversify into. Lots of things.

We are going to talk social search and social networking. We are going to talk about podcasting. Blogging – yeah it’s been out awhile but you’re still not doing it, are you.We’ll revisit Vertical search engines like shopping search and local search. Pushed out any press releases lately, how about Ezines or newsletters.

I’m calling it the Getting Started series but don’t let that fool you. I’ll be lacing it with something for everyone whether you’re a beginner or an old hand at it.

I can’t wait for the podcast on Social Search and Social Networking. I am excited about it and dreading it all at the same time. I’m 42 years old, do I really need a My Space account. Do I really need to Digg stuff. Is it a goldmine or a big waste of time.

We usually avoid what we fear or what we don’t understand. I know a lot of SEOs that hate getting links because they don’t want to have to actually communicate with another person. A lot of us have a fear of speaking – not looking forward to that first podcast – are you? Don’t understand all the tech stuff surrounding Shopping Search - don’t worry it’s probably just a fad anyway.

Let’s face down some of those fears, that apprehension together. Let’s go back and revisit some of those online marketing vehicles that we took a look at a few years ago and turned our noses up at – darn shopping engines. Let’s get diversified. A little secret – it’s mostly just about repurposing content.

So if you haven’t yet subscribed, you won’t want to miss out. You can follow the subscription links on our site. Or, if you use iTunes, do a search for drive it convert it and pick us up there. I’m John Boulter, for Bastion Internet’s Drive It – Convert It! podcast.

Visit us at bastioninternet.com or Email us at podcast@bastioninternet.com. I’ll get back to you. See you then.

 
Continuation of episode #9 - Techniques to build trust and credibility on your web site.

 
Trust and credibility translates into website conversions. Here are 50 tips to help you build your web site’s credibility rating.

 
Suggested Tags: web design, website design, web site conversion, online sales, ecommerce, internet marketing, web marketing, trust, credibility

 
The 50 tips are separated into 9 categories

 
Download the Podcast here:

 
Subscribe to Drive It - Convert It! here:

 
Read a full transcript here …
 

Hi and welcome to Drive It - Convert It!, for July 21st, 2006. This is episode #10: Converting Web Traffic – Part 4 – Building Trust – 50 Tips in 20 Minutes.

 
Drive It - Convert It! is the podcast where Small and Medium Sized businesses learn the marketing strategies and tactics behind Driving More Traffic to their website and Converting that Traffic into qualified leads and sales.

 
Drive it, convert it.

 
The more people trust you, the more credibly you come across, the more likely people will be to do business with you. Your website is no different.

 
I’m John Boulter. I’m the president of Bastion Internet. Podcasts, show notes, and transcripts can be found at BastionInternet.com/podcast. That’s B A S T I O N internet.com/podcast. Email your comments and questions to podcast@bastioninternet.com.

 
This podcast is a direct continuation of episode #9. I would definitely recommend you listen to it in order to get some background to the subject of trust on the web. However, if your like me and don’t mind diving right in without all the background – they I say keep listening and catch up later.

 
Today, I’m going to give you 50 tips in 20 minutes. As you can imagine, I won’t be going into a lot of detail on each one. That’s okay though. The real objective is to get you thinking about your website and the trust and credibility it invokes. Each specific tip is just one more thing you can do to throw the odds in your favor.

 
Now I’ll be surprised if anyone agrees with all of my tips did. Trust is typically based on past experience. We’ve all had different experiences, so the factors that trigger our trust (or lack of it), will be different for each of us.

 
I compiled my list from my own experiences of 20 years in technology marketing and customer interaction - the last 10 of which have been in the Internet marketing space. I regularly talk to other industry experts, I research and read reports on the subject and have also done a fair bit of research in general psychology.

 
Even with that impressive background I’ll miss a few things. If you think you catch one I didn’t, or you vehemently disagree with one – drop an email to podcast@bastioninternet.com. I’d love to hear from you.

 
And remember, not all tips will apply to all sites.

 
I’ve separated the tips into 9 different categories. Nothing special about the number 9, just happened that that is how they seemed to split out.

 
So let’s start our clocks and let the tips fall where they may:

 
Category 1 – Stay current: If you look old and outdated your credibility suffers. This applies to design trends and content - so:

 
- Update your copyright year: nothing spells old and outdated like a 2003 copyright in 2006. Change it each year.
- Update your content: Go through your site every 6 months and freshen up your words a little. It might help your search ranking, too.
- Don’t use old-style technology and techniques: Get rid of anchor pages, animated .gifs, frames. They are all from a bygone era.
- Don’t have a “reset button” on your forms: Oh my gosh, if I can reset a form on your page, I am so out of there. It just smells of a site that hasn’t been updated in years.
- Don’t have anything that blinks: blinking bad, blinking bad, blinking bad. Not blinking good.
- Avoid “click here”: The words “click here” used to be instructive, now they are just unimaginative and annoying.
- Avoid being too trendy: Trendy is not current. It’s doing stuff for the sake of newness.
- Be trendy: I know I just said not to be trendy, but go ahead a be a little trendy here and there. It shows you’re paying attention. Just don’t be too trendy.

 
Category 2 – Pay attention to detail: If you’re sloppy on your website, it’s assuming you’re sloppy in your business, too. Here come the tips:

 
- Use proper grammar: For people that notice bad grammar, it will stand out like a sore thumb. Writing for the web is more conversational then writing for your English teacher, but watch the sloppy stuff. Don’t just do it good – do it well.
- Spell correctly: Just a sign of sloppiness and another brick in the wall of poor credibility. Spell check, baby, and then proof read. Homonyms can cost you business.
- Check all links: Have you got broken links. Is that the best you can do.
- Check navigation in other browsers and platforms: This is a little tougher, but at least check the most popular browsers for proper display and functionality of your website.

 
Category 3 – Be easy to read: People that play their cards close to their chests want to beat you in poker. People that don’t mind being easy to read are people you can usually trust - so:

 
- Have shipping rates and policies that are easy to find: Nothing like a nasty $20 shipping charge at the end of my $10 shopping cart purchase to set me off. I’d like to do a little research before I start a process, so please let me.
- Have tax information easily found: One of the great benefits to buying off the Internet is there is often no tax. Don’t make me go all the way through the checkout process to find out if you charge tax in my state.
- Don’t be tricky: If I think you’re trying to trick me in one place, I’ll think you’re trying to trick my every place.
- Don’t host ads: This is going to be tough for some of you. Is your site a real site or is it just here to get me to click on a Google ad. Is it really worth the money. If you’ve got that much traffic that your Ad Sense is paying, you’ve got enough traffic to convert a lot of sales in your primary business.
- Be consistent: I don’t mind dealing with “characters” but I don’t want to deal with schizophrenics. If you’re website is a little wacky, ok. Just be whacky in the same way throughout the site. If it looks like 5 different people designed 5 different parts, your not to be trusted.
- “But” out: Minimize the use of the word “but” b – u – t . It’s like arguing or hedging your bet. It’s rarely describes something in the other persons best interest. Replace it with alternatives like “however” or “although”. You don’t want to be argumentative or manipulative do you.

 
Category 4 – Give respect: If you respect me, you’ll likely do right by me.� Show me respect by doing the following:

 
- Have the shortest forms possible. You respect my time and aren’t trying to pump me for personal information.
- Minimize your use of .pdf’s. Few things spells disrespect more than enticing me to click on a link and my seeing Adobe Acrobat start to boot up. I hate it. Others hate it.
- Let users know if they are clicking on a .pdf. So if you absolutely have to link to a .pdf, give a warning.
- Don’t default to sound. It’s pretty obvious, however, I want to make sure I’ve included it. If you choose to have sound play, make it the non-default option.
- Know your audience and their tastes. If you have a clear audience, design for them. Make them feel comfortable in your home.
- Write to your audiences’ level. Do this or you’ll either sound pedantic or real real dumb.

 
Category 5 – Look like a duck: There’s an old saying; if something looks like a duck, acts like a duck and quacks like a duck – it’s probably a duck. Do things like other companies in your space and of your quality (or of the quality you’d like to be), do.

 
- List your physical address: real companies have one.
- Avoid (dash) having (dash) multi (dash) hyphenated (dash) URLs: I know it sucks that so many people have squatted on all the good domain names, but the spammer sites tend to have multi-hyphened URLs – don’t be mis-categorized to be one of them.
- Send order acknowledgements. Immediate order acknowledgements on eCommerce sites are standard for credible, well established Internet commerce sites. Be like them.
- Have a customer login area. Even if it doesn’t go anywhere for now. Is this a little deceitful, maybe, but it’s quack has a nice ring to it.
- Have a jobs page: Successful companies need employees, don’t you.
- Take credit cards. Well established eCommerce sites take credit cards. If you’re just taking PayPal – maybe your too little, or too simple to do business with.
- Don’t have an all Flash site: You want to dare to be different, well dare to have low market share, too. Few flash sites are like one another. Most solid companies don’t have them. That doesn’t mean that companies with Flash sites aren’t solid. It just means it’s not the norm.
- Don’t look hokey or too slick: You want to stand out from the crowd, not stick out from the crowd. People don’t trust things that are too far away from the norm.
- Have some boring, never read pages (like Our Philosophy, Mission Statement, About Us,). It gives a sense that you have a level of reliable (although boring), people helping to keep your business doing business.
- Match your industry’s theme: Once again, you want to do it better than others in your industry, not different. Unless of course, your industry is on the low low end of the website quality spectrum.

 
Category 6 – Show commitment: Committed people see you through the tough times. Non committed people take the money and run.� How do we show we’re committed:

 
- Treat images. Pictures should have a border, they should be file-size optimized, preferably they’ll have captions, and maybe have a graphical treatment overlaid on them. It shows you don’t mind investing some extra time and money because you’re in this for the long run.
- No out-of-the-box templates: Nothing says I’ll be gone in a week, then a nice purchased template.
- Include “trust” logos. They can be a little trite, but they show you took the time. Verisign, Better Business Bureau.
- Show that you do something other than have a website. Talk about events you’ve done, articles you’ve written, associations you’re a part of. Do a podcast, do a webcast. Write newsletters. You need to show you’re more than just a website.
- Avoid stupid technology (frames, stretching tables, you name it). I have a high resolution monitor. If your content stretches to fit it, I end up looking at a 15 inch long sentence – it’s unreadable, so I don’t read it. If you still have a frame based site – you likely don’t have commitment to your website. You need to invest to change that.
- Host your own shopping cart. Taking the easy way out smacks of a “proof of concept” website. Call me when you’ve proved your concept and plan to stick around.
- Properly repurpose other media content you’re using. If you took your old sales letter and stuck it up there as your main converting page, you really haven’t invested much time or energy to be here. If you want me to look at some touched up PowerPoint, look for someone else.
- Invest in design. People don’t always notice if things don’t have gradients, if they don’t line up, if pictures and images are low quality, they just get a feeling of walking into an old, shoddy store.

 
Category 7 – Been there, done that. If you’ve done it before, you’re likely to do it again. Show them you’ve been there and done that – here’s how:

 
- Include testimonials. Hey, customers have dealt with you and like you. That counts.
- Have partial customer lists. Hey, you’ve got customers. I guess this isn’t a brand new business for you.
- List some Frequently Asked Questions. Make sure they’re frequently asked questions: This isn’t some backhanded type of sales copy page. “How do you keep your prices so low”. This page shows you’ve had lots of customers asking intelligent questions and you want prospective customers to get those answers, too.

 
Category 8 – Watch their back. Hey if someone cares about watching my back, I’m going to trust them.� How do we show it:

 
- Have a privacy policy: Keep it simple. Keep it direct.
- Make sure SSL certificates work: I guess it goes without saying that you should have one if you’re collecting sensitive information. Now make sure it’s not expired and that it works for both the www or non-www version of your site.
- Don’t ask for Driver’s License, Social Security, and Credit Card numbers unless you have properly protected SSL certificate areas. Enough said on that one.
- Include privacy taglines and information snippets wherever you ask for personal information. Put a little tagline and link beside sensitive areas. For example, on your contact form beside the email box, tell people you don’t sell or distribute email address and link to your privacy page.

 
Category 9 – Have confidence

 
- Use the word “believe” instead of “think”: I believe you’ll find this tip beneficial. Notice I didn’t say “I think you’ll find this tip beneficial”. Hear the difference.
- Make the first interaction an easy one. I believe a User will want to come back to your site if you make the first interaction an easy one. That builds trust.
- Write in a conversational style: I don’t need to hide behind formality. There are real people behind our website. Real people talk like real people.

 
Done!

 
For those of you who were counting – I just gave you 52 tips in 19 minutes.

 
So did my credibility take a hit because I didn’t do exactly what I said I would – 50 tips in 20 minutes - or do you trust me more because I believe in under promising and over delivering.

 
Hmmm…. you may want to think about that one. While you’re thinking about that – consider subscribing to Drive It – Convert It!, and automatically download episode number 11 when it comes out.

 
You can follow the subscription links on our site. Or, if you use iTunes, do a search for drive it convert it and pick us up there. I’m John Boulter, for Bastion Internet’s Drive It – Convert It! podcast.

 
Visit us at bastioninternet.com or Email us at podcast@bastioninternet.com. I’ll get back to you – trust me.

 
The more credible your website, the more trustworthy and capable you will be perceived to be. The more trustworthy and capable you are perceived to be the higher your website conversions.

 
Web site design and refinement plays a key role in building a site’s trust level and credibility, all which translate into a higher conversion rate.

 
Suggested Tags: web design, website design, web conversion, online sales, ecommerce, internet marketing, web marketing, trust, credibility

 
Topics include:

 
1) Web smarts – today’s street smarts
2) How web visitors judge us
3) Improving credibility and trust
4) Introduction to 50 tips in 20 minutes

 
Download the Podcast here:

 
Subscribe to Drive It - Convert It! here:

 
Read a full transcript here … 

 
Hi and welcome to Drive It - Convert It!, for July 14th, 2006. This is episode #9: Converting Web Traffic – Part 3 – Higher Credibility Higher Conversions – Trust Me.

 
Drive It - Convert It! is the podcast where Small and Medium Sized businesses learn the marketing strategies and tactics behind Driving More Traffic to their website and Converting that Traffic into qualified and leads and sales.

 
Drive it, convert it.

 
The more credible your website, the more trustworthy and capable you will be perceived to be. The more trustworthy and capable you’re perceived to be the higher your website conversions.

 
I’m John Boulter. I’m the president of Bastion Internet. Podcasts, show notes, and transcripts can be found at BastionInternet.com/podcast. That’s B A S T I O N internet.com/podcast. Email your comments and questions to podcast@bastioninternet.com.

 
We’re up to part 3 of our series on Converting Web Traffic. If you haven’t listened to Parts 1 and 2 yet (that’s episodes 7 and 8 ) – that’s okay, but I do recommend going back and downloading them. Also, if you didn’t catch the very first episodes of Drive It Convert It (episodes 1 and 2), I highly recommend you give those a listen, too.

 
Trust and credibility is a fairly extensive topic. So rather than trying to cram it all in – I’m going to cover it in two episodes – this one and episode 10 later this month.

 
Do you have kids? I have kids – one of my kids is 14 and one is 8. Both their schools recently organized meetings regarding My Space. It seems that with 40,000,000 or whatever number of users they have, My Space has attracted some people that have less than honest and ethical intentions. Of course it’s going to make the news when some 50 year old man tries to lure some 15 year old through the My Space service.

 
Now I don’t discount the dangers, however, I don’t see that much news coverage about the weird people that hang out at malls or arcades (do they still have arcades), or other places the younger generation can be found.

 
Now when I was a kid and then a teenager I developed something call street smarts. My parents gave me some initial guidelines (don’t take candy from strangers, don’t help that guy look for his lost puppy). Then I developed a sense- a sense for which streets to avoid riding my bike down. I learned to sense which friendly people were really friendly and which were just sort of creepy.

 
Now when I got a little older and needed to buy things like a car I started to learn how to tell if people were telling the truth or if they had something to hide. If they were hiding something it was usually either a matter of them being dishonest or were they just hiding the fact that they were inexperienced. They were trying to pass themselves off as knowing more than they did or being more capable then they actually were.

 
I started to learn what poker players call “tells”.

 
Tells are mannerisms and movements that tells a person’s true intentions regardless of the words they are saying.

 
I actually encourage my kids to get involved in online interactions. So much of our world is heading that way that everybody needs to develop online street smarts. You should be starting that at a young age or whatever age you are now and continuing on.

 
Is that person commenting in your forum just trolling to disrupt or are they leaving a legitimate opinion. Is that email requesting information from a real prospect or is it a competitor. Is that My Space friend a potential confidant or a creepy old man.

 
Part of online smarts is being able to tell the character and credibility of someone based on their online presence. We all start to look for online “tells” that give us insight into the real character and capability of the online entity we’re dealing with.

 
Whether we realize it or not, as users of the web we all are developing online street smarts. We are constantly picking up “tells”. Tells in a website we’re looking at, tells in an email we got. More than often, we aren’t even aware of what’s happening. We think we have instinct. We learn to trust our gut. Really, were just learning from experience. There’s actually a neat book out called “Blink” which talks about some of this. It’s written by Malcolm Gladwell. He wrote “The Tipping Point”, too. I’d highly recommend both.

 
If I’m a visitor to a website - what does the fact that the Copyright says 2003 tell me. Does a broken link reflect a person with bad character. I don’t know. What does that Flash element say about this company – do they respect my time. Is their contact form like a dimly lit street that I don’t want to risk walking down.

 
Now, as a web professional I’m more interested in making sure that my clients don’t get misclassified or mischaracterized by giving off the wrong signals. I don’t want their “tells” to tell visitors the wrong thing.

 
My clients are of course experienced, upstanding companies and they deserve a web visitor’s trust. They’re a credible resource for the products and services the sell. Now, some of them are sole proprietors just starting out, some are corporations that have been in business for years and have hundreds of employees.

 
If you’re my client, it’s my job to make sure you don’t dress funny, you don’t say stupid things that give the wrong impression. It’s my job to portray you in the best possible light. If this were like a job situation, your website is your resume, at a minimum. You need to nail it in order to get the interview. Then you need to nail the interview. Now I’m would never tell you to lie on your resume – that will catch up with you. I am going to tell you how to talk, how to walk, what to play up, what to play down so you get the interview, and the job – or in web vernacular – you convert.

 
We need to start by looking at how you’ll be judged – how you’ll be evaluated. I call these the four “c”s:

 
- Capability
- Competence
- Commitment
- Character

 
Capability: If I’m going to deal with you I want to know you have the capability to deliver what you say you can. I’m going to look for experience, I’m going to look for expertise, do you have a track record.

 
Competence: I want to know that you are going deliver the right level of quality with minimal hassles to me. This doesn’t just apply to an end sale. It applies to the entire process I’m going to go through with you. Are you going to give me the information I need or the product I order in an efficient manner. Will your delivery be smooth. Are you going to protect my identity, my credit card information, my time.

 
Commitment: Are you committed to this. If I get involved with you are you going to be around next week when I make my buying decision. Are you going to be around next month when I have a question. Are you going to be around next year when I want to order again.

 
Character: What will you do if something goes wrong. Do you choose your partners wisely - so if you’re outsourcing part of your process are your partners likely to be trustworthy, too. Will you sell my email address to a spammer.

 
Now, instead of coming out and telling people that your capable, competent, committed and full of character it will be much more powerful if they just get that feeling from your site. Your tells will consciously and subconsciously tell your website visitor the right things.

 
The words, the information, the images on your site are going to explain what you do, how you do it and why it’s in their best interest to work with you.

 
The way you present those words, that information, those images will be your “tells”, they’ll imply capability, competence, commitment, and character.

 
So what says “we are capable”. Well, you need to show you have expertise. You need to show you have experience (lots of alliteration in this episode isn’t there). You can do this in a couple of ways. First you do it by including sections that show your expertise and experience. Some things that come to mind

 
Have content displaying knowledge of your subject – pretty straightforward. Normally I recommend this be done in layers. Most people skim a website, but they absolutely notice that there is more there should they want to read it all. You need to have the more on display and a click of a page-down away. So when people tell you to just put the high points in your site because that’s all people read – don’t do it. Extend your pages, link to white papers, downloads, whatever. I agree that people skim, but they will subconsciously know that there’s a whole lot more substance to you if they want to investigate a little further.

 
Customer testimonials and case studies. This shows a been there, done that, and done it well kind of attitude. People like to know they’re not your guinea pig.

 
The last one I’ll mention for now is functionality. Functionality on your site is going to reflect how capable you are. You don’t necessarily lose credibility if you have a 10 page site that is simple in design with static HTML content. However, you can get “capability” points by having a few areas of sophistication within the site. Whether its’ site-wide-search capability, database driven content areas, it helps to have something that’s a little beyond run of the mill website stuff.

 
Competence: What screams “We are competent!”, without screaming it. Once again it’s going to be two-pronged. First, your content describes your knowledge and can provide examples of industry competence.

 
However, a website that is well thought out and functions smoothly will properly shows your competence. Your ability to get your message across to the web visitor shows you are competent. Links that all work show you are competent. The tough part is that it’s way easier to show you’re incompetent. Often competence is more of a matter of avoiding the pitfalls.

 
Commitment: We are absolutely committed to this industry. Our website looks like we spent 150 bucks on it and we haven’t updated it in a year, but we are absolutely committed to this industry. We have no physical location but we are absolutely committed to this industry. Now I’m in the business, but if I see a site that looks like it was bought from a template company with a logo and a tagline plugged in that’s just not a good thing. Now, a template can be a fine starting point, but if you cut corners on design, whether your site has a simple design or one that’s really elegant it will show – and what the brain picks up is – no investment, no commitment. That’s just one of a dozen things that show a lack of commitment.

 
Character: Character is proven over time. However, indications of whether you have a good or bad character are being picked up from the instant you come into contact with someone. I believe you need to be at the top of your peer group without being over-the-top. What do I mean by that. You need to look a lot like everyone else in your space (not My Space – your space), only better. Your goal is to be the belle of the ball.

 
If your ball is a bunch of 6’s – be an 8. If your industry is full of 4’s – be a six. If your crowd is all 8’s – you better be a 10. If in your industry your competitors are all selling online and you aren’t – that can be a red flag. If none of your competitors sell online and you do – that can be a red flag. If everyone’s site is blue and your’s is orange – that could be a red flag. The trick is to stand out without sticking out. You stick out if you are different in an unusual or bewildering way. You stand out if you are similar but of a higher quality. Take the same track but raise the bar 2 levels.

 
Now that doesn’t mean you can’t be innovative or a leader in your space. But be careful how far ahead of the pack you get. People, right or wrong, get suspicious of companies that are too different. If you have the time and the right environment – you can explain why you are so much better. But if someone is meeting you for the first time through your site – be conservative at the site.

 
Now the exception to this is if your industry just sucks from an online perspective. In that case you may want to bump up the bar more than a couple of notches.

 
Well, we’ve laid down a good basis. Next up is some detailed tips and techniques to get your trust level and credibility way up.

 
In episode 10 I’m looking to give you 50 tips in 20 minutes. Now usually I get this podcast out about every 2nd week. However, I’m due for a little vacation. But I don’t want to leave you hanging.

 
I’m going to do my best to get the next podcast out next week – trust me.

 
Here’s a little preview:

 
- Use gradients.
- Treat images
- Use proper grammar
- Spell correctly
- Check all links
- Update your copyright year
- Update your content
- List your physical address
- Avoid having a multi-hyphenated-url
- No out-of-the-box templates
- Include testimonials
- Have partial customer lists
- Send order acknowledgements
- Have a privacy policy
- Have shipping rates and policies easily found
- Have tax information easily found
- Make sure SSL certificates work
- Have a customer login area
- Have the shortest forms possible
- Link to credible industry sources
- Use the word “believe” instead of “think”
- and a whole lot more

 
Well, we’ll slow it down get it organized and add some comments. Don’t worry it will all get clear soon.

 
So - Subscribe to Drive It – Convert It!, and automatically download episode number 10 when it comes out.

 
You can follow the subscription links on our site. Or, if you use iTunes, do a search for drive it convert it and pick us up there. I’m John Boulter, for Bastion Internet’s Drive It – Convert It! podcast.

 
Visit us at bastioninternet.com or Email us at podcast@bastioninternet.com.

 
Suggested Tags: landing page design ppc email campaign conversion online sales ecommerce internet web marketing advertising website web design webdesign

 
Show Summary - Seven Steps to Effective Landing Pages:

 
1) Recognize the true value of a better landing page
2) Know your product
3) Know your target
4) Build based on your lead-in
5) Set you landing page objective
6) Design a superior landing page
7) Measure and test

 
Download the Podcast here:

 
Subscribe to Drive It - Convert It! here:

 
Read a full transcript here …
 

 
Hi and welcome to Drive It - Convert It!, for June 29th, 2006. This is episode #8: Converting Web Traffic – Part 2 – Seven steps to effective landing pages.

 
Drive It - Convert It! is the podcast where Small and Medium Sized businesses learn the marketing strategies and tactics behind Driving More Traffic to their website and Converting that Traffic into qualified and leads and sales.

 
Drive it, convert it.

 
I’m John Boulter. I’m the president of Bastion Internet and podcasts, show notes, and transcripts can be found at BastionInternet.com/podcast. That’s B A S T I O N internet.com/podcast.

 
I got a little behind with my podcast – thanks for hanging in there. I’m seeing the subscription numbers go up and up and was starting to feel really guilty about the delay in getting this latest podcast out.

 
Things have been busy and it’s gearing up to vacation season. All in all I’ve been squeezed for time. I always hesitate to tell people how busy I am because I just get no sympathy. Because we’re all busy – aren’t we.

 
But don’t be too busy to email me your questions, comments, or suggestions – email the show at podcast@bastioninternet.com.

 
Web visitors get driven to sites all the time – and they leave those sites – just as fast. The good news is – the site they are likely leaving is your competitor. You have the opportunity to get lots of high quality traffic into your business – your website. Handle it the right way and you’ll be as busy or as care free as you want to be.

 
There is a lot to go through, today. Here’s some extra motivation for you to keep you hanging in today. In a little while, just when you think good landing pages might be too much effort, whether you do them yourself or hire someone like Bastion Internet to help you – I am going to give you some truly inspirational information. If you’re anything like me, you won’t be able to wait to get started. You will not be able to contain yourself.

 
Let’s get going.

 
Here’s what we’ll be covering today.

 
1) Recognize the true value of a better landing page
2) Know your product
3) Know your target
4) Build based on your lead-in: lead in being an email or a Pay Per Click ad
5) Set you landing page objective
6) Design a superior landing page
7) Measure and test

 
1) Recognize the true value of a better landing page

 
Landing pages offer a huge return – there is no question about it – here’s why:

 
First it’s a leveraged return on investment. Do I sound like a banker, or a financial planner, oh well, if I must I must.

 
If you’re getting a 5% conversion rate - 5 visitors out of every 100 - you can raise your overall success by 60% by just convincing 3 more out of the remaining 95 to go with you, too. I did the math, trust me – it’s right.

 
Next - the rich get richer. You’ve heard me say that before. Now you’ve got to get on the right side of the rich/poor line – the rich side – so you can start getting richer, because the alternative is to get poorer.

 
How does that work - as you raise your conversion rate, you further justify your spend on the advertising. This can justify a higher pay per click bid, a better quality email blast design, or any number of other advertising expenditures. Spending more on driving more quality traffic will just keep the whole ball rolling.

 
Finally, bad conversion rates don’t just waste your click money, you’ve lost a customer.

 
I just finished reading the July issue of Business 2.0� there’s an article on Gamal Aziz, I hope I got that pronunciation right, he’s with the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. His claim to fame in the article is that he works backwards when looking at profitability. He looks at the potential of each venue - the restaurants, the rooms, the casino, the showrooms, to determine if that section of the hotel is on track. If it’s not reaching its potential, it’s losing money – even if it’s profitable now.

 
So if the restaurant is pulling in a million dollars with a 10% profit margin, he decides what the revenue for that space could be. If that potential is two million with a 15% profit margin, then the venue is actually losing him $200,000. I did the math, twice - trust me it’s right.

 
Now that might appear to be a harsh attitude, but that attitude has him improving profits of the various venues anywhere from 40% to 700% and more. And that is in one of the most competitive industries around.

 
So if you’re getting 1000 clicks and your converting 30 (for a 3% conversion rate), how much money are you leaving on the table by not converting 40 or 50 or a hundred, if it’s within your capability to do it.

 
You’re not going to sell everyone, but you better take your best crack at the one’s who come through the door.

 
2) Know your product

 
Look at your product from the web surfers’ perspective.

 
Is it an impulse buy type of product. Do you need to hit fast and hard. I’ve often run into situations where I need something now - for example recently I need a piece of software. I went did a little research and bought it within the hour.

 
Other times I need a service or it’s a larger purchase – my buy cycle might be a month or more.

 
Ask yourself what is the furthest you can push your conversion. I suppose you could sell a nuclear reactor online, but I doubt it. Can your service even be sold online. Is someone likely to even contact you on their first visit to your site.

 
How complex is your product. Is the user likely to know a lot about it. Have they likely already looked at your competitors.

 
Also, will the visitor be expecting to see your product when then click through.

 
What do I mean by that… For example, if the PPC ad or Email says “Quality Business Cards - Cheap” and it sends you to a printshop website. That’s expected.

 
Some time back I was doing some research for a dating site client I had. I was checking out some competitive ads. One of them took me to a page about God and not being lonely if I knew and accepted a fuller role for Him in my life. Now I’ll bet clickers weren’t expecting that when they clicked on the ad.

 
It can be an effective way to market - but it will make a difference as to how you deliver your message if the target is not expecting your product at the other end of the click.

 
Speaking of which …

 
3) Know your target

 
It seems I harp on this every podcast episode. Know who’s visiting. You’re ad will appeal to them, that’s why they clicked through. They will have a certain profile. Ask yourself

 
How motivated to buy are they.

 
Are they likely to buy now; will they be naturally trusting; will they spend time digging to get answers; are they likely to be fickle and impatient.

 
How savvy are they likely to be from a web perspective.

 
Also, building on that last thing about the product - will they be expecting your solution

 
Same idea as before – are they likely to be expecting the solution you are offering. If you’re trying to sell energy efficient lighting to companies searching for insulation products, you may be right in understanding that they want to reduce their energy costs, but it’s going to take a different kind of message on your landing page for them to make the connection between lights and insulation. You run the risk of a quick back-button. But you may get the reward of hitting them unexpectedly. Not my first choice, but perhaps worthy of some testing and measurement. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

 
4) Build based on your lead-in

 
Your landing page design will vary based on what drove the Visitor there.

 
Let’s look at 3 alternative ways to drive traffic, PPC Ads, Emails, and SEO.

 
Consistency is very important. Your landing page needs to be consistent with you lead in. If Visitors are coming from a text ad, you’ll want to have the same headline. Beyond that, you’ve got flexibility.

 
Now you may have 30 different ads running, or you may have PPC ads that pick up the keyword phrase the searcher typed in and replicate in automatically in the ad. Ideally you’ll have multiple landing pages that exactly match the specific PPC ad that drove that traffic.

 
Email - an email offer landing page needs to look like the email. So if you want to use your website’s design as a backdrop for your landing page, make sure you format your email appropriately. The design of the landing page should look like the design of the email and the offer should be the headline.

 
SEO – search engine optimization. This is harder. If you’re driving traffic organically, through the natural listings on the search engine results pages – you need to be careful. If you change that page, it may affect your ranking. However, if the page is getting you traffic but not converting for you – it’s likely worth the risk. Just do it slowly – over time. If you’ve got some images on the page, you can replace them with more direct or motivating images.� You can likely improve the “call to action” on the page, too, without affecting the basic makeup of the page.

 
5) Set your landing page objective

 
What do you want your landing page to achieve. Is it going to be the place where the client will sign up. Is it a single step away from them buying now. Is it a bridge to deeper material found in the rest of your site.

 
Let’s look at this in more detail. If your landing page is a conversion page, design with that in mind. You’ve got to pull out all the stops to get the conversion then and there. You’ll want to have a form, a paypal link, a phone number, whatever your action step is. It should be bold and make no apologies. You either win or lose right there.

 
Or - is your landing page the step before the conversion page.

 
Hey, you’ve come to the right place. I’ve told you a little more, now click through to sign up or buy.

 
If you sell a more complex product or service where your skeptical target market is more likely to want more information before giving up their email address to you or their phone number – you’ll be using the landing page as part of a process. It’s a bridge to your catalog or products page or somewhere else. Let the visitor know about the journey you’ll be taking them on and motivate them to start it now.

 
We’re almost at that inspirational news thing – hang in there. It’s coming up … but first, you need to know how to …

 
6) Design a superior landing page

 
The planning is done - time to design.

 
Your immediate objective – don’t let them leave. Your second objective – motivate them to leave – your way – by converting.

 
So, don’t let them leave – first - reinforce to the Visitor - they are in the right place

 
They’ll know they are in the right place because you’re going to do the following:

 
- You will repeat the exact headline of your PPC ad or your Email Offering as your landing page headline.
 
- You will not deviate from the look and feel of the email that drove them there.
 
- And - your landing page will remain consistent with the ad.

 
So in our lighting products example if the PPC ad said – “Better light – less energy”, that’s our landing page headline.

 
If our offer in our email was for a “Free Energy Audit”, that’s our heading.

 
I am amazed at how many product specific searches take me to home pages or category pages when the company could have sent me to the page with the actual product. They’re making me now search within their site – incredible. If I’m looking for an iPod, land me on an iPod page. Don’t land me on an MP3 player page. Don’t land me on your Home page. At least land me on the iPod page and better yet, land me on a page built specifically for someone coming from the PPC ad or email.

 
Now, your Visitor didn’t immediately click the back button – they stayed - so deliver your message - one message.

 
Maybe it’s a benefit statement with a lifestyle image shot. Maybe it’s a rhetorical question that drives home the point of your product.

 
“Tired of making your utility company rich?”

 
or

 
“We lower your energy costs and give you better lighting. Find out how”, accompanied by a form to get an emailed version of a “ten tips to cutting your lighting bill”.

 
Next – motivate the visitor to take action – to convert – or to cross the bridge to conversion.

 
Although they just met you –they now know you can be trusted. You’re a consistent company. You haven’t bait and switched on them. You haven’t wasted their time. You reinforced the message of the ad that drove them to your site.

 
Increase the trust – if you have a form asking for an email have a short statement beside the field stating that you don’t share email addresses and linking to your privacy policy.

 
You can have an endorsement easily seen and recognized as an authority in your industry (a utility company logo for the lighting firm, BBB logo, whatever)

 
Now – you provide one clear choice for the Visitor – click this button; fill in this form, click, and submit. The more choices the less chance of a conversion. So if you wrap your landing page in your website design and all your main site navigation is at the top, you will distract from your main goal. You’re offering many more choices that all distract. You may decide you want those choices available. Just don’t do it out of default.

 
Make the action as easy as possible. If you want the Visitor to sign up for a newsletter, you need one field – their email address. That would be ideal. Now, I’ll let you get away with a few more, but do you really need that fax number. Do you really need their address. Do you really need them to tell you what they are most interested in. Probably not – at least not at this point in your relationship with them.

 
If your conversion is to have them delve deeper into your site, I recommend you have a separate “click track” – a few pages that will tour them around. Your conversion button might be “Start Here”

 
Keep in mind, with every click decision, one choice you provide is to have them leave. And you will loose them eventually. No one stays forever. The trick is to get them to leave on your terms.

 
So let’s sum up the main points on design:

 
- don’t let them leave: be consistent, let them know they are in the right place, reinforce with a benefit statement and image.

 
- Motivate action: their next step is crystal clear

 
- Make it easy: the action step is concise.

 
There are many other subtle design considerations. There are good resources out on the web that go into some detail, do a search, or easier yet - call us. We’ll see what we can do for you.

 
Some things to look at when designing –

 
Should you offer any type of fallback position - yes or no – I know it violates one of our rules, but maybe your targets markets vary and you don’t want to loose that visitor by giving them only one choice.

 
So you want to hedge your bet. “Buy Now or click here to learn more” – ouch, two choices, should you do it.

 
“Sign up for our newsletter, or click here to explore our site in more detail” – ouch, should you do it.

 
Realistically, depending on your product or service, it may be best to offer a couple of next step options. It will hurt your number one choice, though. Whether you make it up with a lot of number 2, I’ll leave that up to you – no pun intended there.

 
Make sure your landing page design is consistent with your website. If the Visitor is likely to check out more of your site and you paid heavy dollars for a beautiful landing page however the site was designed by your nephew in college, you may want to tone the landing page down or up the site quality. If the two don’t match it may become a trust issue. It throws up a flag to the Visitor.

 
Design above the fold. For those that don’t know, “the fold” is where a newspaper folds. You get more action on stuff above the fold. So in the web world we put our main impact points, images, whatever, above the point where the webpage needs to be scrolled to see. Now this is going to range based on the Visitors’ browser (how many toolbars they have at the top of their browser), and their screen resolution.

 
Next - make the copy and images readable. Use large fonts, and black on white works best. Short sentences. Tenth grade reading level – max.

 
Quick load - optimize your images, limit non-essential graphics.

 
Eliminate unnecessary elements. Just the facts, ma’am. Don’t distract from your main point. No matter what you paid for that cool graphic.

 
Finally,

 
7) Measure and test

 
Measure your results and test different alternatives. This can get very technical and we aren’t going to get into the ins and outs of it today. Just make sure you can measure the specific results of each landing page. Also, play around with alternatives and compare the results of each.

 
Even we professionals who do this every day are surprised at how little changes can make a significant difference and quite often - we have no idea why. We only know it worked because we tried it and measured it.

 
Okay, time for the inspiring piece of news that will make you want to rush out there and get better designed landing pages.

 
Most landing pages suck – they absolutely suck – they really, truly, absolutely suck. Go to your search engine of choice, Google, Yahoo, whatever. Search on some terms and click on the sponsored ads. Now don’t go overboard, these advertisers are footing the bill for your research, but check it out.

 
See how atrocious the majority of the landing pages are. You’re going to see Home pages, category pages, pages with no direction, pages with so much text you’ll hit the Back button before you even realize your hand is moving.

 
So you know what this means. Even if you do only an ok job with your landing pages, you’ll likely kill your competitors. If you do a superior job either in-house or by hiring a firm like ours, you’ll be in a position to absolutely clean up.

 
Pilots have a saying. A good landing is one you can walk away from. Forget that. A good landing page is one that is smooth, powerful, and motivates your passenger to continue the journey.

 
And we will continue this journey next time.

 
Until then - Subscribe to Drive It – Convert It!, and automatically download episode number 9 when it comes out.

 
You can follow the subscription links on our site. Or, if you use iTunes, do a search for drive it convert it and pick us up there. I’m John Boulter, for Bastion Internet’s Drive It – Convert It! podcast.

 
Visit us at bastioninternet.com or Email us at podcast@bastioninternet.com.

 
Suggested Tags: conversion web ecommerce internet online web marketing promotion seo search engine optimization advertising website design webdesign

 
Show Summary:

 
Ten tips to improve website conversions.

 
1) Define your target
2) Define your objective
3) Define the offer and call to action
4) Define a conversion
5) Match ads to offers to landing pages
6) Vary your approach
7) Test, test, test
Audit your conversion process
9) Have a good overall design
10) Build a tracking methodology

 
Download the Podcast here:

 
Subscribe to Drive It - Convert It! here:

 
Read the full transcript here … …

 
Hi and welcome to Drive It - Convert It!, for June 9th, 2006. This is episode #7: Converting Web Traffic – Part 1 – Ten Tips to Higher Website Conversions.

 
Drive It - Convert It! is the podcast where Small and Medium Sized businesses learn the marketing strategies and tactics behind Driving More Traffic to their website and Converting

that Traffic into qualified and leads and sales.

 
Drive it, convert it.

 
I’m John Boulter. I’m the president of Bastion Internet and podcasts, show notes, and transcripts can be found at BastionInternet.com/podcast. That’s B A S T I O N

internet.com/podcast.

 
To paraphrase an old anecdote – “The good news is - we won. The bad news is - we won.”
That’s often how I feel when I talk to clients whose main goal was to get more web traffic to their site. In a minute I’m going to explain what I mean by that.

 
Before I do, I know we’ve got lots of new listeners out there – welcome. However, looking at the podcast stats, the new listeners typically go back and download all the past shows –

so they probably don’t feel like new listeners. So for everyone’s sake, I’ll just say, if you have questions, comments, or suggestions – email the show at podcast@bastioninternet.com.

 
Last episode we finished up a 4 part series on Search Engine Optimization. I was left feeling good about the “drive it” part of Drive It – Convert It!, but neglectful of the “convert

it” side of the coin. We’re about to change that.

 
There often seems to be a cycle to website development and strategy. Now it differs somewhat if you only do business over the Internet versus using the Internet to expand your

physical business. I see this cycle for companies that conduct business through traditional methods and use the Internet to support and expand their reach.

 
First, a company develops their website. It will often simply reflect that company’s physical strategy and way of doing business. So - in case a sales prospect forgets what the

salesman said after they leave an appointment, they can go to the website and read about it. Or in case the salesman forgets what to say – he can go study it at his own website.

 
The next phase is for companies to try to leverage the site. Up until now they’ve likely used the site in that sales support role. The website supports the activities of a field sales

force, other advertising, other marketing, and such. Now the strategy becomes one of website promotion. Companies realize what a valuable asset a website can be and they see the huge potential of

selling to brand new prospects through it. They just need to get them to the site.

 
So they embark on any number of traffic driving and website promotion strategies. They advertise via the search engines, the do search engine optimization to increase their rankings.

The do email campaigns. Maybe they even start a podcast – who knows. Now the traffic comes. User visits rise, but sales don’t.

 
So the good news is – they won the battle to get traffic. The bad news – they now have traffic, but it’s not converting into leads and sales.

 
So –what now.

 
Well, here are 10 things that I take a look at when trying to improve conversions for clients. This is going to be an overview. In future weeks, I’ll pick some of these items and

expand on them. In fact, the first two have already been the subject of past podcasts – in episodes 1 and 2.

 
Here they are:

 
- Define your target
- Define your objective
- Define the offer and call to action
- Define a conversion
- Match ads to offers to landing pages
- Vary your approach
- Test, test, test
- Audit your conversion process
- Have a good overall design
- Build a tracking methodology

 
So, let’s dive in.

 
1) Define your target

 
I discussed this at length in episode number 2, a few months back. You need to know who you are targeting if you are going to convert them. What do they look like. What do they smell

like. What do they talk like, read like. Then you need to make sure your site – or the particular part of your website you’re driving them to, is appropriate to them. New prospects are much

different then visitors to your site that have already had some contact with your company.

 
Write your target market profile down and refer to it constantly as you develop and refine your site. Always ask yourself the question – does this appeal to that audience.

 
2) Define your objective

 
I discussed this at length in the first episode of Drive It – Convert It!. Your site should have a definite objective. It may be to educate, to motivate, to sell, to support … You can

have more than one objective, motivate new prospects to call you, motivate old customers to place new orders … However, you should have a primary objective and focus for your site. Once again,

write it down and refer to it constantly through the process.

 
3) Define the offer and a call to action

 
Make sure that you have a clear and definite offer. Latch onto one or maybe two of your most attractive introductory products or services and focus on them. What is compelling about

them. What benefit will the visitor have in taking you up on the offer.

 
Now the offer may be to sign up for a newsletter, or get a free report or white paper concerning that offer. You don’t necessarily have to make your whole year’s revenue target off of

this first interaction. The idea is to get the client comfortable in dealing with you.

 
Hand in hand to this is the call to action. Users should easily see how to take advantage of your offer. They should be one or two clicks away from having completed their first

transaction with you. It may just be to sign up for more information or to send an email. Or it may be to get a free sample or quote. Or it may be to pull the trigger on a significant transaction

complete with their credit card number.

 
4) Define your conversion

 
What determines a conversion for you? Is it a phone call, an email, a credit card swipe… Make sure you are clear on what constitutes a conversion for you. That is the way you evaluate

your conversion success. Your website isn’t your company. Typically before the client buys, they’re going to have interaction with something, or someone, other than your website. They may email

someone, call someone, go into your physical location… If you don’t get the sale because of a rude receptionist or less than informed salesperson, you don’t want to change your website because of

it. Your site may be very successful at converting the user into a phone-calling prospect. You’ve got to know that so if your revenue targets aren’t hitting, you’re able to focus on the right

issues.

 
5. Match ads to offers to landing pages

 
If you have misleading ads, you might get a lot of traffic, but you won’t get many conversions. Now misleading ads might very well be accidental or just simply too general. They may

not be misleading to you, just to the people who stumble across them.

 
This comes about due to different meanings of words, too broad of a key phrase match, or sloppiness when writing the ad.

 
So it’s important to have content in your ads that helps define the offer. Then, the page linked to from the ad – the landing page - needs to reinforce that offer.

 
I’m definitely going to devote an entire future podcast to this item. It’s huge.

 
6. Vary your approach

 
When you are driving traffic to your site through online advertising, create a number of combinations of ads, landing pages, offers, etc. You’ll find that some work better than others

and that each may be effective for a different type of visitor.

 
You can use visual links - like images - to keep highly visually people on that kind of a track and more detailed links like text, to keep analytical people who enjoy more information

than less, on that kind of track.

 
It makes for more work on your website.� But what’s a new client worth to you over the life of that client.

 
7. Test, test, test

 
As a follow on to item 6, you need to test. Your gut feelings are often wrong. Sad but true. You are not your potential customer. You can’t help but know more than the website visitor

about your subject. You’ll overlook industry buzzwords that you use, product concepts… You’ll just naturally assume web visitors know more than they do. And, you will naturally think you know how

your client thinks. There’s a cause and effect trap here. You see, your current customers were attracted to you for a reason. You are already doing the things that attract those type of people

and companies. The people and companies that visit you for the first time via your website aren’t necessarily like your current client base.� Thus, what worked in the past or with other

audiences, probably won’t work with this audience, in the present.� A lot will, but a lot won’t.

 
I recommend you come up with at least a couple of approaches, that’s combinations of ads, offers, landing pages, and regular site pages - and test them out.

 
This is harder to do if you are driving traffic through the natural part of the search engines because you don’t control what page your visitor will be landing on.

 
We’ll definitely get more into this in future episodes, too.

 
8. Audit your conversion process

 
You need to have your grandmother go through the entire conversion process. Ideally, you’ll have your other grandmother do the same thing using a different computer, different

browser, bandwidth speed, etcetera, etcetera. Firewalls, anti-spyware setting, SSL certificate peculiarities, browser settings – they’ll all cause your site to act differently. The more anomalies

you can eliminate the higher your conversion rates will be.

 
I often picture 100 people landing on my site. Every time the site acts in a peculiar way to them, some will leave. Now some things I can’t help. If I want some Flash to make the

content more compelling and the user doesn’t have the flash plug-in, I’ll lose them. The objective is to make my losses my choice. I made a decision to use a technique to motivate some users

knowing that it will hurt my chances with others. If I have an SSL certificate that only works for the www version of my site, and yet my site can still be accessed without the www, then that is

just careless of me. I should not lose users because of a certificate mismatch.

 
9) Have a good overall design

 
Hey, if your design is ugly. You won’t convert as well. Bad haircut – fewer dates. It’s a fact.

 
Even if you spend some cash or resources on a beautiful landing page, if the rest of the site is bad – you are wasting a lot of opportunity.

 
I think the amount of money companies are willing to invest in the look and functionality of their site should be on the rise. So much time, effort and money is and will be spent on

driving traffic to your site, that to save a few thousand dollars on the design elements just doesn’t make sense.� You will continue to see a higher and higher quality of site.� You’ll need to be

prepared to match that.� Better yet – lead the way.

 
10. Build a tracking methodology

 
Decisions are only as good as the quality of the data supporting them. You need good data on conversions. There are lots of ways to skin this cat and you can phase it in, too.

 
At a minimum, make sure you’re asking your clients how they found out about you. Ideally, you should put in some tracking code to know where your conversions originated from.

 
Ultimately its going to be vital to know what your conversion rate is and what the profitability of a conversion translates into in order to establish an overall return on investment

rate.

 
If you’re just starting out, the fact that your ROI – return on investment - is positive will be pretty clear. You may just not know how much. However, as you spend more and in

different ways, you’ll need to be able to break that down into some detail. Does Yahoo deliver better than Google. Does natural searching deliver better than paid. Does email deliver at all. You

get the idea.

 
I love this stuff. There’s so much information available to you.� That information is also available to your target prospects and your competitors.� You have to step it up in the

business world. There’s more to know but so much more opportunity to go with it.

 
If you love to learn, stick with me. If you don’t – just hire us. Either way, I hope you’re enjoying listening.

 
If you have some specific situations you’d like me to comment on, either during the show or offline, let me know – drop me an email.

 
I want you to be comfortable dealing with Bastion Internet.

 
Until then…

 
Subscribe to Drive It – Convert It!, and automatically download episode number 8 when it comes out. You can follow the subscription links on our site. Or, if you use iTunes, do a

search for drive it convert it and pick us up there.

 
I’m John Boulter, for Bastion Internet’s Drive It – Convert It! podcast.

 
Visit us at bastioninternet.com or Email us at podcast@bastioninternet.com.

 
Show Summary:

 
Take-aways from this episode are:

 
1) What’s a link, what’s a backlink.
2) Why are links important (there’s a number of reasons)
3) How you can get links (and COULD doesn’t always mean SHOULD)
4) The future of linking

 
Shameless linking plug (add a bastioninternet.com/podcast/ link to your site - thank you very much!). Here’s the code to cut and paste:

 
To listen to a great <a href="http://www.bastioninternet.com/podcast/">Internet marketing podcast</a>, check out BastionInternet.com

 
Quick links:
 
Download the Podcast here:

 
Subscribe to Drive It – Convert It! here:

 
Read a full transcript here …  

 
Hi and welcome to Drive It - Convert It, for May 25, 2006. This is episode #6.

 
Search Engine Optimization – Part 4 – All About Linking.

 
Drive It - Convert It! is the podcast where Small and Medium Sized businesses learn the marketing strategies and tactics behind Driving More Traffic to your website and Converting that Traffic into qualified and identifiable leads and sales.

 
Drive it, convert it.

 
I’m John Boulter. I’m the president of Bastion Internet and podcasts, show notes, and transcripts can be found at BastionInternet.com/podcast. That’s B A S T I O N internet.com/podcast.

 
Links, links everywhere and not drop to drink. Linking is huge, but is it on the decline. Do you still need to pay attention to this or are you better off heading off to the next big SEO tactic. We’ll find out.

 
Well, the Drive It – Convert It! podcast subscriber numbers are growing – welcome back alumni! And like always, if you’re new, welcome aboard. Thanks for the emails. I think we had some great dialogue back and forth. Please, if you have questions, comments, or suggestions – email the show at podcast@bastioninternet.com.

 
Last episode we discussed Keyword Targeting. How to determine the best words and phrases to focus on to drive more traffic to your site. Now - onward and upward.

 
This is the 4th and last show (for now) in our Search Engine Optimization series. At least from a general perspective. It the future we’ll touch on a lot of SEO areas but they’ll be more targeted and integrated to other strategies and less general in nature.

 
The purpose of this 4 part series has been to get you familiar with the main components of optimizing your website for the search engines. This and the last 3 episodes of this have been meant to build your base knowledge from a strategic standpoint while giving you some technical background and tips..

 
Take-aways from this episode are:

1) What’s a link, what’s a backlink.
2) Why are links important (there’s a number of reasons)
3) How you can get links (and COULD doesn’t always mean SHOULD)
4) The future of linking

 
Let me start by saying that of all the subjects this one is probably the biggest from an opinion perspective. Everybody’s got one. There is also a huge amount of area to cover. I am certainly not going to be able to get to it all in the next 20 minutes or so. So, if you’re tasked with getting links for your website, get on the internet and start digging around. There’s a wealth of information. What’s that old phrase “caveat emptor” – let the linker beware, a lot of it is conjecture and opinion. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong.

 
What I’ll be covering is what I believe is the best strategy for an ongoing program. Something that won’t go out of date too quickly. Like always I’ll throw in some tactical tips, too.

 
1) So let’s start with what exactly is a link – and, what is a back-link.

 
A link is something that you can click on that takes you somewhere. Internal links are on your own site and take you to other places on your site. Outgoing links are links on your site that take the clicker off of your site and to someone else’s site.

 
Finally, a backlink. A backlink is a link that brings traffic to your site from someone else’s site. This is where we’ll be spending most of our time.

 
2) Why are links important

 
Links share the wealth. The Internet is a place for information. All that information can’t be kept in one place. Also, it isn’t best kept by one person or in one format. So people who manage websites link to other places on their site (an internal link), or to someone else’s site (an outgoing link), to give their Users a better overall experience.

 
Now in the days before good search engines, sites used to have whole pages of links to help send traffic to other good sites for additional information. So it was good if other sites linked to you to (a back-link), because you could potentially get traffic from that.

 
When I used to manage client sites 7 or 8 years ago, sites used to have pages called “Favorites” or something similar where they listed websites they thought would potentially add to their User’s experience.

 
Now as Search Engines like Alta Vista and directories like Yahoo became known, Users found they could get better results there than on the random websites they happened across. So links started becoming less important. However, the smart sites still always wanted back-links to help drive traffic.

 
And then along came Google. Now you know that this company had to have California roots, because they decided it wasn’t “what you knew”, but “who you knew”, or at least who knew you. They reasoned that the more people that pointed to you, the more knowledgeable or important you must be. So when they delivered search engine results, they factored in how many people were linking to you. The Google search engine results seemed to be much more relevant than their competition, so more and more Users chose Google as their search engine of choice. And the rest is $400 a share history.

 
It didn’t take too long for people to discover that the more links they got to their site the higher they would rank.

 
So you had a double bonus from back-links. Natural traffic would be driven to your site from the link itself, but seemingly more important was that your search engine rankings would go up and more traffic would come to you from those search engines.

 
Of course this started the whole cat and mouse game of webmasters getting links just for the sake of search engine results and the search engines trying to figure out which links should affect site importance and which shouldn’t. This game has been going on for a few years and will likely last at least a little while longer.

 
So there are two important reasons (or maybe 3), to get links:

 
- Natural traffic will be directly driven to you by the link
- You’ll rise in engine rankings and get more traffic that way
- And maybe, you’ll actually help keep this great Internet experiment going by giving and getting links and helping people find good information (or is that just too idealistic). Okay let’s stick with the first two.

 
Okay, so we know what links are and why they’re important.

 
3) How do you get them.

 
A bunch of ways. You need to understand those ways and then decide on what’s right for you:

 
- First: you can buy them. This is the easiest and quickest way. Also, potentially the most dangerous. Because the search engines want to reward natural, quality links, they, by default, need to figure out how to penalize or at least ignore unnaturally procured links. If you buy, you are dependant upon the quality of your link broker as to how well they place your purchases. And, you run a higher risk of getting identified as a site buying links and possibly get punished in the rankings for your efforts.

 
However, if you need links quickly and the risk is worth it, this can be an effective way to do it. You’ll likely only get rankings benefit. It’s a lot less likely that people will actually click on a purchased link – with some exceptions.

 
(Sometimes I think I should have named my company “with some exceptions” it seems like that I’m always saying that)

 
Now, no one clicking isn’t always the case. If you find a site where you’d like them to link to you because it makes sense, and you pay that site owner to link to you, that’s really like an advertisement. I think it makes total sense. Because you are likely relevant, there’s less risk of a downside.

 
You can also buy links on Directory sites. The most famous is the Yahoo directory. These links can cost anywhere from a few bucks to hundreds of dollars. There are also free directory sites out there. A lot are overused, but may still be worth signing up for.

 
- Second – trade links. AKA also known as reciprocal linking. You link to me and I’ll link to you. This was pretty huge for awhile. The Search Engines have been warning against this recently and have been trying to scare people off of this strategy.

 
I have a general thought. Chances are that the more threats you hear from the engines the less likely they have actually got their algorithms in place. Otherwise, they’d simply state their policy and let their algorithm and ranking results do the talking. So, I don’t know how much risk you have in this area. However, it’s likely that in the long run this will have a highly diminished affect.

 
One thing to also remember, is that it’s very difficult to have links removed. If you have been trading links with a “bad” site, and eventually you get penalized for it, it might be tough to convince the “bad” site to then take you off of their list. They may just not want to take the time or spend the effort.

 
- Third – ask. I like this one the best. Ask people to link to you where it makes sense. Customers, vendors, people in complementary industries. Let them know why it’s in their best interest to link to you. If you’ve already got some sort of business relationship with them, they’ll likely do it. They may ask for a link back to them – fine – do it, if it makes sense.

 
I guess another type of ask, although it is a lower quality one, is to go out and put links to your own sites on other people’s blogs and on forums. I think this one has seen it’s day, though. My general belief is that anytime you do something for the sole purpose of SEO, it usually will backfire. If you’ve got something of value to say and a link back to your site is beneficial to your post – do it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t

 
- Forth – attract This is the best for results. If you can attract links naturally, you’ll almost never go wrong. In order to do this you need what’s becoming known as “link bait”. Some sort of attractive lure that others will be motivated to link to. Good examples are tools (say a mortgage calculator), a good white paper, a study, a list, a funny article, a controversial blog.

 
Something that other sites will want to send their Users to because it makes them look good and it’s good for their Users.

 
Now here’s the Catch 22. How do you attract other sites to your site so they learn about your incredibly cool and informative link bait if you’re not ranking well to begin with because you don’t have enough links. I hate it when that happens.

 
No magic answer here. It’s a matter of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Once you get some richness you’ll attract more. The more you attract the richer (in links) you become. So you’ve got to do it the American way – work your butt off to get over that line and become one of the “haves” and no longer a “have not”. Or, you can try that other American way and just try to buy your way in (see item # 1).

 
Pick a strategy that works for your company. Like always, I try to leverage short term effort into short and long term results. I’ll sacrifice a little now for more later. But that’s just me.

 
4) The future of linking

 
Tough one. I could go a few ways on this.

 
I could see a scenario where the search engines get so good with their algorithms that only the naturally occurring links are likely to give you a rankings boost.

 
However, I have even more confidence in the ingenuity of the masses. It seems more likely to me that there will be so many contrived yet well disguised link strategies in use out there that they become meaningless from a ranking perspective.

 
Thus only the purest of links will benefit you.

 
So my advice is this:

 
Natural links will always drive natural traffic. You can’t lose. Plus, it’s likely that these high quality links will continue to be recognized at least somewhat by the engines. That should be your first priority.

 
However, timing is everything. You don’t want to be left out in the cold until the engines figure it all out. So go after some good second tier links – buy from good sources (ones that have a chance to have people click on them, too), and go after relevant reciprocal links. Sites where it actually makes sense to be found.

 
A good rule of thumb – if it looks like your link belongs on that other site – it probably does.

 
Wow – linking is always intense. Time has flown and it’s almost time to wrap up. But before I do, a couple of very important things.

 
I need to ask you something – if you’ve gotten some value from these podcasts, it would probably add to your website visitors experience to link to bastioninternet.com. And when you do, use some good, descriptive anchor text (that’s the actual text that contains the link), like “ Internet Marketing Specialists” or “Search Engine Optimization Experts” or something like that.

 
See the show notes for some specifics.

 
Now we’re ready to wrap – that is episode #7 – All About Linking.

 
Next episode we’re going to flip to the “Convert It” side of “Drive It – Convert It!”. Be sure to take it in.

 
Subscribe to Drive It – Convert It!, and automatically download episode number 7 when it comes out. You can follow the subscription links on our site. Or if you use iTunes, do a search for drive it convert it and pick us up there.

 
I’m John Boulter, for Bastion Internet’s Drive It – Convert It! Podcast.

 
Visit us at bastioninternet.com or Email us at podcast@bastioninternet.com.

 
Show Summary:

 
1) Why Keyword Phrases are important.

 
The search engines and searchers are all focused on them – at least for now.

 
2) How to determine what phrases you want to target

 
Look at the nouns and adjectives that describe your company. Modify and qualify with industry niches, geographic locations, and alternate phrasing.

 
3) Technical processes to determine which phrases and terms to target

 
A few methods to see which terms are going to give you the biggest bang with the least competition.

 
4) Ensuring your website is being developed and maintained to take advantage of keywords in search.

 
Make sure your site is heading in the right direction

 
Some quick links I refer to:

 
- Yahoo Search Marketing tools

 
My Odeo Channel (odeo/1bf9f36afb79290e)

 
Download the Podcast here:

 
Subscribe to Drive It – Convert It! here:

 
Read the full transcript here …
 

 
Hi and welcome to Drive It - Convert It, for May 12, 2006. This is episode #5.

 
Search Engine Optimization – Part 3 – Keyword Targeting.

 
Drive It - Convert It! is the podcast where Small and Medium Sized businesses learn the marketing strategies and tactics behind Driving More Traffic to your website and Converting that Traffic into qualified and identifiable leads and sales.

 
Drive it, convert it.

 
I’m John Boulter. I’m the president of Bastion Internet and podcasts, show notes, and transcripts can be found at BastionInternet.com/podcast. That’s B A S T I O N internet.com/podcast.

 
Today we’re going to look at how to determine your keyword targets. I’ll give you a solid background for strategy and some great tips to get you up to speed.

 
If you’re a returning visitor – welcome back. If you’re new, welcome aboard. I appreciate the emails you’re sending and hope I’ve been able to answer some of your further questions. If you want to send an email – please do – email us at podcast@bastioninternet.com

 
Last episode we discussed on-page coding of your website. The basics and strategy behind making sure your site is properly coded to get you great results.

 
But that’s yesterday’s news, isn’t it. We are onto the exciting world of Keyword Targeting

 
This is the 3rd in my Search Engine Optimization series. The purpose of the series is to get you familiar with the main components of optimizing your website for the search engines. This series is meant to build your base knowledge from a strategic standpoint while giving you some technical background and tips to get everything meshed into place.

 
What I’d like you to take away from our Keyword Targeting episode is this:

 
1)    Why Keyword Phrases are important – seems obvious but I’ll address it never-the-less
2)    How to determine what phrases you want to target – a little trickier
3)    Some technical basics on which phrases and terms to target
4)    From a strategic level - how to ensure your website is being developed and maintained to take advantage of keywords in search.

 
1) Why are keywords and key phrases important. Well, if you want to be found in the search engines, you want your site to be optimized for what your potential customers are likely to search for.

 
I’m a pretty big fan of content. If you have a lot of content (that’s mostly revolving around text), you can’t help but to include a lot of top keywords and keyword phrases. It will be pretty natural in your writing. However, there are so many sites out there, that if you want to rank highly and drive qualified traffic to your site, you need to make sure you’re putting the odds in your favor.

 
You need to write content with keywords in mind (listen to show number 3 for more on content). You also need to have your on-page coding focused on your keywords (listen to show number 4 for more on that).

 
So currently at least, the world is searching on specific words and finding you based on those words. That may change somewhat in the future, but that’s how it is now and likely won’t stray too far from that at least in the near future.

 
There is a lot of discussion regarding the various search engine companies’ efforts to get better at analyzing synonyms and using that as a weighting factor for relevance. We also have some big tagging trends. However, the principles of determining targeted terms are going to remain largely the same.

 
2) Determining your phrases

 
Well, it boils down to nouns and adjectives. So if you still keep in touch with you elementary school teacher, they could be a very good resource here.

 
Nouns represent the broader terms. Adjectives will narrow or refine those terms.

 
So, lets say you run a catering business, your nouns might be
- parties
- celebrations
- catering
- lunch

 
Now let’s add some adjectives

 
- birthday, business, wedding, graduation

 
So you have 4 nouns and 4 adjective. That should give us 16 potential terms if we mix and match -

 
Birthday parties
Birthday celebrations
Birthday catering
Birthday lunch

 
Business parties
Business celebrations
Business catering
Business lunch

 
And so on.

 
Now some terms won’t make much sense or they’ll be too unusual or too generic. You’ll eventually have to weigh your assets and resources versus your terms. In other words you’ll want to get the biggest bang for your buck. But let’s not worry about that now. More on that later.

 
Some other adjective categories can include industries or potentially a geographic focus

 
Los Angeles wedding catering

 
So if you specialize or have niches, those will be very important. Your level of catering (no pun intended) to your niches, will often depend on how competitive the broader terms are. If you can’t score highly on the broader term, go for the niche term.

 
You’ll also want to consider some company specific terms like brands, company names, product names, and the like.

 
Additionally, you might need to substitute “Catering” for “Caterer”

 
So pretty soon you can have a really big list. It doesn’t take long to get up to 100 or 200 phrases.

 
Even so, you’ll also want to check out your competitors. What words and terms are they focusing on.

 
Let’s spend a minute to talk about that.

 
Next time you have access to the web, type a term into Google or Yahoo or MSN that you think you’d like to rank highly for. See who comes up near the top. Pick one of the higher results (make sure it’s one of the free or organic listings and not a paid or sponsored listing). Go to that company and check out their pages. Look at their Title Tags. Look at their Meta Tag Keywords. Look at their main content H1 headings.

 
If you’re unsure of how to do any of that, download the last Drive It – Convert It podcast – show number 4 - or visit the show notes at bastioninternet.com/podcast. I’ve got some instructions on how to do those things.

 
See if your competitors have thought of any good terms that you don’t already have on your list.

 
Now down the road, as people come to your site through searches or pay per click ads, you’ll also get additional information on what your web visitors are also typing into the search boxes through analyzing your log files and statistics reports.

 
A great final contributor can be your current customers. Ask them what they’d search for to find the type of services you offer. Often you and your competitors are so into what you’re doing and are so familiar with the buzz words of your own industry that you miss a lot of the terms that might be common with potential customers but aren’t in your industry’s jargon list.

 
For example, we may find that your target market for “Los Angeles Wedding Catering” is far more likely to search for “food for wedding receptions in LA”

 
So bounce some keywords off your customers.

 
Anyway, by now you’re going to have a pretty comprehensive list.

 
3) Now we need use a little technology to find the biggest bang for our buck.

 
There are lots of ways to do this. I’m going to cover a few basic yet fairly comprehensive ways.

 
- first, we’ll rank the popularity of our terms
- second, we’ll look at the competitiveness of ranking for that term
- finally, we’ll look at the vulnerability of our competition where that term is concerned

 
So we’ll start by listing our terms. Putting them into an Excel spreadsheet can be a pretty easy method.

 
Then you’ll want to navigate to the Yahoo Search Marketing tool:

 
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/ (and yes, I’ll have that posted on the show transcripts page at bastioninternet.com/podcast

 
now go to the “Keyword Selector Tool” under the Tools selection. This tool provides counts of how many Yahoo searchers searched on particular terms in the past month.

 
Cut and past each term from your spreadsheet into the tool and see what the results are. Now this is better used to judge the relative quality behind the terms. Which terms are more popular than others. Don’t use the raw number to make too many judgments. They can be off. Plus, this is only one engine with about 25% of the search market share.

 
So I find that “Wedding Catering” returned 4466.
“Wedding Caterer” returned 5063

 
“Wedding Caterer” was a little higher.

 
Now, “Los Angeles Wedding Caterer” returned 54

 
Add the results to your spreadsheet.

 
Second, let’s look at the relative competitiveness. Do this one of two ways.

 
If you’ve got a Pay Per Click account with Google or Yahoo, you can use their traffic estimators and bid tools to see how much people are willing to pay for the term. That gives you an indication of how competitive it is.

 
Or, go to Google and do a special search. Type in allintitle: yourterm

 
That will show you how many pages out there are also doing a level of optimization for that term.

 
Once again, these are more useful as relative ranking indicators.

 
So

 
Los Angeles Wedding Caterer 37
Wedding Caterer 11,400
Wedding Catering 73,200

 
So we see that Wedding Caterer is far less competitive than Wedding Catering, yet Wedding Caterer is actually searched on slightly more according to our Yahoo Keyword tool

 
So if our site truly would be relevant to someone searching for a Wedding Caterer, then we would do well to optimize for that term above wedding catering. Now we may likely optimize for both in this case, but you get the idea.

 
Additionally, adding the qualifier “Los Angeles” resulting in 1/100th of the popularity, but about 1/300th of the competition.

 
Another reason we’ll need to prioritize our terms regards linking anchor text.

 
In the next Podcast – we’ll look at linking. We may have to make choices as to how and where to get links to our site. At that point, we’ll need to prioritize search terms. So knowing that Caterer is a better bet than Catering is going to help us make some decisions.

 
Third - we need to see if it’s viable to displace whomever is ranking now for our target term. This gets a little trickier to do if you aren’t in this game as a professional.

 
Here’s a couple of quickie ways.

 
View the top 5 sites. Look at their content. Look at their on-page coding. Then get an idea of how many sites are linking to them. Do this by going to Yahoo and typing “linkdomain:http://www.TheSiteName.xxx). See how many links to that domain it shows. Do the same for all the sites. Are the number of links in the hundreds (manageable), thousands (a lot tougher), the 10s of thousands (lookout).

 
Get an overall feel for what kind of sites you’re up against. Judge them on content, on-page coding, and link popularity.

 
Let’s move on to

 
4) Reviewing your overall site strategy.

 
As the owner of your business or as a marketer for your company, it’s important that you set a tone for how your website is evolving. Your site needs to have focus. It also needs to have depth if you’re to do well over time in the area of Search Engine Optimization. Make sure that you are developing enough content to cover off many potential search terms.

 
If geographic adjectives are important to people wanting to do business with a company like yours, make sure you have sections that will focus on that. If you serve different industries and your likely customers will be including those type of terms in their searches, make sure you have sections devoted to those industries.

 
As search and the web gets more and more crowded and as searchers become more sophisticated, they’ll be lengthening the number of words they use for a search query. Get ahead of the game by having more content and focused content.

 
A final reason you’re going to need to prioritize search terms is that you likely you won’t have the resources to do everything at once.

 
Key in on the most popular terms that are relevant to your site where you believe the competition is vulnerable.

 
However, don’t forget that the narrow terms often convert better. A person searching for Los Angeles Wedding Caterer and finding your Los Angeles based business is more likely to Convert than someone from St. Louis searching for the broader term Wedding Caterer and finding your Los Angeles based site.

 
That wraps up episode #5 – Keyword Targeting.

 
Next episode will be Part 4 of driving traffic to your site through Search Engine Optimization. It will be “All About Linking”. Getting links is huge right now and will definitely be an ongoing contributor to your overall SEO success.

 
Be sure to download that podcast. Look for new podcasts every 2nd week or so from me. Occasionally, if I’m really flying, maybe as frequent as once a week. But you just need to subscribe to the podcast and you’ll get it as soon as it comes out without having to always check.

 
So subscribe to Drive It – Convert It!, and automatically download episode number 6 when it comes out. You can follow the subscription links on our site. Or if you use iTunes, do a search for drive it convert it and pick us up there.

 
I’m John Boulter, for Bastion Internet’s Drive It – Convert It! Podcast.

 
Visit us at bastioninternet.com or Email us at podcast@bastioninternet.com.

 
Click the “more” link below for a full transcript of the show.

 
Here is a summary:

 
(Note: In this podcast, on occasion I refer to the “Content” meta tag. That should be the “Description” meta tag. I guess my “Content is King” theme from Show #3 stayed with me a little too strongly. Sorry for any confusion.)

 
The code you use on your web pages was designed to tell users more about that page. Thus, it also tells search engines more about your page.  Over the past 5 years the importance of that code has diminished somewhat, but it is still a valuable tool for both the viewers of your page and for the search engine crawlers.

 
First it’s important to have an understanding of the web itself and how it works. I briefly discuss and explain the following:

 
1) What is the Internet
2) Web Page Technology
3) How crawlers crawl
4) HTML – the language of the web
5) Specific on-page coding

 
Within Item 5 – Specific on-page coding, I take a look at 7 items that can help you to higher rankings:

 
1) Title Tag
2) Alt Attributes
3) Headings tags (like an H1 tag)
4) Meta tag – Description
5) Meta tag – Keywords
6) Internal linking structure
7) Clean code

 
(see examples here)

 
This is not a tutorial but is meant to give you an understanding of the relative importance of on-page coding, it’s likely importance in the future, and some of the top areas to examine if you want to pursue your on-page coding in more detail.

 
If you’d like to get more into the details, there is one excellent resource at www.seomoz.org. I also recommend frequenting www.searchenginewatch.com and www.webmasterworld.com.

 
Download the Podcast here:

 
Subscribe to Drive It – Convert It! here:

 
Read a full transcript here …

 
Hi and welcome to Drive It - Convert It, for April 27th, 2006. This is episode #4.

 
Search Engine Optimization – Part 2 – On-page Coding.

 
Drive It - Convert It is the podcast where Small and Medium Sized businesses learn the marketing strategies and tactics behind Driving More Traffic to your website and Converting that Traffic into qualified and identifiable leads and sales.

 
Drive It Convert It

 
I’m John Boulter. I’m the president of Bastion Internet and podcasts and show notes can be found at BastionInternet.com/podcast. That’s B A S T I O N internet.com/podcast.

 
Today we’re going to look at how special coding can work on your site to improve your overall rankings. I’ll give you a checklist to go through to make sure your site is adequately coded.

 
Welcome back to you returning visitors. If you’re new, welcome aboard.

 
Last episode we discussed the content of your website. How important it is to have good, original content and how to get that job done.

 
It’s probably a good time to also review the scope and intension of these podcasts. The main focus is to arm you, the business person or marketer with the information you need to adequately communicate and direct the Internet Marketing efforts being made on behalf of your site.

 
If you are a do-it-yourselfer, and are looking to learn how to do all the detail work yourself, then you’ll need to use these podcasts only as a starting point. They aren’t meant to be full tutorials. Use the Drive It – Convert It! podcasts to 1) nail down the business strategy and 2) familiarize yourself with the technology at a high level.

 
I’m going to list in the show notes some excellent sites that you can visit to get deeper into the technology if that’s where you want to go. Here are a few great resources:

 
- seomoz.org
- sewatch.org
- webmasterworld.org

 
So for those of you that want to be able to talk to the techs in your life without them looking down their noses at you, listen on. And for you techs listening in, you might be able to find a few good analogies to help you communicate the importance of technology to those simply looking at a website from a pictures and colors point of view.

 
So what is on-page coding. To explain this, I have to make sure we’re all starting with a base level of knowledge. Here’s how we’ll break it down.

 
1) What is the Internet
2) Web Page Technology
3) How crawlers crawl
4) HTML – the language of the web
5) Specific on-page coding

 
1) What is the Internet

 
Picture the Internet like the road system. You live on a street. Multiple streets connect your neighborhood. You have roads connecting your neighborhood to your city.
You have highways connecting your city to the state. And finally, you have interstate highways connecting your state to the rest of the country.

 
So once you step onto the street, you are basically connected to every single place in the country that is also connected to a street.

 
Now, also connected to these roads are buildings. You have two kinds - commercial buildings and residential buildings.

 
So think of the Internet as simply a bunch of roads on which you can travel anywhere. The commercial buildings are those places that have websites. The residential buildings are where people live. You can send and receive mail from there, but you aren’t open for business.

 
Computers that are specially set up to host a website are like the commercial buildings. Computers just set up to access the web are like residential buildings.

 
That’s it. Now you understand the Internet.

 
2) Web Page Technology

 
I know I’ve got listeners out there at all different technical levels. So, if some of this is old hat to you, bare with me.

 
When you want to learn about a business, you hop in your car, travel out to a commercial building, let’s say a retail store, and go in and look around.

 
Now with the web, you tell your computer to hop onto the road (i.e. the Internet) and travel to the store. Now your computer in reality never actually goes into the store. It just sends a message telling the store’s computer to send some information about the business. The store’s computer sends it, and your computer loads it up for you to read.

 
The information your computer receives isn’t all pretty and easy to understand, it’s just a bunch of lines of computer code. You need software to look at that code and turn it into something that makes sense and is easy on the eyes. That software is called a browser. You probably know it by names such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, or Netscape.

 
Your Internet Explorer reads that computer code and transforms it into a pretty, easy to follow website. All this is being done on your local computer using your installed software.

 
Now, if you’ve never done this, you need to. The next time you are on a website go to your browser’s menu and click on View, and then on Source, or Page Source.

 
You’ll see a whole bunch of computer code that if you’re not real familiar with it, looks like a bunch of gobbledygook. That gobbledygook is what your computer reads and more importantly, it’s what a Search Engine Crawler reads.

 
So each web page is really just a file – a bunch of lines of code - located on another computer that gets transferred to your computer when you click on something.

 
3) Search Engine Crawlers.

 
So, we know how the Internet works and we know what a web page actually is – a bunch of code. How do Search Engines work. Well, what they do is they write these little programs called crawlers or bots (that’s short for robots). The bots go out to your site and get the code from the web pages and they read it. They then send the information back to their main computers where it gets indexed and stored. Part of the procedure is to “score it” for the purpose of ranking the results when people search for terms that match that page.

 
The bots will also come across code that is a link to another page on your site, or a page on a different site. They’ll follow that link and then read what’s on that page. By doing this, they eventually crawl the entire Internet (or so they’d like you to think).

 
Now bots are capable, but they aren’t very smart. If you’ve constructed your site in such a way that they can’t follow a link, they won’t make an educated guess, they’ll just leave the way they came. More on that later.

 
4) HTML – the language of the web

 
Our final piece of background information is HTML. HTML is the main programming or scripting language that is used to construct web pages. For the most part, it’s what tells the browsers how to display a good looking site. The bots understand HTML.

 
HTML has different ways to classify and understand what to do. There are things called tags. A Title tag, is a piece of HTML code that tells a browser to display the text attached to it at the very top of the browsers window.

 
A paragraph tag tells the browser that all the words that follow it are regular text that is part of a paragraph. The browser displays this, too.

 
You may have heard of something called a meta tag. That’s a type of code or element that the browser doesn’t display. However, the bots, know what it is, and they can use the information that’s attached to it to help them classify or index your site.

 
Wow! You are a techie star. You know how the Internet works, you know how websites work, you understand how search engines work, and you understand the language of the web – HTML.

 
Now we need to put it to good use.

 
5) Specific on-page coding

 
Different search engines are going to weight on-page coding differently. For example, MSN may put some weight (give some value) on the Meta tag - Keywords whereas Google may hardly consider it at all.

 
Additionally, the engines will change the way they value, or weight, the different components from time to time.

 
What I’m recommending you do, is to make sure you’ve got the basics covered.

 
Let’s look in some detail at 5 on-page coding components and talk about 2 others for a total of 7 items:

 
There are more, but if you cover these off, you’ll be in pretty good shape.

 
1) Title Tag
2) Alt Attributes
3) Headings tags (like an H1 tag)
4) Meta tag – Description
5) Meta tag – Keywords
6) Internal linking structure
7) Clean code
 
I’ll post links to examples of each of these components in the show notes. I’ll put the links both in the Summary and in the transcript area of the show notes.

 
Here is where I’ve gotten a little ahead of myself with the podcast series. You see, all this optimization is going to revolve around your targeted keyword and keyword phrases. I haven’t really gotten into how you determine how to choose the best keywords. We’ll get to that next show – so between now and then, start considering it.

 
1) Title Tag

 
(Example of Title Tag)

 
Many of you have probably never even noticed this. It does show up on your browser screen, but it’s not actually a part of the web page area. It is way up in the top left corner above the browsers menu. Look above the File menu button and you’ll see it.

 
Search engines read it and use it to determine what your page is about. So you want to tell them.

 
This is also the text used when someone bookmarks your page. Don’t try to stuff everything in. Generally, go with a keyword phase (2-4 words and then I usually put some branding like the company name). Now make sure that you’ve repeated whatever the keyword phrase is in the content of the page.

 
2) Alt Attributes

 
Back in the day, people with dial up Internet access would sometimes turn off images on their browser to make pages load faster. Browsers would then display an alternate text description of the image. So if you had a picture of people at a party and your page was describing your Disc Jockey service, you might put as an Alt Attribute “Party enjoying DJ service”. Now part of Alt Attributes is that they are also used by the blind who use screen readers to describe what an image is telling them. So, try to make the description really describe the action, too.

 
I don’t want to try to tell you over this podcast how the code actually looks. Come to the bastioninternet.com website to view an example if you’re going to be doing this yourself.

 
If you’re using the Firefox browser, it’s really easy to see if your site has Alt tags. Just right-click on an image and select “properties”. It will then display a box that includes the Alternate text. In other browsers, find where you can unselect showing images and the images will be replaced with the Alt Attribute text. In Internet Explorer it’s found under Tools – Internet Options – Advanced – Show Pictures.

 
Finally, you can view the page source and search for the word “img”. “img” denotes an image and immediately following it is typically the Alt Attribute.

 
Opinions vary on how much weight the Alt Attribute has on overall ranking especially if the graphic is also a link. I say, put it in. In makes sense to do it on a number of different levels.

 
3) Heading Tags (H1, H2, etc)

 
(Example image)

 
These are typically the first words of content (that’s the page text not counting menus, images and the like). I consider this the headline of the page – like a newspaper has a headline.

 
Anyway, by denoting something as an H1 Title you are giving it more importance (and usually more font size). Make sure each page has one and preferably it will include the same keyword phrase or variation of it, found in the Title Tag. Now if it just looks stupid because it makes for a poor headline then consider ignoring it. If your page sells better with a different headline, then don’t lose sleep over it.

 
Now further down in the page you can have sub-headings at the H2 and H3 levels or in a Bold or Strong font. This may or may not have a impact on rankings, but it will probably make your page easier to skim and read. So do it.

 
4) Meta tag – Description

 
(Insert Example image)

 
Meta tags are HTML elements that are used to store data about a web file (or page). They don’t show on the web page but are read by search engine crawlers.

 
The Discription meta tag consists of a few sentences which should describe the specific web page. You can have a different Description meta tag for each page on your website.

 
Most SEO professionals believe that this element has basically become meaningless as far as impacting your ranking. You see, it was vastly overdone and abused in the past. Many webmasters put misleading and “spammy” descriptions in solely to get better rankings for their sites in areas where the web page wasn’t relevant.

 
I give it some attention for 2 reasons:

 
First, it can be the content that gets picked up and displayed on a search engine results page. So if it’s compelling copy, it makes your search listing more likely to be clicked.

 
Second, what goes around comes around. It’s like men’s ties, never throw them out because eventually they come back into style.

 
Let me expand on this a little. Every time the search engines figure out a better way to evaluate sites, the webmasters and SEO professionals start to exploit them. So the search engines have to come up with new ways to base their evaluations and rankings. Well, they’ve pretty much run out of ways. Now, they just have to get better at evaluating the information that is there. So when too many people abused the Description Meta tag by misrepresenting what their page was actually about, the search engines just started ignoring that element. Soon, I believe the engines will take a look at it again with now improved technology to judge the relevance of that tag to the rest of the website’s content.

 
Bottom line –do it now and you won’t have to worry about it.

 
Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch had a good, quick technique for accomplishing this if you’re in a hurry. Copy the first few lines of your pages’ text, and stick that in the meta tag area.

 
5) Meta tag – Keywords

 
(Insert Example image)

 
The Keywords meta tag consists of 10-20 keywords for which you’d like your page to be ranked. Just like the Description meta tag, you can have a different meta information for each page on your website.

 
Don’t go crazy here with too many keywords. The engines don’t read past a certain point anyway. Make it relevant to the page. This can be a good place to put in misspellings. So if you sell “jewelry”, consider also adding “jewlery” to the Keywords meta tag.

 
Once again, this element doesn’t currently add a lot of weight to overall rankings. However, it does have an impact and should be done. If nothing else, it will focus you on the keywords you want to include in your content. I’ll often refer back to the keyword meta tag as I review page content to make sure I’m including the relevant words. It keeps focus on them.

 
That’s 5 basis on-page coding elements that will take your site a long way. Let’s look at a few other more global items.

 
6) Internal Linking Structure

 
Internal links are links that go from one page in your site to another page in your site.

 
There is a lot of analysis and speculation about how much an internal linking structure may have to do with transferring ranking weight that comes from linking. I’m not going to address that here. It’s a little beyond the scope of this podcast.

 
What I want to address is more of a crawl-ability aspect. Can the search engine crawlers navigate your entire site and how easily can they do it.

 
So test your site for crawl-ability.

 
Use only your mouse and click on HTML links and see if you can get to everywhere on your site. You can’t click on anything programmed in Flash or inside a Frame. Also, if you have any menus that “fly out” which means when you hover over the main part of the menu, a new sub-menu shows up. Don’t use a drop-down menu and you don’t use the keyboard to type in any type of search criteria like a part number.

 
Finally, you should count the number of click levels deep you have to go to reach a page. Ideally, it should be 3 or less.

 
I believe in Show 3 we talked about one good method of making your site accessible and that is to have a site index easily accessed from the Home page, and to have all of your pages accessible from it.

 
7) Clean code

 
Search engines often don’t read all the way to the end of your web page. They also may value the content at the top of your page much more than that at the bottom of your page. If you use clean code (and now Cascading Style Sheets tend to be in vogue), you make it easier for the engines to read your site and your content tends to be much higher on the page (from a bots perspective).

 
So, if you are having development done for you, find out how your developers are designing and if they are using CSS technology.

 
Well that covers most of the basics and starts to edge into the intermediate. There are a whole bunch of variations and other factors such as database driven or content managed sites, other tags and attributes and more accessibility factors. To really understand them even to the extent of just being able to judge if your current webmaster or SEO talent is employing them, gets far more complex.

 
If you want to get to that point, welcome to my world.

 
Start by visiting some of the sites I talked about in the beginning.

 
Coding for the search engines is fairly standard for the most part. You can probably get 80-90% of the benefit by looking at the areas I’ve outlined. If you are in a highly competitive space, you’ll likely want to address that other 10-20%. However, to do that, you’ll have to double the effort you put in.

 
That wraps up Search Engine Optimization – Part 2 - On-page Coding

 
Next episode will be Part 3 of driving traffic to your site through Search Engine Optimization. It will cover key word analysis. The keywords you choose to optimize for can make or break your optimization strategy.

 
So subscribe to Drive It – Convert It!, and automatically download episode number 5 when it comes out. You can follow the subscription links on our site. Or if you use iTunes, do a search for drive it convert it and pick us up there.

 
I’m John Boulter, for Bastion Internet’s Drive It – Convert It! Podcast.

 
Visit us at bastioninternet.com or Email us at podcast@bastioninternet.com.

 
Click below for a full transcript of the show.

 
Here is a summary:

 
Writing content is one of the most challenging aspects of producing a website. However, it’s extremely important from both a Web visitor perspective and from a search engine optimization perspective.

 
To effectively produce your content you need to plan, write the overview, focus, and refine.

 
Plan by architecting your website into logical categories and subcategories. Write in a similar style to that of a newspaper with the most important points first and then breaking down into further and further levels of detail. Focus each page on a central idea and incorporate targeted keywords and phrases.

 
Make further search engine specific refinements such as accessibility, elimination of pronouns, high use of adjectives, variation of keywords and strong use of relevant headings.

 
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Read a full transcript here …
 

 
Hi and welcome to Drive It - Convert It, for April 14th, 2006. This is episode #3.

 
Search Engine Optimization – Part 1 - Content is King

 
Drive It - Convert It is the podcast where Small and Medium Sized businesses learn the marketing strategies and tactics behind Driving More Traffic to your website and Converting that Traffic into qualified and identifiable leads and sales.

 
Drive It Convert It

 
I’m John Boulter. I’m the president of Bastion Internet and podcasts and show notes can be found at BastionInternet.com/podcast.

 
Is content really king. Is it really the key to high search engine rankings. And, if it is, how do we give it royal treatment on our website. That’s exactly what we’re going to look at today.

 
Welcome back to you returning visitors. If you’re new, welcome aboard.

 
In prior episodes we set the stage for driving and converting web traffic by

 
1) establishing solid website objectives and
2) defining exactly who our target market is

 
Now that we’ve established those, it’s time to drive traffic to our site.

 
The technique with highest impact for driving traffic to your site is to rank highly in the Search Engines such as Yahoo, Google, MSN and Ask.

 
Now, ranking highly is based on a whole bunch of factors. We’ll cover most of them in the next weeks and months. Today, we’ll be looking at the value of “content”; the words that make up the content of your site.

 
I’ve been a part of the web development community for a long time. Probably the toughest thing to do when developing a new or revamped site is to get the content from the client. Now having actually written the content for a number of sites myself – I totally understand why. It’s a tough, tough job.

 
Just writing any content can be a challenge. Then you have to make sure it’s written in a way that’s going to effectively get your message across to your web audience. Should it educate, inspire, motivate, explain. Should it be simple or comprehensive; eloquent or to the point.

 
Now here we go throwing a whole new set of criteria at you – write for the search engines, too.

 
So let’s get into it

 
I’ll cover this in 3 parts

 
1st – Should we care
2nd –Getting started – an overview and some guidelines
3rd – Refining: Details and techniques

 
Should we care:

 
The general consensus is that your content significantly impacts your Search Engine rankings. Most believe it impacts anywhere from 30 to 50% of your overall ranking. Probably the other major factor in ranking is in-bound linking. Do other sites link to you in a meaningful way. Now linking is something we’ll talk more about in a future episode, however, for now let’s assume it’s important.

 
So, if you want to attract links, what is most likely to do it – good content (or money – but that’s a different story).

 
Thus you get a double bonus from good content (or a double whammy, as the case may be for poor content). The content itself is the first bonus - the linking it attracts is the second.

 
I find the most compelling argument is that well written content will never go out of style. Search engines are continually trying to find ways to deliver more relevant results and drop spammers to the bottom of the pile.

 
The search engine firms have hired some of the best brains in the world whose job it is to try to find better ways to evaluate content.

 
Spammers often rely on tricks and volume. If they can trick the engines for awhile and do it on enough different websites, they make money. Anything you can do that can’t be easily reproduced, falls into an area that search engines love and will continue to love.

 
Currently, the engines are pouring tons of resources into being able to identify good – non-duplicated content. Good, original content takes time and resources to produce. It’s not a volume thing – thus, it’s likely it will stand the test of time for giving you good search rankings.

 
Finally, if your content is good – you get conversion dividends. Web users are more likely to convert if your content is good. However, there can be a bit of a Catch 22. The best written content from a Search Engine perspective may not be the best from a conversion perspective. However, usually the two are close enough that if you do a quality job with your content from a web visitors perspective, you’ll get results in both areas – Driving Traffic and Converting Traffic.

 
So yes – we should care.

 
It benefits Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Advertising, all with higher conversion rates.

 
2nd – Let’s get started amassing and writing our content – here’s an overview and some guidelines

 
This breaks down into 3 parts:

 
1) Planning
2) Writing
3) Focus

 
1) Planning: This is going to differ if you’re building out your site or doing a major overhaul, versus if you’re going to leave your site largely intact and just adjust the content within it. I’ll talk as if you’re going to be building it out and leave it to you to decide to what level you can adjust your existing site if that’s your situation.

 
This is pretty logical. List the main sections your site will have. Within those sections, list the main themes you want to address. Within that, list specific ideas.

 
An example: Let’s say you have a company that manufactures and sells industrial cleaners.

 
Your main sections might be Company Background, Products and Services, Support Issues and Information, and Examples of Success.

 
Within each section, say Examples of Success, list the main themes you want to address. For example, Customer Testimonials, Case Studies, Product Applications by Industry.

 
Now eventually, this will make up your site navigation

 
Now break it down one into principal ideas. Application by Industry would have degreasers for the refining industry, cleaners and disinfectants for the food industry, and so on. These will ultimately make up your web pages.

 
The final part of planning will have to do with your keyword phrases. This gets back somewhat to target marketing, too. You need to determine what keyword phrases you are targeting for the search engines to rank you by. For now, you can use your gut (once again, in future episodes we’ll get more into how to nail down keywords and phrases).

 
That takes care of the first step of the General Guidelines - planning. Now let’s write!

 
2) Writing: You’ll want to use a style similar style to that of newspapers. The most important stuff comes first and then we start filling in some details. After we fill in a first level of detail, we go on to add a second, even more detailed level.

 
Web visitors will skim your page. They’ll read a sentence or two at the top, may continue on to a paragraph or two. At that point they’ll either choose to really dive in and pick up some detail, or they’ll leave to another page.

 
What you don’t want to do is to write a story. Web visitors and Search Engines crawlers are more and more likely to bail out, the further they get.

 
So – we’ve planned, we’ve got our writing style in place now we need to Focus.

 
3) Focus: Write your content, sticking to the section, theme, and principal idea of each page. Make sure to include the specific keyword phrases you’re targeting. The more focused the better. To explore ideas outside of that focus – link to those pages on your site that are focused on those other ideas.

 
That’s all there is to it. Well, almost …

 
Now onto the details and techniques that make all the difference.

 
Let’s do a little review: We’ve established that we care about content. We’ve got our main guidelines in place and we know our focus.

 
We now need a little Search Engine Optimization Refinement

 
3rd - details and techniques

 
There are 5 areas of detail and techniques you’ll want to be aware of:

 
1) Make it accessible
2) Eliminate pronouns
3) Use adjectives
4) Vary your keywords
5) Use headings and highlights

 
1) Accessibility

 
The search engines have to be able to navigate to your pages in order to crawl them. The safest way to do this is to have a simple, text-based, site map. Make sure the site map is linked to from the Home page in a text-based manner. Your site map should list all the pages on your site or at least everything you want the engines to see.

 
Hopefully, your general navigation will take them there, but too often things like Flash and Javascript can thwart that.

 
To be accessible, the text needs to me just that – text. Images are not text. Flash is not text. If you have content contained in Flash objects or as part of an image, make sure to repeat it elsewhere if it’s important from a search perspective.

 
Finally, if you haven’t already heard, frames are bad for search. If your site uses frame technology (where you can scroll through the content while the top, banner area and/or the side areas don’t move), you’ve got some issues beyond the scope of this.

 
2) Eliminate pronouns

 
Start going through your content and eliminate “we” “our” “it” as much as possible without making your content sound silly. For example: “We strive to make the highest purity of cleaners. They surpass all standards of purity set with your industry.

 
Change the “we” to “industrial cleaning products firm”. Change the “They” to “disinfectants” change the “your” to “food services”

 
So it now reads “As an industrial cleaning products firm, we strive to make the highest purity of cleaners. Our disinfectants surpass all standards of purity set within the food industry”

 
3) Use adjectives

 
Further refine that content with

 
“As a leading industrial products firm, we strive to make the highest purity of industrial cleaners. Our powerful disinfectants surpass all health standards of purity set within the food services industry.”

 
What we are doing is adding to the “long tail” of search. The more adjectives and nouns, the more likely we are to match up with the term a User types into a search engine.

 
4) Keyword variation

 
If your target keyword phrase is “food services disinfectant”, be sure to use some alternate phrasing throughout your content (e.g. disinfecting, disinfected, disinfect).

 
… our product fully disinfects your equipment
… leaves your food services equipment fully disinfected
… for disinfecting your food services equipment, our products are number 1.

 
5) Headings and highlights

 
In the language of the web – HTML – there are ways to identify headings – “H1”, “H2”, “H3”, tags. You can also use Bold fonts, Italics, and so on.

 
Opinions differ on how impacting these are to search rankings, but most agree that if you write your content with their proper use, you’ll gain some advantage. At a minimum make sure to have relevant H1 headings for the top of your page. I also recommend either an H2 heading for subsections or bolding of the first portion of a paragraph, typically containing the main theme for the paragraph (i.e. your key words).

 
Writing good, original content is not easy. Especially when you factor in that it should be effective from a human and a search engine perspective. Yet it’s this very difficulty that makes it such a big payoff. The quality sites will do it. The spammers won’t.

 
So Plan, Write, Focus and Refine.

 
A final comment: you don’t need to have one person do it all. Often you can get multiple people within your organization to contribute. However, I do recommend that one person does the final draft and incorporates the refinement. It’s best to have a consistent writing style throughout the site.

 
That wraps up Search Engine Optimization – Part 1 - Content Is King

 
Next episode we’re going to continue to talk about driving traffic through Search Engine Optimization. It’s going to be a little more technical in that we’ll be discussing on-page coding. If you don’t actually understand the coding and someone else is doing it for you, you’ll easily get the gist of it and you’ll be able to keep your web master on their toes.

 
Download episode number 4 when it comes out next week. The easiest way is to make sure you’re subscribed to Drive It – Convert It. You can follow the subscription links on our site. Or if you use iTunes, do a search for drive it convert it and pick us up there.

 
I’m John Boulter, for Bastion Internet’s Drive It – Convert It! Podcast.

 
Visit us at bastioninternet.com or Email us at podcast@bastioninternet.com.

 
This podcast explores some examples of how your online target market may differ from your regular brick and mortar target. It also covers the effect of demographics, psychographics, and technographics on site design, search engine strategies and other web marketing vehicles.

 
Download it now - Drive It - Convert It! Podcast #2
 
Here is a more complete transcript …

 
Drive It – Convert It! is all about driving more traffic to your website and converting that traffic once it’s there.

 
Many Bastion Internet clients dive right in and want to talk about the latest in Search Engine Optimization techniques or how to write a good Pay Per Click ad. Now these are certainly important items.

 
First though, you need to be well aware of two things – Your Site’s Objective and Your target market.

 
We covered the site objective in Show Number 1. Today we’ll focus on identifying your target market and considering them when developing strategies and tactics of Driving and Converting.

 
Here’s what I’d like you to take away from today’s Podcast. If you’re in a strategic position with your company – make sure you’ve identified who your target market is and how that knowledge should be utilized by your web personnel (designers, optimizers, marketers).

 
If your role is tactical or technical in nature – first, make sure you’ve got the right strategic directives to accomplish what you need to do. Next, use the techniques I give you to do a better job when designing your site or landing pages, or implementing marketing programs.

 
Way back when I was in college, I had my first marketing course. One thing we really focused on was Target Markets. So here I am today talking about – Target Markets. I’m still learning about them. You’d think I would have gotten it by know.

 
Recognize that target marketing for your website may be significantly different than target marketing for your brick and mortar operation. Or you may need to support two target markets within your site.

 
Let’s go through an example:

 
You sell and install Energy Efficient lighting products. Your typical customer is a large office, retail operation or warehouse. You have a sales force that makes contact with prospects, explains your value proposition – which is to get higher quality lighting and save on energy costs at the same time. The cost of the product and installation is more than offset by the energy savings.

 
Your sales force is very consultative. They start by doing an audit of the prospects’ current use and then propose the new lighting products. The whole thing is very convenient for the client. Once they make a decision to go forward, your installation team takes care of everything during the client’s off hours.

 
Well, business is good and you decide to start selling over the Internet and across the nation. Your website used to just support your local team. Now it’s doing double duty to also sell product nationwide.

 
The first thing you need to recognize is that your target audience is going to be different. First, you now are getting inbound leads. Prospects are searching for you. That means that they are likely to be more knowledgeable or at least recognize they have a need.

 
Next, you have less control over the installation process. It’s no longer turn-key for the customer. They will likely need their own local contractor to do the installation. Your consultative approach may or may not work over the Internet. In-person it’s very effective – will it translate to the web?

 
So the part of this site that focuses on the nationwide market may end up targeting a different type of client:
- More self-reliant
- More knowledgeable
- Perhaps in a less metropolitan areas where not as many vendors are approaching them. They need to go out and find cost-saving products.
- More price aware
- They likely have never heard of your company before they reached the site
- They are looking for quality products and need a high level of electronic trust since there will be little personal interaction (at least initially).

 
So how will your website and traffic-driving strategies differ based on this alternate target market.

 
Driving Traffic:

 
From a Site Optimization perspective:
- Geographic keywords and content
- Various utility companies mentions (rebates)
- More specific product names (”T5″s versus “fluorescent lighting”)
- Less focus on installation terms like “retrofit” or “installation”
- More focus on manufacturer brand names

 
From a Pay Per Click perspective:
- More focus on low price (“bulk pricing”)
- More focus on delivery and guarantees (“2 day delivery”, “Guaranteed Quality”)
- More focus on geographic prowess (“shipped nationwide”)

 
From a Conversion standpoint:
- Create landing pages specific to your PPC ads with specific offers and calls to action.
- Content supporting remote delivery
- How to choose an installer
- What your contractor needs to know
- Can you retrofit yourself
- How to save money without installation costs
- Sales case studies (printable so the researcher can use it to sell their boss on the idea)
- Reiterate in your eCommerce section policies on shipping, breakage, and returns.

 
So, we know that our target market may be different than what we think. Let’s take a step back and look at some other Target Marketing fundamentals:

 
Demographics (the physical characteristics)
- Target Company
- Industry, Size, location, population center
- Competitors (especially if you aren’t local and they are)
- Target User
- Title/position
- Authority
- Age, sex

 
Psychographics (the mental characteristics)
- Status aware
- Consider themselves smart shoppers, an analytical, etc.
- Attitude of prosperity or frugality
- Appreciate quality, price, efficiency
- Trusting
- Is this an industry where stability is important, innovation, etc.
- Quick and decisive, slow and methodical, impulsive and spontaneous
- Visual (images) vs. studious (words)
- Appreciate beauty and creativeness or conformity and stability

 
Technographics (the technological adoptiveness of the user)
- Technically savvy
- Heavy web surfers
- How does your use of technology reflect on your products and services
- Creative industry = creative website
- Detailed service = no typos, less technical chances (e.g. browser conformity)
- Are they forgiving.
- Is the resolution of their monitors likely to be higher or lower.
- Are they likely to have plug-ins like Flash and Adobe Reader installed and are they up-to-date
- Do they have broadband or dial-up
- Macs or PCs
- Do you think they are more likely to use Google, Yahoo, MSN, or AOL
- Are they likely to use Shopping Engines or Directory services
- Do they own iPods; video or audio
- Are they likely to access the web through a mobile device.
- Are they likely to be a part of web communities (like MySpace, or Slashdot, or other forums)

 
The answers to these questions give direction to you from a web design, web architecture (both technology and likely navigation paths through your site), Pay Per Click, search engine optimization, content development strategy and more.

 
If you’re instructing someone to do the work for you, they should be asking these questions, understanding the ramifications, and tailoring their work on your website and Internet marketing to properly target your audience.

 
It will affect your web design:
- colors, use of images, resolution, navigational style, site depth, mobile version, printer version

 
It will affect your content:
- education level, level of detail, amount of content, type of content (words, images, audio, video, Flash use, pdf use, printable version, etc.)

 
It will affect your site optimization:
- keyword phrases primarily
- long tail

 
It will affect Pay per Clicks
- keyword phrases
- Ad write up
- Landing page design

 
It will affect other marketing vehicles
- email campaigns
- Newsletters or Ezines
- Whether to do a Blog or Podcast or Videocast

 
So, identifying your target market and leveraging technology to appeal to that target market is definitely a key building block in everything else that you do regarding web marketing. Correctly establish it and many other things will fall neatly into place. Well, as neatly as this industry ever allows.

 
Over the next few weeks we’re going to look at what I call “Web Marketing Vehicles” for Driving Traffic to Your site. We’ll start with an overview on the Search Engines. Why they are important, where that industry seems to be heading, and how you can leverage technology and knowledge to get the most from them.

 
Search Engines spawn two major web marketing vehicles. Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Advertising.

 
So download Show number 3 when it comes out.

 
Visit us at bastioninternet.com or Email us at podcast@bastioninternet.com, with questions and comments.

 
Until then – I’m John Boulter for Bastion Internet and the Drive It – Convert It! podcast.

The Background:
A client’s site had some design issues that made it somewhat less accessible to certain web visitors. If a User had changed the “text size” setting in their browser (e.g. Internet Explorer), to “largest”, some of the text menu’s would blow out of their space and became unreadable. Many far-sighted people do exactly this.

I talked to some technical resources to see what options there were to modify the site to limit a browser’s ability to enlarge the text within certain menu areas. This has traditionally been done using images (i.e. pictures of text), as opposed to using text characters themselves. However, there are certain design techniques (e.g. CSS), as well as Search Engine Optimization traits that make using text preferable to using an image. Well this started a whole discussion on the aging population and how a user should be able to view a site in whatever manner was best for them. It also led to a further discussion on moral and social responsibilities not to discriminate.

Now, I’m getting older, too, but it didn’t quite sit right with me that a site should need to cater to me, if indeed I wasn’t their typical audience. The answer all boiled down to target marketing.

If your target market includes people who are likely to have their “text size” set to large - then make sure your site is designed accordingly. However, you may very well be targeting a younger audience where this is secondary to other design considerations.

For all I know, the younger generation may soon be demanding non-resizable text sites as a way of rebelling against the older generation.

“So Dad, you want to monitor my MySpace account, bring a magnifying glass with you - ha ha ha.”

The bottom line is that when we try to cater to large trends we can lose sight of the immediate opportunities. Have a good understanding of who your target audience is. Design your site, design your ads, and design your ad landing pages all to appeal to that audience. If you’re in business to do business, your first priority must be economic specifics.

Examine generalizations; just because the macro market of the U.S. population is aging, doesn’t mean that you should be catering to it at this point. However, if you are targeting that market, then proper use of technology could definitely leverage your marketing strategy and your ability to convert these users.

Finally, a good piece of news is that true accessibility (i.e. for the handicapped), usually has excellent benefits. For example, if your site is developed so that a visually impaired person could easily understand and navigate it with a screen reader, then it is perfectly designed for Google and Yahoo’s crawler robots, too. For a crawler, like love, is blind.

The Background:
A business associate/friend and I were talking. I was lamenting the fact that often when I came up with a strong marketing answer to a client’s business challenge, I was often at odds with my technical staff. They preferred to do things the “right way”. Additionally, they often came up with fantastic ways to deploy new technologies without any idea of the marketing purpose.

So I asked my friend - “why?” His answer - “Because they can.”

Now, to some I am a tech geek, to others a neophyte. It usually depends where on the spectrum you are coming from. I have both a strong marketing and strong technical background. However, I’m no match for those creating, using, and deploying technology on a daily basis. Still, I have felt the thrill of overcoming a technical challenge, of creating something that should be exciting to all - but isn’t.

Web Marketing is a marriage of marketing and technology. It is a constant battle for balance. If done right - you, the business client win. You leverage technology to drive more high quality traffic to your website. If done wrong - either you get a cool look that nobody sees, or a well trafficked, poorly converting page.

Seek out specialists that also see the big picture.