The internet is a valuable marketing and PR tool, but getting the best out of it can be a daunting challenge, especially for smaller businesses with limited budgets.
Understandably, the agenda of the companies setting up websites is to sell their products and services. But it is no good setting up a website with no strategy and objectives behind it and hope customers and potential customers will flock to it.
Too many websites are designed to be ascetically pleasing and flashy with lots of graphics and little focus on content, says Ceri James, sales and marketing director at JD Internet Consulting.
"But search engines rank websites according to the relevance of their content." As much content as possible should therefore be presented in a text format that can be cut and pasted into a document as opposed to being embedded in images. "Search engines do not pick up and index fixed images," he says. So it is best not to just have fancy graphics on the home page without any informative text-based content.
"The first 300 characters of content on the home page are the most important for relevance ranking," says James. Option tabs used to navigate the website and the page titles they click through to should contain the same key words and phrases that should also relate to the content on the page. Search engines are more likely to pick these up than cute or clever titles that need to be interpreted.
"Google's main goal is to index the internet and rank websites in order of relevance," he says.
A company’s aim should be to achieve a higher relevance ranking for its target audience than its competitors as opposed to trying to be everything to everybody. Another consideration is that a 50-page website full of useful content has 10 times more chance of being picked up by the search engines than one with only five pages. Creating links to other relevant websites and getting listed on relevant portals and directories are just some of the ways to get a higher search engine ranking.
"A good internet consultant will set up these links as part of a package," says James. Having attracted the right audience, it is important to keep them on the website as long as possible.
The "stickiness" of the website will depend on factors like the overall look of the website, how easy it is to find what they are looking for and how relevant and useful the content is once they have found it.
Further attractions might include interesting relevant articles, product reviews and benchmarks, offering giveaways or special discounts and displaying prices of products and services.
Some companies are reluctant to display prices on their website, but competitors will get their hands on pricing information some other way if they really want to, says James. Informative articles will attract target audiences to a website and help to increase its search engine ranking, especially if the content contains key words and phrases.
Having found what they want potential customers will also need to easily access contact details, obtain further information or find out where to buy products or services.
“You want the customer to explore the content and then convert their interest into a sale,” he says.
When Robynn Burls set up her online company Encyclomedia, which provides a media contact database service, she realised that setting up a website that nobody can find is a waste of money.
So she started attending conferences and searching for information on the internet to learn how to optimise the website to get a good search engine ranking.
"Search engines look for keywords and phrases in website content that match the words users' type in when searching for information," she says.
Before setting up the company's website Burls first brainstormed with other people about which keywords and phrases to use.
She then used various internet software tools obtained from websites like www.keyworddiscovery.com and www.wordtracker.com/ to test out the effectiveness of the selected keywords. Both these websites offer a free trial of their software and the Wordtracker website contains expert articles and case studies and offers a free newsletter subscription.
Wordtracker will test keywords and report on how regularly these are used in searches and will come up with other related keywords. It will establish how likely users are to type in these words and phrases when they are searching for the type of information posted on the website. But it is worth remembering that a website that uses the most popular keywords will be competing with a lot of others that are using the same ones.
It may therefore pay to use more targeted keywords that are specific to the products and services on offer and are more likely to bring the website up first on the search listing when people type them in. For example, instead of just using the keyword "insurance," use "car insurance" or "budget car insurance."
Having established the optimum keywords, these need to be embedded in the text content on the web pages.
"Bear in mind that Google uses clever algorithms to test the relevance of website content," says Burls. So including words and phrases that relate to selected keywords is likely to increase the relevance ranking of the website. For example, if a person types in the words "public relations", Google will also pick up content containing related words like PR and perhaps publicity.
Having decided on a selection of keywords, the next step is to optimise the content on the website, make sure the text is easy to read and easy for the search engines to pick up and position the keywords strategically.
"I selected three to four keywords and phrases on each page and repeated them three times, once in bold type," says Burls.
Adding a blog to a website is a great way to continually create fresh content that includes keywords and invite comment from those reading the articles posted on it.
Burls says she also writes authoritative articles on the topic of PR for well known information websites like Bizcommunity and embeds some of her keywords in the text with links back to her website. This type of activity gets picked up by the search engines, adds credibility and increases traffic to the website.
Encyclomedia is staging a conference in Cape Town on 20 November (date expired since article was published) aimed at small companies that want to expand their knowledge of PR and what it can do for their business. Conference topics will include search engine optimisation, as an important element of web PR.
Leon Lategan, MD of Purple Cow Communications says in some cases it will pay a company to list its website on an aggregator portal because the chances are that it will achieve better results.
"An aggregator that has say 2000 bed and breakfast establishments on its website is likely to get more hits than an individual website for one B&B," he says.
Today, everyone seems to be offering search engine optimisation and it is important to choose the right one. The selection process should include asking for client references, testimonials, speaking to a few of them and asking them what the consultant achieved for them and how long it took.
Lategan says businesses often make the mistake of trying to pay as little as possible for website optimisation and end up being disappointed with the results. He says if a company wants to pay half the price it could take twice as long to get results.
Article Source
Business Day article published on Tuesday, November 18th
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