Marc@PromotionsAndPrint.com & Christi@PromotionsAndPrint.com

Please Read: How Will You Market Your Web Site?
By Christi White, Promotions & Print

Search Engine Optimization
by James E. Clemens II MICA Specialties http://www.micaspecialties.org/websitecreator.htm

Revving up search engines/Boost site performance By Mark Brohan
www.internetretailer.com

Enhance Your Customer’s On-line Shopping Experience
(excerpts from above article)
by Christi White, Promotions & Print



Please Read: How Will You Market Your Web Site?
By Christi White, Promotions & Print

For Promotions & Print, marketing your web site involves making full use of the title tags, meta tags and keyword/keyword phrases on your site.
These features are necessary for proper search engine placement, but alone they will NOT guarantee you high page rankings. So many other factors besides title tags, meta tags and content come into play when it comes to determining your search engine ranking within any one or more keyword situations.

Your link from another site will assist with proper search engine placement and the number of hits you receive, but only in the case where the linking site displays content relevant to your site: hence, both sites should be related by topic. Link exchange agreements might help site traffic, but again, only when the two sites are related.

You have decided to work with Promotions & Print and create your own custom-designed web site.

Your internet marketing strategies can be implemented in three ways:

1) you can provide Promotions & Print with all of the content for the site AND/OR direct me in the use of your title tags, meta tags and links,
2) you can allow Promotions & Print to direct and manage your site’s content and the use of title tags, meta tags and links, and then additionally if you choose, to “SEO” your site by spending a large amount of time utilizing keyword tools and reporting those results that are supposed to make your site more search engine friendly, AND/OR
3) you can allow Promotions & Print to propose and develop a pay-per-click Google Adwords campaign for you. Both #2 and #3 will incur additional fees.

Still none of these three choices will ensure your site will be ranked well on search engines.

For guaranteed results, you may want Promotions & Print to focus only on the technical/ graphical elements of your site and hire an internet marketing agency to consult you with the tags/content development of your site and/or develop your Google Adwords campaign. I say this because an internet marketing agency may be able to guarantee you search engine rankings, whereas Promotions & Print cannot.

The following article on Search Engine Optimization provides information on what to watch out for when contracting an internet marketing agency.

The article suggests you use exactly those strategies that Promotions & Print can offer you: search engine optimization with the proper use of site tags and keywords, and then also, professionally written content that educates your visitors about the benefits of your product/service and entices them to respond to you immediately.

Many of Promotions & Print web site clients use their web page as an on-line brochure, and they direct web viewers to their site through advertising other than search engines. You are encouraged to market your web site using any low-cost methods that you can think of: that includes print, signage, radio, TV, etc., if these are cost-effective. Or again, try to acquire a link to your site from a related web site, such as: listing your web site on related blogs, link exchanges or requests with related web sites, directories that are very related to your business and content, etc.

Now that I’ve provided you with marketing choices, we can move ahead to designing your custom web site! I look forward to finding out how you would like Promotions & Print to proceed with development. Contact me, Christi, at 816-322-9988!

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... Or See More Articles Below:

Search Engine Optimization
by James E. Clemens II MICA Specialties http://www.micaspecialties.org/websitecreator.htm

Revving up search engines/Boost site performance By Mark Brohan
www.internetretailer.com

Enhance Your Customer’s On-line Shopping Experience
(excerpts from Brohan article)
by Christi White, Promotions & Print



Search Engine Optimization

by James E. Clemens II MICA Specialties http://www.micaspecialties.org/websitecreator.htm

Most of your traffic will come from search engines. The performance of your site will affect your relationship with the major search engines. You will want to create a site that the search engines like.

There are dozens of companies that ask for payment, promising to give your site a high page ranking. This is something that they truly cannot do. It will cost you time, money and worse yet, possibly very low page rankings. When you pay, they will auto-submit your site to dozens of search engines. This will affect you in a negative way because the search engines consider this a spamming technique. It can get you blocked from being listed at all.

Another trick they will use to try and boost your status is to list your site on several link page sites or harvest sites. This will give you very low status with the search engines. When you are listed on a page with lots of other websites, without quality content written about your site, search engines ignore you or give you an un-credible status. This type of marketing will hurt you in a big way.

If you market wall clocks, your site would not really “fit” on a site about auto parts, as far as search engines are concerned. So they give this link a very low score. If, however, your site is listed on the “official wall clock union” site that only lists other clock makers, you will get a higher score. The higher the score, the higher the rank your site will have. So, link exchanging could be good for your site or it could cause you a lot of problems.

Without paying for listings and advertisements, getting a high ranking with search engines can take awhile. Still, paying for a high ranking is not advisable unless you have lots of money. When you stop paying, your site will lose all of the ranking score and you will be back to square one.

I recommend that you submit your site yourself. Do not submit it until you have it complete. Only submit it once to the same engine in any three day period. Never submit a site that is ‘under construction’ or has lots of errors. After it is submitted, it will be indexed, or crawled, by the search engine. The time it takes depends on the engine.

Once your site has been indexed by a search engine, it will be listed on their directory/search page. When they index/crawl your site, they read your code, without looking at your actual site. They do not see images, Flash or your fancy graphics; they only read the content and links. The higher the quality of links you have, the better. And the more links that are attached to larger articles, the better. If you have twenty links listed down a page with no words, you will not get a preferable rating from the engine.

This is where “Meta Tags” and clean code comes into play. Do not add Java or Flash at the top or bottom of your site, as this can cause problems for the search engines. But do give them the keywords, site description, and title Meta Tags. Put these at the top of your page away from Java scripts and Flash. If you must use Java, build yourself a site map from raw code only.

Your “keywords” Meta Tag will be one of the big things to consider. When someone goes to MSN or Google and types your exact site name and it shows up, it simply means that you have been indexed or crawled. This is great news but not the only thing you want to achieve. If you are a clock maker, you will want your site to be listed when someone types in “quality wall clocks” or something to that effect. This is where new traffic will come from and this is what your “Keywords” Meta Tag will do for you. You will want your keywords to come from the content that is on that page. And do not repeat them over and over. All of the information that is put into your Meta Tags should come from the content that is written on that particular page of your website. When you have “Tags" that have no relation to your content, they are considered un-credible by the engines. Sometimes they can get you flagged as a bogus or scam site.

After talking about these basic things to consider, I want to mention the fact that the most important thing for you to do is write quality, original, credible content that is grammatically correct and in a professional writing style. This is the only way to boost traffic and rankings with the search engines and your visitors. Educate and inform them, without focusing too much on entertaining them. Make sure the search engines know about you and then focus on your content.
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Revving up search engines/Boost site performance By Mark Brohan
www.internetretailer.com

Given that a single search-engine marketing campaign can cost up to $60,000 but may deliver only a few targeted buyers, there’s little doubt that web merchants can improve site performance by cutting down on the number of pages that take customers from a general product search to specific merchandise pages.

Many retailers take a shotgun approach to search engine marketing and include too many steps that impact site performance. Many retailers direct customers from results at search engines such as Yahoo and Google to the retailer’s home page, where the shopper must start all over, typing in the term, then waiting for the retailer to return results.

The result is an inefficient process. A shopper may need 15 or 20 page clicks to conduct a general search, shop a retailer’s site and complete the purchase.

But some retailers such as FurnitureFind.com are using a combination of web analytics and savvier marketing to drive shoppers from a search engine directly to a product page. With new technology and a better understanding of who is truly in the market for certain kinds of furniture, FurnitureFind.com no longer has to purchase as many as 20,000 word combinations from a search engine to drive site traffic.

Instead, web analytics are helping FurnitureFind.com to utilize site and marketing campaign data and specific sales and conversion rates based on keywords or phrases that shoppers type into a search engine.

For instance, if the phrase “blond oak furniture” is pulling in search engine traffic and resulting in more people coming to the home page, the retailer may register only a few “blond oak furniture” combinations. And if past keyword, product sales and conversion reports show that “blond oak furniture” is driving more serious traffic, FurnitureFind.com will adjust its home page to feature more oak merchandise; readjust its oak merchandise categories and move them higher on the home page; or put specific redirects—with the URL of the actual product page—in the links on Yahoo or Google.

“Our site performance is improving because we’re cutting out unnecessary clicks and steps between getting started on the search engine and finding a specific brand on our site,” says Cory Nielsen, project manager of web development and marketing for FurnitureFind.com. “We now know which keywords and phrases deliver better results, and that helps us improve our site navigation and design.”

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Enhance Your Customer’s On-line Shopping Experience
by Christi White

Customers expect fast-loading pages and links that take them quickly to the products they want. Internet shoppers have high expectations for performance and customer service. They won’t put up with broken links, time-out errors and shopping carts that take too long to complete transactions. They know that if one retailer’s site doesn’t perform up to their expectations, a more satisfying shopping experience is only a click away.

Given the maturity of business-to-consumer electronic commerce and the wide availability of performance hardware, software and services, shoppers assume that Internet retailing sites will operate nearly problem-free. Performance studies suggest that some web shopping sites strained under the load of holiday shopping volume, result in customers who can’t complete a transaction or load a home page in under 60 seconds.

While many customers will put up with frustrations for the sake of avoiding a trip to the mall, retailers still must address the challenge of web site performance with good site design and navigation, and better business practices:

1. Provide security and prevent fraud
2. Find and fix all broken links
3. Expedite checkout process
4. Enhance product display
5. Fine-tune site search
6. Improve your response times
7. Adjust pages for search engines
8. Streamline site navigation
9. Speed up page loading times
10. Frequently test and troubleshoot
11. Listen to your customers

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