presented by success in the online marketplace web ...€¦ · presented by william roy web...
TRANSCRIPT
Presented By
Wil l iam Roy Web Accounts Manager IMMERGE Division McClung Companies
SUCCESS IN THE ONLINE MARKETPLACE
540-307-0766 [email protected]
1. Searchability
2. Marketability & Best Practices Online
3. Use of Other Engagement Channels
4. Mobile & Tablet Factors
FOR THOSE WHO LIKE AGENDAS
SEARCHABILITY
¡ Searchability is making your website easy for users to find.
¡ Done through: § optimizing your site for search engines such as Google § running online ad-campaigns § finding creative ways for users to find your site
(other engagement channels).
¡ One of the major issues that many websites have is the simple fact that users can’t find them.
¡ New issues today with having your mobile site searched properly and other canonical issues
ABOUT SEARCHABILITY
HOW DO PEOPLE USE SEARCH ENGINES?
¡ A CLEAR CONCLUSION – THE WAY WE RESEARCH PRODUCTS AND SERVICES HAS CHANGED
¡ In the past , when we were looking for a local product or serv ice, we used the Yel low Pages. Today, less than 1 in 10 use the Yel low Pages and more than 91% of us research onl ine before making a purchase of $100 or more.
¡ The Internet is a fantast ic way to at t ract , educate and engage your potent ia l customers. But f i rs t , you must make your websi te easy- to-d iscover.
...go on to page 2
90% 10% 60% 78%
HOW PEOPLE USE SEARCH ENGINES
...of all searches end on page one
...end with the first 5 listings
...end with the first 2 listings
How would a page-one ranking affect your business?
RANKING RESULTS PAGE ONE OR BUST! SEO DONE RIGHT!
WHERE ARE YOU IN SEARCH?
I f your websi te isn’ t ranked on page-one o f Google, you are probably miss ing out on huge opportuni t ies. . . and for a l l in tents and purposes, your s i te is inv is ib le. Even worse, i f you aren’ t eat ing up Google’s top real estate, your compet i t ion is !
This probably isn’ t the f i rs t t ime you’ re heard about SEO and i t probably won’ t be the last . But , not a l l SEO is created equal . When we work for you, we use only safe and proven techniques that have del ivered resul ts for our c l ients again and again!
Al l good SEO RANKINGS begin wi th ser ious keyword research. We work hard to d iscover which keywords are most l ike ly to produce the best resul ts for you before we star t opt imiz ing your s i te . What good is a great ranking for a keyword that no one searches for?
KEY PRINCIPLE: IF YOU’RE NOT ON PAGE-ONE, YOU’RE INVISIBLE.
¡ There are good coding techniques that should be applied to your website.
¡ A couple techniques/tips to make sure your site is very readable for the search engine crawlers 1. Create unique, accurate page titles 2. Make use of the “Description” meta tag 3. Don’t worry about the keyword meta tag 4. Build a solid site structure to build good URLs 5. Optimize content for search engines
IS YOUR WEBSITE TECHNICALLY SOUND?
SEO BASICS – THE TITLE TAG
¡ Create unique, accurate page titles § Page titles are displayed in search results as first line
§ Words in the title are bolded if they appear in the search query
§ The title for your homepage can list the name of your website/business
and could include other bits of important info like the physical location or a few of its main offerings
EX: <title>Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices | Brandon’s Baseball Cards</title>
§ Be sure to use unique title tags for each page that describe the page’s
content. Keep the length short enough to show in results.
§ UPDATE: Make sure to put the most important keywords at the beginning!
THE DESCRIPTION META TAG
¡ Think of these as summaries or “snippets” for each page ¡ Displays in search results under the title ¡ Google decides what to pull if you don’t take the opportunity ¡ Not used in Google ranking, but keywords search for are
bolded which tends to increase likelihood of click through ¡ NOTE: Google is making this area more custom every day AND
providing you with ways to define how you display on the search page. § See Google Webmaster Tools > Structured Data and Data Highlighter § Inside Webmaster Tools on any given website you’ve setup
THE KEYWORD META TAG - NO MORE
¡ Meta keywords have no impact anymore on search engine rank. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE’S STRUCTURE
¡ Improve the structure of your URLs
§ Good for marketing § Good for user experience § Helps Google evaluate your content
CONTENT TACTICS TO AVOID
¡ dumping large amounts of text on varying topics onto a page without paragraph, subheading, or layout separation
¡ inserting numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines but are annoying or nonsensical to users
¡ having blocks of text like "frequent misspellings used to reach this page" that add little value for users
¡ deceptively hiding text from users, but displaying it to search engines
¡ rehashing (or even copying) existing content that will bring little extra value to users
PERIODIC TABLE OF SEO RANKING FACTORS
MARKETABILITY & BEST PRACTICES ONLINE
¡ Marketability deals with what happens when users do manage to find your website.
¡ Your website represents the “face” of your business or organization and can either draw people in or scare them a way.
¡ Usually the way a website looks and is set up will establish in a person’s mind the overall quality that your organization or business represents.
¡ If you have a mediocre website, chances are that the average person will be relatively unimpressed and will probably not want to have anything to do with your business or organization.
¡ Because of this, many businesses and organizations are on their 2nd or 3rd version of their website.
MARKETABILITY OVERVIEW
1. BE CONSISTENT ONLINE Whatever you decide to do online, establish the schedule and then stick to it. 2. PICK AND CHOOSE WHERE YOU WANT TO BE ONLINE You don’t have to be on all platforms. Do you want to blog, tweet, Facebook? All of them? Have them connected?
7 BEST PRACTICES TO BUILD YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE
3. DECIDE ON A PERSONAL CODE & STYLE
I have a list of things I will and won’t post about. You could keep this in a draft email or your smartphone’s notepad app. Don’t tweet while you are drinking, don’t over share. Be positive.
BEST PRACTICES CONTINUED
4. THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT TO BE KNOWN FOR & FOCUS IN Your reputation online is real! It matters. It l ives and breathes and you need to figure out what it is. Treat it delicately and carefully l ike you would a resume for a job and always put your best foot forward. Do not complain about competitors or customers. Avoid negativity. If you don’t have something nice to say don’t say it. Avoid chronicling your rejections.
BEST PRACTICES CONTINUED
5. BUILD A COMMUNITY ONLINE - Comment on other blogs. - Read other industry -type blogs. - Find like-minded friends on Twitter. - Reply to their tweets. - Interact.
BEST PRACTICES CONTINUED
6. BE AUTHENTIC At the end of the day you need to be yourself. But your best self. And your most authentic self. Inauthenticity can be spotted a mile away! Do your best to be true to who you are and to convey that in your online presence. 7. KNOW YOUR LIMITS Pull back on blogging or any other social media marketing if it affects completing your core work negatively or if you can’t be consistent at the level you originally planned.
BEST PRACTICES CONTINUED
Social Media Of fl ine Methods
ADDITIONAL ENGAGEMENT
CHANNELS
Google Plus is a great, free tool to get your website to appear on the first page of Google’s results in local search results. If you have a local brick and mortar business or localized service offering, you need Google Plus. V is i t www.plus .google .com and lookup your l is t ing . A Google account is requi red to c la im i t .
GOOGLE PLUS – AN SEO OPPORTUNITY
¡ The conventional wisdom where Google+ and online marketing goes is this:
Even if your audience isn’t active there, it’s almost mandatory to have a profile and be active there because of the way Google is showing more Google+ content in its regular search results.
WHY GOOGLE PLUS
¡ Fresh content matters: Google+ profiles with no posts within the last 72 hours don’t show up in the “Related People/Pages” section of Google’s search results
¡ +1s matter: G+ pages that get a lot of +1s on their posts tend to show up more often in the “Related People/Pages” results
¡ Comments and re-shares don’t matter as much as +1s in helping to influence who/what shows up in “Related People/Pages”
¡ Reach/follower count matters a lot
G+ TAKEAWAYS
HOW PEOPLE SHARE ON THE WEB
People are no longer simply content consumers but are now content producers. We now allow Internet users to share valuable content freely and instantly (pros and cons) This has turned us into info-‐addicts.
“When we want to know something -‐-‐ anything -‐-‐ a Google search can find the answer in less than a second. Wai8ng un8l you get home isn't necessary either: Just pull up Google or Wikipedia on your smartphone and your "infogreed“ (or infolust) is immediately sa8sfied.” ~ Mashable's Pete Cashmore
¡ Print Marketing Collateral § brochures, business cards, direct mail § trend to include QR codes now (pickup info at our booth!)
OFFLINE SOURCES
MOBILE & FUTURE BROWSER INTERFACES
MOBILE AND
SOCIAL MEDIA
¡ Every business will have different needs. You may not need anything if your website content is accessible relatively well.
¡ Flash and large images are the biggest issues that can be avoided during development of your site.
¡ You need to evaluate what content your audience would want to most likely find when using a phone to access your site.
¡ Make sure that your phone number is visible in the header or
footer and is text-based. This will allow a mobile viewer to click the number to instantly call you.
WHAT DO YOU NEED IN MOBILE SITE?
¡ Responsive design provides dif ferent laytous for dif ferent screen resolutions by fluid grids and flexible images.
¡ On various desktop screens the website may look the same just adjusting dimensions
¡ On smartphones and tablets the site will be scaled down.
NEW TREND - RESPONSIVE DESIGN
¡ Using a single URL for a piece of content makes it easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to your content, and a single URL for the content helps Google's algorithms assign the indexing properties for the content.
¡ No redirection is needed for users to get to the device-optimized view, which reduces loading time. Also, user agent-based redirection is error-prone and can degrade your site's user experience (see "Pitfalls when detecting user agents" section for details).
¡ It saves resources for both your site and Google's crawlers. For responsive web design pages, any Googlebot user agents needs to crawl your pages once, as opposed to crawling multiple times with dif ferent user agents, to retrieve your content. This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of the site's contents and keep it appropriately fresh.
GOOGLE RECOMMENDS RESPONSIVE
¡ While similar experiences will occur on mobile browsers, support does not mean that everybody gets the exact same experience in every browser.
¡ Expecting two users using different browser software to have an identical experience today undermines the most important aspect of browser support – making sure that content is available and accessible.
¡ Mobile browsing experiences will dif fer from desktop browsers, but the content will generally be accessible.
FINAL NOTE ABOUT BROWSERS
