The Internet is a small business owner’s dream come true because it allows you to market your products and services exclusively to people who are looking for them!  What’s more, if you know what you’re doing, you can effectively market your business for a fraction of the price of traditional methods.

Small Business Online Marketing Traps

Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to lose a lot of money on internet marketing if you don’t know what you’re doing.  In particular, hiring a bad web designer can be catastrophic.  Additionally, Google makes it very easy to drop hundreds or thousands of dollars on Adwords ads that don’t convert to business for you.

Here’s what you need to know in order to compete in today’s online marketplace:

Choose your web designer carefully

The ability to market yourself online cost-effectively starts with a good web site.  A good web site is one that not only looks professional, but also shows up in search engine results. After all, if Google can’t find you, nobody else can either.

Therefore, it’s  important to hire a web designer who is familiar with the basics of designing a search engine friendly site.  Make sure your web designer:

• uses text-based navigation (not image-based or javascript navigation)
• uses a full css layout, not a table-based layout
• writes unique title tags for every page of your site
• uses search-engine friendly urls or permalinks, not long, dynamically-generated urls containing a lot of question marks and equal signs
• writes a unique description for every page
• includes a site map
• only uses one H1 heading on each page
• uses your keywords in your titles and headings

Hiring a designer who is not familiar with the basics of search engine optimization is a waste of money. You can easily weed out the really bad ones (without having to resort to a lot of technical jargon) by asking them if they use javascript-powered menus or table-based layouts.  If they say yes to either question, spend your money somewhere else.

Choose good keywords, and use them wisely

Before you hire a web designer or write a word of copy for your web site, it’s important to put some thought and research into your keywords.  Keywords are the words people type into search engines to find your site.  A good keyword will actually be a phrase, and not a single word.  For example, if you own a piano store in Dallas, a good keyword for you would be “Dallas piano store.”

Once you have a pretty good list going, go to the Google Keyword Tool and put in your keywords.  Here, you can find out how many people are searching for those keywords every month.  (This tool will also generate additional related keywords that you may not have thought of initially.)

Very high traffic keywords (in the tens of thousands) will be difficult to rank for–meaning that you can use these keywords in your site, but when someone types them into Google, your site is not likely to be one of the top search results. On the other hand, the lower the traffic estimate is, the more likely your site will be to show up at the top of the listing when someone types in that keyword.

The problem is, of course, that if no one is searching using your target keywords, it doesn’t matter how well you rank for them.  Your site will still get no traffic.  The trick is to find keywords that sit at a good balance between no search traffic and too much search traffic.

Once you find the right keywords, make sure you use them in your title tags and page headings.  Do not spam the search engines by using them too many times.  If you repeat your keywords too many times per page, Google will ban your site from its listings altogether. Always remember to write your web site content for people, not search engines.

Get high quality links pointing back to your web site

In the old days, you could manipulate your search engine ranking solely by creating a search-engine friendly site and using keywords wisely.   Google thought that gave web masters too many opportunities to game the system, which resulted in irrelevant results.  In an effort to provide good, relevant results, Google changed its search algorithm to take into account the number of other sites that link back to your site.  The more people link to your site, the more it will rise in search engine listings.  To start getting links back to your site:

• register with directories like yellowpages.com, business.com, bestoftheweb.com, etc.
• join local chambers of commerce and get them to link back to you.
• issue press releases via prweb.com and similar services.
• Create “linkbait,” which is a lot of unique content on your site that other people will naturally want to link to.

Creating Linkbait

Sites that naturally rank highly often have a lot of helpful content that people naturally want to link back to.  The more unique content you can write around your keywords, the better.  Never copy and paste articles from other sites, as Google dislikes duplicate content and often won’t index it.  (Also, copying and pasting pictures and text from other web sites is a violation of copyright which can get you sued.)

If you can write articles that will position yourself as an expert in your field, you will be more likely to attract incoming links.  This in turn will push your site to the top of Google’s search engine listings for various keywords, which will hopefully generate business for you.

If you are worried about the ongoing cost of constantly paying someone to update your site with new articles, consider investing in a content management system such as Joomla or Wordpress, which will allow you to write articles and post them yourself.

Be careful building Adwords or other pay-per-click campaigns

If you are having a hard time ranking naturally for your chosen keywords (or if your site is new and hasn’t been indexed yet), you can buy links to your site that show up on the first page of search engine results.  In Google, paid links show up on the right hand side of the screen, whereas organic search results show up on the left.  However, if you’re not careful, you can lose a lot of money fast.

A full-scale Adwords tutorial is beyond the scope of this article, but it’s important to know that choosing the most popular keywords for your Adwords campaign is often the wrong way to go.

For example, if you own a web site hosting company, you might think it  would be a good idea to buy the keyphrase “web site hosting.”  Then, every time someone types “web site hosting” into Google, your ad would show up.  This seems like a good idea until you realize that every time someone types in that keyprhase and clicks on your ad, it will cost you $8-12.  Add that to an estimated traffic volume of 147-184 clicks per day, and you have spent $1200-2100 per day on internet advertising.  If you only make a few dollars off every new web hosting account you sign up, you’ll quickly go out of business this way.

Instead, you want to find longer phrases that are more descriptive and cost less money.  Consider using regional modifiers, such as “Dallas web site hosting” or “Denver web site hosting.”  Other common modifier words include “cheap, affordable, buy,” etc.  Longer phrases are available for cents.  The down side is that long phrases don’t individually generate very much traffic.  The key is to come up with a lot of long search phrases that each generate a little traffic–hundreds of phrases, if possible.  When you group them all together behind one ad, the result is a lot of traffic for cents per click.

These tips should get you started on the road to effectively marketing your business online.  If you have additional questions, feel free to email me at jenn@zensamarketing.com.

Simple. First, understand what “search-engine-friendly” means, so you can know what to ask when choosing a designer for your web site. Then, ask for it.

What is a Search-Engine-Friendly Web Site?

A search-engine-friendly web site is one that is designed in such a way as to be readable by the spiders (computer programs) that search engines use to read and index pages on the Internet. If your site is search-engine-friendly, it will be more likely to show up in search results when you type in certain keywords. For example, if you search for your company name on Google, your web site will always come up as one of the top results if your web site is search-engine-friendly.

Text Links vs. Image Links

The first thing to remember about Internet spiders is that unlike their living counterparts, they don’t have eyes. This means that if there is text on your site that is part of an image file, web spiders can’t read it.

For example, try clicking and dragging your mouse across this paragraph to highlight it. You can highlight each individual word of this paragraph because it is actual text that is wrapped in html code. Spiders can read text like this, and they will index everything that is written in actual text. The more text content your site has, the better. If you fill it with relevant keywords, the more likely your site will be to show up in search engine results when someone types in those keywords.

Spiders cannot read text that is part of image files, such as text that is part of a logo, or some navigation schemes. Try highlighting individual words or letters on the logo at www.zensamarketing.com–you can’t really do it. That text is invisible to spiders, so unless your webmaster tags the image with additional text, a search engine will have no idea what that image says.

A search-engine-friendly web site designer will use as much plain text as possible, even if it means not being able to use fancy fonts. This is the only way to make a web site accessible to the spiders. If a web designer does use images for navigation buttons, logos, or other areas, she should place redundant text links behind the images or at the bottom of the web site to make sure spiders can find every page in the site.

Title Tags and other Meta Tags

Your web site should contain certain tags in the code on every page. The text a web designer places in these tags will not show up in the body of the web site itself, but it may show up in other places. Search engines use the text in these tags to help determine what your site is about and whether or not it should return your page as a result for a particular search.

The most important tag your web site can contain resides in the “title” tag. The text your web developer chooses to code into the title tag shows up in the very top bar of your browser (or in the tab, if you are using a browser that uses tabs). For example, if you look at the top bar of your web browser right now, you can see that the title tag reads: “Search Engine Friendly Web Sites.”

You should have a unique title tag for every page, and that title tag should pertain directly to the content that is on the page. Search engines tend to rank sites lower if web designers have not taken the time to write a unique title tag for every page on the site or if the title tag isn’t relevant to the content on the page.

Meta tags containing description and keyword text should also be included in the code for every page, and this text should also be unique to each page and relevant to the content you can see. Often times, a search engine will display this text in its search results, which means this invisible text is the very first impression of your company many of your web site visitors will receive. Therefore, the importance of having a designer who has taken the time to write well-crafted description tags cannot be understated. Always ask your designer what they have written in the description tags.

Have a Site Map

Text links function as doorways to other pages. Therefore, if you have one page on your site that contains text links to every single other page on your site, that means a spider can go to that one single page and use it as a doorway to get to every other page on your site. Spiders like site maps because site maps make it easy for them to make sure they have indexed all of your pages. So make sure you have a text link leading to a site map on every page of your site–especially your home page.

Use Static (not Dynamic) URLs Whenever Possible

A dynamic URL looks like this: http://www.domain.com/product.php?cid=1&pid=5

A static URL contains no question marks and looks more like this:

http://www.zensamarketing.com/services.htm

Typically database-driven web sites built on platforms like Joomla or Wordpress generate a lot of dynamic URLs. Search engines prefer static URLs, so try to make sure your most important pages live on static URLs.  Your web designer should easily be able to adjust your web site’s settings so that your URLs appear static and not dynamically generated.

What’s the difference between Search Engine Optimization and Search-Engine-Friendliness?

A site that is search-engine-friendly means a site that Google, Yahoo, and other search engines can find. A site that is search engine optimized (SEOed) is a site that has been engineered to show up high in search engine results for specific keywords and phrases.

Everyone can and should have a search engine friendly site. SEOing your site can get tricky and expensive, particularly since search engine algorithms are trade secrets and trying to game them is not an exact science. Some leading SEO providers charge as much as $100,000 a year for their SEO services.

Small businesses often find that they can generate more web site traffic for significantly less money through pay-per-click services such as Google Adwords, although there is also a definite strategy for using pay-per-click services as well.

Conclusion

It’s a waste of money to buy a beautiful site that isn’t also search-engine-friendly. By learning how search engines work and setting up your pages in a format they like, you will receive more traffic to your web site. Always ask your web designer if they know the basics of building a search-engine-friendly web site before you hire them.