Introduction to Online Marketing

Web design, search engine optimization, social media and more.

Site Design/Userability

• Good, clean web site design DOES matter!

• How intuitive is your web site designed and set up?

• Have you minimized the number of clicks to key ‘call to actions’?

• Is your site the BEST it can be?

• Are you addressing all your site visitors needs?

• Are your online competitors doing anything you are not?

• CONTENT IS KING!

Good and Not So Good

www.utahskihomes.com

Good and Not So Good

www.ski-utah-rentals.com

Good and Not So Good

www.drivingskillsforlife.com

Good and Not So Good

www.drivingskills.on.ca

Why You Should Care About SEO?

As can be clearly seen the first position gets about 42% of the click-throughs. Position 2 receives a staggering 70% less click-throughs and only receives roughly 12% of all traffic. Position 3 receives only 8% and thereby drops about 28% compared to position 2. The rest of the positions show a gradual decrease in click-through percentage, whilst the bottom position generates more traffic than position 9.

Segments of Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

Local Search – getlisted.org

Keyword Research

• What is keyword research?

• Why is keyword research important?

• How to select keyword phrases?

• How many do I select?

• What tools do I use?

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Baseline AssessmentWhere is your site at now?

•Run Web Site Grader – websitegrader.com

• Install Google Analytics

• Is your site currently indexed by the Search Engines?Yahoo: “SITE:www.windhill.com”

• How many back/inlinks does my domain have?Yahoo: “LINK:www.windhill.com”

• Where is your site currently in the Search Engine Results Pages?http://www.seomoz.org/rank-checker

How about your online competition?

• Who ranks near the top for your keyword phrases?

• How many pages do they have indexed and how many backlinks?

• Visit their web site. What are they doing that you are not? How does their site look? Look at their on-page efforts?

Natural/Organic OptimizationOn Page Factors – (15% of the value)• Title Tag, META Tags, ALT Tags

• Visible Text

• Navigation Links

• Header Tags

• Keywords in URLS (www.windhill.com/web-site-design/nh/) vs. (www.windhill.com/search.asp?cat=21)

Off Page Factors – (85% of the value)• Back/In Links – other web sites linking or pointing to your web pages

Black Hat SEO• Keyword Stuffing

• Invisible Text

The graph above was created by www.seomoz.org.

Pay Per Click (PPC)The Major Players

• Google Adwords – adwords.google.com

• Yahoo! Search Advertising – searchmarketing.yahoo.com

• Microsoft adCenter – adcenter.microsoft.com

Advantages

• Immediate Traffic

• Control Spending

• Test Keyword Phrases for Organic/Natural SEO

Disadvantages

• Can get expensive, quickly

• Subject to click fraud

Blogging & WordpressWordpress

• Open Source = free, highly supported and extendable

• Can be used as the platform for your entire web site

• Allows site owner to manage, update and maintain their own web site

• Integrates very well with social media sites like Twitter, Facebook

• Allows people to subscribe via e-mail or RSS feeds

• Very search engine friendly out of the box

• Search engines like to see fresh, new content generated by blogs systems like Wordpress

• Each post is a new page of content

Social MediaYou become part publisher/part business owner

• Facebook – 4th most popular web site

• LinkedIn – business networking site

• Twitter – ‘micro blogging’ allows only 140 characters at a time

• YouTube – video sharing site owned by Google