Online Marketing Sydney, Internet Marketing Australia Freestyle Media

How would you feel if your website wasn’t accessible for a whole day?

Does the thought of that happening make you kind of sick in the stomach?

Well this is exactly what happened to a site I visit regularly (we’ll let them be anonymous to avoid embarrassment).

One evening their site got linked to by a major overseas newspaper and the incoming traffic all through the Australian night was 10x normal … until the site crashed under great stress … and took 24 hours to replicate and bring back up again on a different server.

Prevent this happening to you:

• Get your site optimized by a specialist internet marketing company – the techniques to make a website user and search engine friendly also make sure that is fast and efficient
• Make sure your web host can handle sudden unexpected peaks of traffic – ask them if they can guarantee your website will survive what’s known in the trade as the slashdot effect
• Monitor your website 24/7 and assign an IT manager with a pager/mobile which gets notified if the site goes down so they can react quickly.

So you know your website sucks but there are still some pots of gold on it that everyone comments about and you don’t want to kill, for fear of losing all of your sales. What do you do?

We have many websites running for our clients and they all have golden elements to them which deliver the leads/signups/sales our clients need, but there are always improvements that can be made. The reason for this is because our clients took on my first principle of getting a website up and running and testing the results. They made sales, saw the potential and kept upgrading. If it died in the ass they dumped it. Your first website needs to be that test pilot that gives very specific users exactly what they need, but unfortunately will have many short comings and some grief for other users. Quickly upgrading your site and evolving it with the feedback from your new users is critical at this stage, but its not a reason to overhaul it.

Decision 1 – Did you figure out what the jewels on your website were?
If you haven’t figured that out yet its not time to rebuild it yet. Save your pennies and make a few imagery modifications, add a few links and push users to the areas of your website that you think might gain interest. Keep the test running. Note down just generally what has tended to provide the best conversions and what has got comments from users. Better still, if you have struck upon some viral elements or written a niche bit of content that is getting a huge amount of search engine traffic keep that and build more onto it. Remember it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to be live and getting feedback.

Decision 2 – Do you have the cash?
If you don’t have the budget to make a better website this time around keep saving your pennies and incrementally invest in the site. If you rebuild a site it should be a bigger and better investment than before because you have the insights of what your customers want and you are upgrading these parts. If you are just rebuilding the site just for the sake of fixing some problems but are keeping the same functionality and content, I would pause and wait a bit more time before rebuilding your site. Just changing the ‘look and feel’ of your website isnt going to skyrocket your traffic or sales. These things might:

1. Building a viral tool - Adding a refer a friend form to your shopping cart thank you page. Creating a free report download form to build a database. Adding a forum.
2. Service - Is what you are adding a new service that your visitors will find handy? If yes, add it, if no disband it.
3. Money - Will you earn more cash from upgrading your site? This is a more crude way of saying is there an ROI in your website upgrade. Since you are a marketing manager and you have been to conferences with everyone screaming ROI. Just give it a thought before you upgrade. Anyone at Freestyle Media could build you a “Space Shuttle” of a website but we would not be keen to take your cash just because you want to upgrade it unless you were going to make more money by doing so.

I would advise that you want to be the big gorilla in your online niche not just a little possum hanging out with their mates. Vision your website as the best in the industry and work towards it.

3 questions to formulate your websites vision

1. Which website is the best in the market?
2. What am I doing better?
3. What do I need to do to take steps to be the best?

If you have 2 No’s from the above, then keep chipping away and rebuild it later. Perhaps just launch a free blog and start testing out those new ideas you had for your site. Alternatively just register a $8 .com domain name, install some off the shelf software with a few mods and plonk it on some cheap hosting and see what happens!

Freestyle Media number 1 spot for “Online Marketing Agency” in Google Australia

Redeveloping your website can be a real challenge when you assume your web designers and developers understand search engine marketing. Unfortunately this is not usually the case. Most designers are great at making pretty pictures and developers are great at making great technology. But pretty pictures and great technology don’t necessarily give you great search engine results. I have come across many designers and developers in my time and following are the main problems I encounter when building a site that you want to rank well in the search engines.

1. Too much Flash with keywords inside it – Websites with too much flash kill the opportunity to gain great results in the engines. The flash also contains all of the keyword text. This is exceptionally unfriendly to the search engine as there is no way to browse the text. The designer will tell you, “We will be using the latest technology in flash, you will be cutting edge!” I like flash but only moderate amounts used for promotion or product demonstrations.
2. No text – Sites that have little or just 1 paragraph of generic text. Google only reads text, pdf’s and word docs. The designer will usually tell you, “Your web design has visual impact because of all the flash.” Unfortunately it will have no impact with Google.
3. No Sitemap – There wasn’t a sitemap. Some developers will tell you that this is just old school and you don’t need it anymore. I assure you that adding a sitemap to your website will improve search results.
4. No web page theming – Firstly a definition, Web page theming is structuring a website into different sections with specific themes so that a search engine can interpret and rank/categorise the pages accordingly. The search unfriendly sites I see are structured in a manner that is great for human browsers and ignore search engines. I always think about the search engines and the user at the same time and develop a structure which brings about a happy medium. Developing your site into themes and topics allows you to deliver the best site for human and search engine browsers. The read the words and browse and the search engine can categorise your site and browse.

3 Ways to Avoid Developing your New Website into a Search Engine Nightmare

1. Check the designer and developers Competency of search engine marketing – Ask your web agency if they understand search engine marketing. All of them will say yes because you are talking usually to the main salesperson. Ask to see some result in the search engines of website they have redesigned. Type in the main keywords for the site and see where the site that was redesigned ranks. They are no good if:
1. No listings – They cant show you a listing
2. Non competitive terms – the terms which they used to show you results were just the brand name of the product and not a generic keyword. E.g. if they were showing you a Nike site and they typed in “Nike” that is no good. Instead if they typed in “sport shoe” and showed you number 1 listings, then you are on a winner.
2. Check that the Content Management System is Search Engine Friendly – Ask your agency what CMS(Content Management System) they use. Get them to show you examples of websites they have built using the CMS and what sort of rankings they have achieved in the search engines. A CMS system can make or baek your searhch engine results by the following things:
1. Too much junk in CMS – If the CMS is dumping huge amounts of content and code into the page, this can ruin your results since Google doesn’t understand code its looking for text.
2. URL formats not compliant – If the CMS formats the URL and filenames of pages with too many query strings e.g. (ThisGreatPage.aspx?id=pinkelephany&Page=ContactMyMum&Query=NotSearchFriendly) All of those query strings will clog up the search engine and it will assume you are just content spamming and treat each of your webpages as a single page. I.e. the search engine will chop off the querystring elements and just assume that there is one page there, even though the query string elements allow you to see different content.
Optimal website search strategy is to assign 2 -3 keywords per webpage
3. Structure your site for the engines – I know the pain you have gone through developing your sitemap and thinking through all of the content that you want the use to look at. What I want you now to do is look at your sitemap and think about all the content you want the search engine to look at. Key things to do:
1. Choose your keywords – First you need to figure out which keywords you are targeting. Your agency should be able to help you with this if you haven’t done any search engine marketing before.
2. Choose your high ranking pages – Since you know which keywords you are targeting, you now need to decide which pages you want to target these keywords and rank highly in the search engines. These will need to be specially developed and your internal linking needs to be structured to give these pages the highest number of backlinks.
3. Homepage vs Subpage organization keyword assignment – The strategy with keyword assignment for web pages is to choose 2 – 3 keywords per page. The normal trap people fall into is assuming their homepage will target all of the keywords. Your homepage needs to be treated just like another page it should have some main generic keywords assigned to it and just target those. (See diagram below)

Optimal strategy for Keyword assignment of website pages

Choosing a competent online marketing agency to build your website

If you are encountering any of the above problems with your current web agency I would suggest building your website with an Online Marketing Agency. The difference is that a web agency can build your site but an online marketing agency can save you money by building your website to be search engine friendly. Save yourself the cost of rebuilding your website and work with an agency that understands how to build a website that is search engine friendly. Contact Freestyle Media, a competent Online Marketing Agency (h
ttp://www.FreestyleMedia.com.au) or call Fred Schebesta on 02 9818 7300 to discuss your website requirements.