The following article appeared in the May 2008 issue of the Nevada Business Journal and features Twelve Horses CEO, David LaPlante discussing search engine optimization and online marketing.

Your Company’s Online Presence

Making Your Web Site Work for You

by Kathleen Foley

According to Internet World Stats, more than 1.3 billion people worldwide have Internet access, and in North America, more than 71 percent of the population is online. With more people each day using the Internet to find information, compare and purchase products, and make important business decisions, having a competitive Web site is vital for businesses both large and small.

Should every company have a Web site? “If you had asked me that five years ago, I would have said no, but now it’s absolutely a necessity,” said Jarrod Lopicolo, business director for Noble Studios, a marketing and Web development firm based in Carson City. “The Internet is the No. 1 place for research before doing business with anyone, whether it’s choosing a dentist for a root canal or someone to provide a service for your company.”

Mark Cenicola, CEO and president of Cenicola-Helvin Enterprises in Las Vegas, agreed that having a Web site today is “critical” for all businesses. “Even if you’re a small operation like an auto mechanic, a Web site is a way for you to build credibility and enhance your image,” he said. “It also helps generate new business via search engines.” Cenicola’s company publishes a variety of Web sites ranging from technology news to classified advertising.

Both these experts agreed that it has become more difficult for the average business to create and maintain its own Web site, because visitors expect more functionality in a site today than they did just a few years ago, when a static “brochure site” containing basic information was the norm. Some of the functions visitors have come to expect on Web sites include event calendars, feedback forms, member directories, blogs and message boards, RSVP functions, shopping carts, search functionality and video clips. “Tools help people stay on your site longer and build up the retention rate,” said Lopicolo. However, learning how to program and maintain each of these features can be a daunting task for a non-professional.

“I don’t think it’s possible these days to implement an effective Web site without going to a Web development company,” he said. “It’s possible to download a Web site design template and populate it with content, but it wouldn’t have the impact you need to compete in today’s market. It would be like handing someone a business card with perforated edges. They would immediately know that you did it yourself, and your image would suffer. It’s hard to do your own site and have it not look amateurish.”

Cenicola remarked, “If you’re not an expert at Web site design, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. You could buy a set of plans and try to construct your own house, but if you’re not a building contractor, think of the learning curve, all the time it would take and all the mistakes you’d make. Then you’d have to worry whether the foundation was really solid.”

Content: Text is Just the Beginning

Managers at many companies today are wondering if they should feature a blog on their Web site. Cenicola noted, “Message boards and blogs are a growing trend, but they aren’t yet business-critical.” Blogs not only present another way to bring visitors into a site, but they also give professionals like attorneys or financial planners a chance to be seen as experts in their field.

According to Ding Communications’ art director, Erik Flippo, who also designs Web sites for the Reno-based advertising and marketing firm, “A blog can drive people to your site if it has good content that people are interested in. You can get repeat visitors that way,” he said. “However, if you don’t have anything relevant or timely to say, it doesn’t make any sense. It can be labor-intensive: somebody has to write the content, and you also have to make sure it’s timely and constantly updated. If you’re not willing to make the investment in manpower, you should think twice about starting up a blog or adding Web 2.0 functionality to your site just because you think everybody else is doing it.”

Videos are another popular feature on many Web sites, since most people now have high-speed Internet connections allowing them to easily download and view larger digital files. Many people prefer to spend four minutes watching a video or slide show instead of reading printed text to get the information.

Constantly reviewing and updating the content on your site is important for items like calendars and blogs, as well as traditional features like press releases or news sections. If visitors to your site see a bulletin announcing that the company president will speak at the upcoming 2006 Chamber of Commerce meeting, they will know you don’t make much of an investment in your Web presence, and your image will suffer.

Your Web Site as a Marketing Tool

David LaPlante, CEO of Twelve Horses, remarked, “Everyone’s waking up to the fact that the Internet starting line is Google. More and more people are realizing that if they aren’t as relevant online as they are in the real world, they have a problem.” LaPlante’s Reno-based marketing and messaging company provides services that include Web site design and development, search engine optimization (SEO) and multi-channel marketing.

SEO is a technique that arranges content within a site to make it appear in the best possible ranking on results pages when online visitors use search engines like Google and Yahoo. Since people naturally read a page from top to bottom, a site appearing near the top of the first results page is more likely to be visited than a site at the bottom, or on a later page.

Search engines routinely “crawl” Web sites looking for key words or phrases, and use complicated algorithms to determine how to rank sites according to how often these words and phrases appear, either in the content that is readable on the site or in the underlying codes or tags.

“When optimizing a site, it’s important to select your key words carefully,” Flippo noted. “You don’t want to be competing for general key words. If you have a travel agency, it would be crazy to optimize your site for the word ‘travel’ because there are so many other sites that reference that word. Yours would never appear near the top among all those thousands of results. You want to go after keywords that are two or three words long, like ‘Hawaii cruise’ or ‘Lake Tahoe skiing.’ The more specific you can be, the more likely it is you will be listed high in the search engine. You will also target the customer who’s more likely to result in a sale.”

Flippo warned against adding key words to a site only to get better search engine rankings. “It has to be good content that makes sense,” he said. “Search engines can tell if you’re just repeating key words, and they will punish you for the technique, which is called ‘keyword spamming.’”

SEO results in what is called an “organic” search, as opposed to paid placement on search engine pages. “The organic part means that it’s free – you’re not paying for it,” Flippo explained. “Once you make the initial investment of optimizing your site, you don’t have to pay for anything else.”

SEO is only one component of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which has grown into a multi-billion dollar business. Although organic searches are free, they don’t guarantee results, and companies eager to grab their share of the market are willing to pay search engines to have their sites mentioned on results pages. According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, spending on SEM grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion in 2007, with spending projected to grow to $25.2 billion in 2011. The largest SEM vendors are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.

According to LaPlante, more businesses have come to realize the importance of Web searches in bringing in revenue. “There is also more competition for your customer’s or prospect’s ‘eyeballs’ and attention,” he noted. “Internet content until about three years ago was composed chiefly of branded sites and news media. There weren’t many compelling reasons for Internet users to spend the majority of their online time on sites that were not brand-specific. Now we have interactive social sites like MySpace, YouTube and Flickr, and people are blogging, consuming video and chatting. They are viewing content that is not created by the brands themselves, but by fellow consumers. The coming together of these two trends has caused many companies to hit the proverbial panic button, asking, ‘Why is our Web site visitation going down or flattening? Where are our visitors going, what are they doing, and why aren’t they staying on our site?’”

LaPlante said the popularity of all these new online channels has created a paradigm shift for companies wanting to advertise their products or services on the Internet. Instead of trying to drive everyone into one site that they can control, they may have to decentralize and spread their brand out into other online areas.

Companies whose customers are more likely to be younger and more tech-oriented are among the first to investigate alternate means of reaching them, according to Flippo. “You have to target the medium to your audience,” he noted. “If your potential customers are not technologically savvy, then why invest in text messaging or a MySpace page? Your audience won’t be there. On the other hand, there’s a nightclub in Reno whose audience skews very young – people in their 20s and 30s – and their only Web presence is their MySpace page. The acts that come to perform there, and special guests like Ultimate Fighting Championship stars, all have MySpace pages, so it creates a kind of synergy, using the ‘friends’ function on MySpace. It presents cross-promotional opportunities that works for them, but their marketing strategy wouldn’t work for most traditional businesses.”

Making the most of a company’s online presence can produce a good return on investment, but experts note that the initial investment does need to made if a firm expects to compete in the 21st century market, which is increasingly moving to the Internet.

When developing a new website, site design and usability should be one of the highest priorities on your development list. Without a usable design, users will quickly become frustrated with your website and will stop visiting. Thankfully, there are a few basic usability practices that you can employ to help make your visitors’ experiences the best they can be.

1. Use different colors. Color design on your website should not be garish or unprofessional, but you can utilize different colors to help draw attention to various portions of your website. If, for example, you wish to emphasize certain points in your content, then a bold red or blue color will draw a visitor’s eye directly to that portion of the site. You can also draw attention to other portions of your website, such as your navigation bar or certain pages that you want to attract more attention. Be cautious of over-using colors, though, since a proliferation of different, non-complementary colors on a website is a surefire way to drive people away from your site.
2. Focus your design on the objective. The design of a website should always focus on the end goal of the site. If the site is designed to inform people, then the focus should be predominately on content and ease of navigation. If your goal is to sell a product, then focusing a design around product displays and easy product searches should be your goal. In focusing on your goal, you can use colors and design patterns that help draw the attention of the customer to certain portions of the website. You can also make things like checking out easy, which will reduce the chances that they will become frustrated with the site and leave before making a purchase. Regardless of the goal, designing your site and marketing it with certain features being in dominance will help stimulate traffic throughput, and is likely to increase your overall return on investment (ROI).
3. Use a consistent formatting scheme. There are few things worse than a website whose formatting and design is inconsistent from page to page. This type of haphazard design and layout smacks of unprofessionalism, and is a big turn-off to visitors. Even if your website consists of only one or two pages, use a consistent design across them. If you have different sections of your web site that require differing designs, link them with some common theme, like a header that remains the same, or a sidebar that doesn’t change. If you can make transitions between designs on your website nonexistent or as smooth as possible, then your internet visitors will feel less jolted during their time on your website.
4. Have simple buttons and links. Long links and large, flashing buttons can be difficult on the eyes and makes it difficult for people on a website to navigate around to different pages. Oversized, flashing, oddly colored and unnaturally placed buttons distract from your content and keep visitors away from your website. To avoid this, design your buttons with simplicity in mind, and steer away from ones that are unconventional. Oversized links that join multiple words in a sentence are also distracting, and it can be difficult for a user to tell if the collection of words is one link, or multiple links all next to each other. Instead of creating links that span multiple words, just use one word, or two at most. The users of your website will then be able to enjoy the content you have created without getting distracted by annoying underlining and linking.
5. Provide a sitemap. A sitemap, while sometimes thought of as outdated, is extremely helpful, especially for larger sites. New visitors to your site will benefit from a sitemap, since it will provide them with an easy way to view all of the pages and sections of your site. If a new visitor comes to your website from the internet, then having a sitemap to direct them to the page they want to go will be a huge help from a usability standpoint. It will also provide repeat visitors with a way to stay up to date on new parts of your website, and will let them find pages on it that they haven’t seen before.
6. Make all sections of the site easy to access. Above all, make sure that your site is easy to access, both for novices and experts. Don’t make links confusing, and avoid any unnecessary obfuscation. If you want to keep people out of a certain part of your website, then either don’t put it up on the internet, or use a password system to protect it. You should also have links on all of your pages that remain consistent in a place like a header, footer or sidebar. These links should go to main pages on your website, such as the homepage, a contact page or other important pages. This reliable set of links will make navigation and accessibility each for users, and will encourage first-time visitors to come back again and again.

Creating a website with good usability traits can be difficult, but the rewards are well worth it. Increased traffic, a higher ROI and more success from your marketing campaigns will all result from your initial hard work in putting the site together. By following these few usability tips, you can make this process much easier.

Want to know about one simple SEO strategy that takes less than five minutes to implement and can have a very positive result in regards to rankings in the search engines? If so get ready to change the footer on your website.

The footer on your website usually simply contains a copyright statement and sometimes some other links. Many websites have a two line footer where one line is devoted to links and the other is devoted only to the copyright. Adding a company statement to your footer is an easy way to implement an seo strategy that is simple and doesn’t take a lot of time. Here is an example:

Previous footer: © 2007 Twelve Horses

New SEO Friendly Footer: © Copyright 2007 Twelve Horses - A Web Design, Development & Search Engine Optimization Company in Reno & Utah

It usually works best when you have the text footer [non-link footer] fit on one line. Here are some key points that this new footer accomplishes:

1. This particular website or business is focused on providing web design, web development, seo or search engine optimization, email marketing, and social marketing services. Although that is a very long list sometimes you have to pick and choose what you can fit in a footer. The above example ensures that every single page of the website contains the keyword phrases of ‘web design, development, and search engine optimization’. This will help the search engines recognize that this website is related to those key terms since they appear on every webpage. This strategy not only assists search engines in knowing what services you may provide but also human web visitors. If a website visitor can not figure out what the website is all about they general do one of two actions; either leave or look in the footer for an ‘about us’ link. Having this line of text in the footer ensures that if they do glance at the footer they will be able to know what the website is about without having to click to another page.

2. The above example also contains ‘Reno and Utah‘ in the sentence. Twelve Horses has headquarters in Reno, Nevada with a secondary office in Salt Lake City, Utah. Having these terms in the footer lets the search engines know what geographic area this particular website primarily provides web services to. You may wonder why the footer contains Reno, a city, and Utah, a state. Through some keyword research it was discovered that people in Salt Lake City generally search for ‘utah [keyword]‘ rather than ’salt lake city [keyword]‘, maybe because Salt Lake City is too long or time consuming to type out and Utah only has one major metropolitan area which is the wasatch front. On the other hand Nevada contains several metropolitan areas such as Reno, Las Vegas, etc. which are spread out from each other. From keyword research we discovered people in Nevada are more likely to type in the major metropolitan area they are in compared to just ‘Nevada [keyword]‘. Again, this also provides website visitors information on the geographic area the company is based in by glancing at the footer.

3. This is a very simple and effective SEO strategy that literally should only take 5-10 minutes to implement on your website and will have a profound effective compared to the investment of time that is required.

If you enjoyed this SEO strategy and would like us to post more please post a comment and we will be happy to share our knowledge with you.

Today, Robert and I had the pleasure of having lunch at La Pasta Bistro with Stoney deGeyter, owner and CEO of Pole Position Marketing. Pole Position is a search engine optimization company located in Reno, Nevada. As Robert and I are used to meeting with people for interviews, I hope Stoney didn’t walk away feeling like it was 20 questions.

Stoney is a blogger. His blog has been doing very well for him and he shared that he tries to do at least one post a day. Also of interest, he makes each of his 5 employees do one post a week.

We discussed the possibility of trying to organize a Reno Social Media Club or similar style group. If anyone else in the area would be interested, leave a comment below.

Disclosure: While I read John Chow’s blog and I love the Wii, I have never used our purchased pens from 1234pens.com.

The root of all evil, John Chow is giving away a Nintendo Wii. To enter, all you have to do is write a blog post about it. This is mine. Where’s my Wii? The contest is sponsored by 1234Pens.com. They make promotional pens.

This is the exact copy for the contest on John Chow’s site. By making this post, I have entered to win the Nintendo Wii. The reason John Chow has asked bloggers to make a post like the one above may not be obvious, so let me explain. The first reason is it’s viral. Because of the uniqueness, it causes bloggers like me to write about it and readers like you to learn about it. At the time of writing, this John Chow post has 177 comments. If a conservative estimate of 1 out of every 10 blog readers post comments, this means his traffic to this one post is probably well over 2,000 people.

Second, and more important, it creates great search engine optimization (SEO). Having people link to you to enter a contest gives you link popularity, a very important factor in most search engine algorithms. If you search Google for “root of all evil,” John Chow’s site comes up third. If you search Google for “giving away a Nintendo Wii,” Chow’s site comes up first. But, since the contest is sponsored by 1234Pens.com, I imagine the real hope is to get them to show up on the first page for “promotional pens” (currently they don’t show up until the 4th page in the 3rd position - basically 43rd).

For $250 - the cost of a Wii - this is a great SEO campaign for next to nothing in terms of cost. However, John Chow had to leverage his site in order to make it happen, so I’m sure he was paid too (although he doesn’t disclose anything about that).

You may ask if it’s ethical for bloggers to use their blogs in this manner. Since Chow didn’t ask bloggers to post a positive review of 1234pens.com, it’s a tough question. Frequent reader’s of Chow’s blog will know that linking is an important factor in SEO. However, bloggers that hear about this through viral techniques may not know they are a “pawn” in this strategy.

I probably wouldn’t have posted it if Chow wanted me to say “They make great promotional pens.” But his very fact based copy - which is just a sample post - compelled me to participate.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Contest, John Chow, Nintendo Wii, Search Engine Optimization