What Your Webmaster Won't Tell You

By Carl Weiss

If you have a website, then you know your webmaster has the power of life or death over it.  You probably also know that he or she speaks in tongues, where terms like “Link Equity,” “SERPS,” and “Meta Tags,” have a meaning all their own.  In today’s blog, I will part the curtain and allow you to take a look at what the wizard of the web knows that you don’t.  I will also endeavor to show you what you need to know if you want your web presence to be more than a billboard in the desert. 

Who’s On First?

The term “Webmaster” is somewhat nebulous, since the creation, optimization and control of your website can actually take anywhere from 1 to 3 individuals. 

Image courtesy of en.wikipedia.org

1.      Web Designer – There are two flavors of web designer.  The first and best is an online marketer who understands that the look of your website needs to take a backseat to the functionality of your website.  A marketing-centric web designer starts by determining what it is you wish your site to accomplish (generate leads, generate calls, or sell directly from the site).  Then he or she will build the vehicle that is designed to generate the desired result. 

The second type of designer is more or less a glorified graphic artist who is mostly interested in the look of the site.  This type of designer will show you graphically intense designs that are beautiful, that most often don’t generate results.  (If you see a lot of rotating images and morphing graphics, this indicates the use of either Java (which the search engines hate) or Flash (which the search engines hate even more than Java).

2.      Search Engine Optimizer – It helps if your web designer understands the ins and outs of SEO.  If not, then you will be forced to hire an optimizer to help you sell your site to the search engines.  This will entail having a conversation with a person that will spout all kinds of arcane jargon in order to describe what it is they need to do to make your website search engine friendly.  (This is another reason to hire a designer that is ready, willing and able to take care of this during the design phase.)

Courtesy commons.wikimedia.org

Unless you want to bring your techno babble/English dictionary with you when you meet with your SEO pro, I suggest you find a firm that can explain in plain English what it is they are going to do for you and how often they intend on doing it.  For the most part you should only need to optimize your on-page assets once.  Anyone who tries to sell your ongoing SEO services other than link building is wasting your money.

3.      Website Hosting and Updating – There are a number of “Webmasters” that only provide hosting and updating of your website.  If this is the case you need to be cognizant of the fact that should you need to make a change to your website, you will first need to go through your web designer who will then need to motivate your webmaster to grant him or her access to make the desired change.  You may also be required to pay both of these individuals to make said change.  Obviously the best solution is to hire an individual or firm who can do all this at once instead of by committee.

Webmasters are a throwback to a time when it required a skilled IT professional to manage the server that contained your website.  This is no longer the case since nearly all servers are now cloud based.  This makes it doubly galling when you submit a change order to a webmaster and he or she sits on a job for days that literally takes a couple of minutes to accomplish. 

What’s on Second?

Once your website is up and running, you next need to register it with search engines and directories. 

image courtesy of flickr.com

You can either do this manually or you can hire a firm to do this for you.  Again, there are professionals who will offer to perform this time consuming service.  The devil, however, is in the details.  That the task needs to be accomplished is obvious.  If you don’t register with search engines and directories your website will never get found.  The trick is to 
get your site or sites registered with as many search engines and directories as possible without breaking the bank.  (Working the Web to Win offers a search engine push package that will register a site on 100 directories for $300.)

Once your site(s) registered on scads of search engines and directories the traffic will start rolling in, right?  WRONG. Even a perfectly optimized site registered on 100 high quality search engines and directories will not prove sufficient to generate significant traffic all by itself.  Why?  That’s because the game of generating search engine position has gotten a lot more complicated in the past few years.

Image courtesy of pixabay.com

Prior to 2005, all you needed to do to generate high ranking on the search engines was create an optimized website and register your site with the search engines.  The search engines would then send their spiders to analyze your site and determine its rank. That’s literally all there was to it.  Today on-page SEO only accounts for 25% of ranking criteria, the other 75% is comprised of off-site assets, such as blogs, social networks, videos, images and podcasts.  More crucially, not only do you need to create, publish and distribute this online content, you have to do so consistently.  Simply having a Facebook or Twitter feed on your site isn’t enough.  You also need to grow and engage your following.  The same is true of your blogs, videos and podcasts. 

Add to this the fact that the search engine spiders can not only read, but understand your website, blogs and social posts and you can see why generating ranking today is a huge undertaking.  I refer to the Internet as the elephant in the room.  Everybody knows it’s there, but nobody is prepared to talk about it.  As search engine spiders continue to evolve, you need to understand that your success online comes down to a popularity contest.  The spiders award their favors to websites that create and engage the biggest audience.  Therefore, you need to either assign the task of feeding the elephant to several staffers, or you need to outsource the task to a company that will put a team at your disposal to get the task done.  (No single human being is capable of handling all these tasks.  It takes a team.)

I Don’t Know Who’s on Third

The other three factors you need to take into consideration if you hope to prevail are geotargeting, mobile marketing and reputation management.

The Internet is no longer a World Wide Wad.  It is now not only possible, but desirable to geotarget your online assets to attract the best audience.  This is done embedding geographic information in all your online assets.  Before you go about creating or retooling a website, you first need to define who and where your best customers are located.  There is a big difference between creating a website for say a chiropractor that will have a reach of 10 miles from his or her location, to a company that needs to market to a regional or national scope.  Today geotargeting can be employed to narrow your scope to as little as an individual neighborhood.

The first thing you should do is register your business with Google Local and create a Google Map.  Since Google controls more than two thirds of all traffic in this country, the more Google friendly you become, the better your chances of success.  Even better is the fact that once created, you can embed your Google map right on your homepage.  This is another important thing to do if you hope to convert traffic into customers.  Nobody wants to search your site to find out where you are located.  Since people spend less than 2 minutes on your website, it is vital you give them everything they need to make a buying decision as quickly as possible.  Gone are the days when a web surfer would click around your site to check you out.  Today the next click you hear will be them going back to where they found you to check out somebody else.

This is also why it is vital you put your best foot forward in a hurry.  This requires video.  If your current website is composed of a bunch of stock images, what does this tell prospects about your company?  Nothing.  If you want to entice prospects to take the next step they need to know what you are all about.  Since you only have 2 minutes or less to accomplish this task, an intro video that shows who you are, what makes you special and why a prospect should take the next step is vital to your success.  It is also vital that the video be located prominently on your homepage, not buried below the fold.

Even better is a second video that shows satisfied customers extolling your virtues.  Like it or not, the biggest obstacle to converting clicks into cash is credibility.  Video testimonials are the ultimate credibility builder.  That and lots of reviews on Google will not only help you seal the deal, but it is a great way to create Google Juice.  When we shoot video testimonials for us or our clients, we routinely take the person being interviewed over to Google Maps to post a review as soon as the video is complete.  Once you get 10 reviews four red stars will also appear next to your listing which helps you separate yourself from the herd once you make it to page 1 on Google.

Getting Mobilized

Image courtesy of linkedin.com

This brings us to the last and currently most important requirement for generating traction with Google: Mobile.  Several months back, Google made it a requirement for websites to be “mobile-friendly.”  This means that if your website is not designed to reconfigure itself to tablets and smartphones, your chances of getting on page 1 are nil.  To see if your site makes the grade, simply do a search for it on any smartphone.  If the page doesn’t change shape to accommodate the platform it is definitely time you did a site makeover.  Make sure your web designer is using a dynamic language such as HTML 5.  If not, you will need to redo the redo.

What’s It All About?

Unless you have to means to hire an in-house online marketing team that has what it takes to create and distribute content to Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and YouTube on a continual basis, you need to find a firm you can trust to outsource your online destiny if you hope to make your web presence work for you.  If not, you will find yourself at more and more of a disadvantage as your competitors reap the rewards online and eat up more market share.  Because the biggest thing you need to understand online is this, “If you are not coming up on page 1 of the search engines and your competition is, does that help or hurt your business?”

Carl Weiss is president of Working the Web to Win, an award-winning digital marketing agency based in Jacksonville, Florida.  You can listen to Carl live every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern on BlogTalkRadio   

Making It Mobile

By Carl Weiss

NEWSFLASH: There are 6.8 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide.  This is surprising, considering the current world population is just a little over 7 billion men, women and children.  More surprising is the fact that mobile has jumped more than 1 billion during the past three years alone. Of that, more than one billion subscribers are now Smartphone equipped. 

http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats/a

What this means to business owners and managers is that if they have yet to embrace mobile marketing, they could be missing the boat.  The problem for many is the fact that it took them nearly twenty years to learn how to add the Internet to their marketing mix.  Now many are reluctant to jump on the mobile bandwagon since they believe it will require the expenditure of yet more time, energy and money.

HTML 5 to the Rescue

While it is true that Smartphone users can and do surf the web, most websites created before 2012 rely on code that forces most people to squeeze many websites down to size in order to read them.  This is

 not only inconvenient. It usually means that most people will choose to surf elsewhere almost immediately.  What HTML 5 does is create a site that can detect and reconfigure itself to make it easier for tablet and Smartphone users to view without having to manipulate the site to make it fit their particular platform.  Better still, HTML 5 works with most browsers.  Plus, it makes embedding video on html 5 as easy as embedding images was with HTML 4.

http://janderson99.hubpages.com/hub/HTML5-is-Here-Now-HTML5-Benefits-for-Users-and-Developers

Of course, it can still be a chore for Smartphone readers to view a site if it has a lot of text.  I know I need a 12-inch tablet to make reading practical.  That’s why I still recommend that every business owner and manager spends a few bucks to create a .mobi site that uses video to showcase their business in a size that anyone can view.  Add to this the fact that there is at least one other advantage to creating a .mobi site, since many prime urls are still up for grabs that can help your business generate more traffic.

There’s an App for That

Some businesses have embraced mobile marketing in a big way by having mobile apps created that not only allow them to get a jump on the mobile craze, but also allows them to do some pretty sophisticated things online.  Whereas in the past many businesses relied upon radio and TV ads to generate a buzz about their products and services, today it is all too easy for someone to change stations or filter their TV viewing to eliminate all those annoying 4-minute commercial breaks. (Darn TiVo.)

This is where mobile apps are changing the way in which businesses engage their customers.  Offering everything from interactive coupons and contests to games and built-in customer appreciation programs, many businesses are capitalizing on the public’s infatuation with Smartphones by developing apps designed to interact with customers and prospects. 

·         Unlike standard email, a text message is more likely to be read right away. 

·         Using push technology an app can deliver relevant information to individual prospects.

·         Apps can also take advantage of GPS technology to geotarget customers.

Of course the downside is that it can be fairly pricey to develop a sophisticated app from 

English: Myurbanspot.com is an online mobile coupon app to find local businesses in the area. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

scratch.  This makes many apps unapproachable for smaller businesses.  There is also the added factor that taking an app to market can take months.  Even once in the marketplace you are forced to compete with millions of other apps.

“It's no accident or surprise that more than 2 million cumulative apps are in the Apple App Store and the Google Play store. While creating an app has been a great gateway into mobile, and still is a valuable tool to deliver content, reach is limited by the number of people who download and use the app.”

http://www.retailcustomerexperience.com/article/230843/How-to-ensure-a-symbiotic-mobile-marketing-strategy

Before you plunk down a wad of cash to develop an app for your business, you need to consider several factors, including:

1.      What is the app going to do for your business to give you an edge over the competition?

2.      How big is your anticipated audience?

3.      How long of a shelf life will your app have?

4.      How are you planning on distributing your app?

5.      Is there a third-party app available that can do a similar job?

English: Graph showing global smartphone market share for Q2 2011 When updating this graph, please check its usage and update the captions and refs in articles which link to it. Thanks. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With two million apps on the shelf it is highly probable that someone has already come to market with

 an app that can do the same or similar job.  Why pay retail when you can access many of the same benefits for pennies on the dollar through a developer?

Speaking of old-school marketing, mobile can enhance virtually every form of print marketing you currently employ.  Have a business card or brochure?  Add a QR code.  Spending money on a newspaper or magazine ad?  Add a QR code.  Quick Response codes allow you to send any prospect with a Smartphone to a website or video.  When you consider the fact that a QR code takes up less than one square inch of space, not adding one to every print ad is tantamount to throwing money away. 

Far from being reluctant to add mobile marketing to your current marketing mix, once you consider all of the benefits that mobile has to offer, you will soon wonder how you ever lived without it.

Carl Weiss is CEO of Working the Web to Win, a digital marketing agency in Jacksonville, Florida.  You can interface with Carl every Tuesday at 4pm Eastern when he airs his radio show on Blog Talk Radio.