The following is a simple set of guidelines that will help you maintain a healthy website; one that draws in potential customers and gives them reasons to interact with your brand.

The obvious goal of any website is to attract visitors. In order for that to happen, users need to have a reason to visit. And that reason is quality, relevant content! Naturally, upon the launch of the website, you will already have some basic content on your site, usually in the form of text on multiple web pages, a blog, a sign-up form, etc. But is that sufficient?

Offer Solutions

The best type of content to add to your site are helpful tips, how-to’s, or discounts as part of a customer loyalty program. Any effort at providing helpful advice to your existing or potential customers is often seen as a gesture of goodwill, and helps portray your company in a favorable light. Plus, you’ll often be rewarded by an increase in average pageviews and time spent on the site – both of which are indicator metrics of website success.

More Is More

The more relevant, quality content on your website, the more you will be rewarded. Organizing and structuring the content into individual pages according to specific themes will work wonders for the website’s organic search engine rankings, boosting your links higher up in the results pages on sites like Google and Yahoo!

There are a number of ways to find new content to regularly add to your site. Do you have a new product offering you’re proud of? Create a blog post about it. Do you find that many of your new customers often have very similar follow-up questions? Add a page of content that thoroughly, and proactively, answers questions you can anticipate from soon-to-be customers. Have video footage that is entertaining or informative? Stream it on your site and provide readable text-based summaries. Make sure that your content is easy to read, easy to understand, rich in information and targeted for your audience. And remember to update often!

How Will People Find My Website?

There are a number of different advertising programs to use to help promote your website. If your new website project was part of a broader marketing effort to attract new customers and build market share, Envision Interactive offers media planning and buying services that help our clients achieve such goals.

Who’s Searching?

Undoubtedly, your prospects are out there on the Internet actively looking for information, products, or services you offer. They are using search engines to tell them which websites contain the most relevant information on what they are looking for. The sites these users are navigating to are the result of either strategic SEO or SEM efforts by your competitors.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term that refers to the modification of specific elements of a website in order to improve the site’s organic (i.e., free listing) rankings on the search engines. High natural rankings can contribute to a significant volume of site visits – by very qualified prospective customers! There are many different approaches that SEO firms take when trying to achieve a level of effective results. But Envision Interactive’s SEO services have proven successful time and time again. We employ a rigorous optimization methodology, whereby we focus on the core fundamentals of proper HTML structure, perform intensive data analysis to gain insights into successes as well as shortcomings, and then put in place any learnings gained.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM, “paid search”) is another means of driving qualified visitors to your site. Unlike it’s free counterpart (outlined above), SEM is a pay-for-performance advertising model; an advertiser only pays when a user clicks on a text ad that directs the user to their site. This is an attractive, low-risk marketing platform that often yields very profitable returns for advertisers. SEM provides a great deal of flexibility, allowing advertisers the ability to maintain control of budget level, keywords, geo-targeted areas, and maximum keyword bids. Again, Envision Interactive’s SEM team has extensive background experience proving the value of this advertising platform for numerous clients across dozens of industries.

Enter Pay-Per-Click advertising. Also known as PPC. If you are new to this term, don’t worry. You probably know more about it than you think. PPC ads are the text-based ads that appear on the results page of any search you perform. You’ve probably seen them a million times on Google or Yahoo! or Bing. They usually take up the far right column, and sometimes can be seen at the top of the page too.

First let me say that PPC isn’t good for every company, nor is it always the right tool to use to market a new product or service. For instance, if you run a software company that makes a never-seen-before business-to-business application for education institutions, you would probably find that PPC doesn’t work as well as direct sales. If your product is highly technical, or if it requires a shift in thinking for your customer to “get it”, a small text-based ad probably won’t make the sale for you.

But for many companies (dare I say most companies?) running a PPC campaign through major search engines can provide incredibly accurate ROI in a time when spending is critical. During a recession, advertising dollars rightfully are directed toward performance-based marketing, such as paid internet advertising. Why? Because when cuts are needed, it’s easier to stick with results-driven channels that have a measurable ROI.

If Envision can help you understand the benefits of PPC, contact us.

The website features a custom photo gallery that the client can update using a simple content management tool, as well as Flash and contact forms. Simple and effective.

Congrats guys! Let’s keep working on those other target key-phrases!

Make no mistake, this isn’t the global internet company. This Yahoo is based in Sherman, TX and makes some of the finest desserts known in the U.S., including rum cake, carrot cake, fruitcake, cheesecake, peanut brittle, and cookies. Envision has been selected to manage their 2008 online marketing campaign, focusing on pay-per-click ad campaign strategy and management. We plan to keep working throughout 2009 on improved organic search visibility.

Now, treat someone you love to a delicious dessert!

Put simply, SEO relates to building your website in such a way that search engines can properly index your website. It’s quite simple: there should be text on your website that is relevant to your company’s name and to the keywords or phrases that people will use to find the product or service that your business sells. That text should be present in 3 key places: the content on your website, the meta tags within your website’s HTML code, and the HTML itself.

Think about the last search that you made using Google or Yahoo Search. What did you search for? Let’s say you are in the market to buy a new house and need some help finding a great property in East Dallas. So, you search for “East Dallas Realtor”. If you look at the results for that search (go ahead, try it), the chances are that somewhere on the first page, you’ll find the website of Kay MacIntyre. And, if you click through to her website, you’ll find that her website has a lot of content that is relevant to your search phrase.

For example, you can see that the headline on the home page uses lots of relevant keyphrases:

And, you can see that the meta tag that generates the browser title uses the keywords “East Dallas Realtor”:

Of course, these are just a few of the dozens of reasons her site ranks well. Creating a search engine friendly website requires many extra steps, and certainly will increase the cost of any website project. But, if being “found” online is of important to you (if you’ve created a website in the first place, we’d like to assume it is), then you need to ensure that your website is built properly. This is a process we go through with every new customer, whether we are creating a website from scratch or taking over an existing site.

We encourage you to read future posts where we will dive deeper into “SEO” techniques and the affect they can have on your business.

But don’t let those things scare your company away from adding a blog to its internet marketing strategy (you do have a strategy, don’t you?). As an agency that provides website development and interactive marketing services, Ei has created dozens of blogs for our clients. But we never do it without an explanation of what a blog can (or cannot) do for a company. Here’s a simple Top 10 list we put together.

Top 10 Reasons to Start a Blog for your Business:

1. New Business and Potential Partners
2. Quick Publishing Tool
3. Affordable Publishing Tool
4. Show potential customers you are a Subject Matter Expert
5. Show existing customers you are a Subject Matter Expert
6. Website Stickiness & Return Visits
7. Potential for Conversations with Customers
8. Recruiting
9. Vendor Relations
10. Search Engine Visibility
11. Company Participation

So, exactly how does a company employ the use of a blog? What risks are there to creating one? Read our thoughts on that very topic in upcoming entries.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (also known as “organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it “ranks,” the more searchers will visit that site.

Optimizing websites is something we offer to every client. There are dozens of techniques we use to help your website rank well for your target search phrases, especially your company name. But notice I didn’t say “guarantee your site to rank well”. With millions of websites on the web, its impossible to guarantee ranking. The popularity of your website is determined not only by how well its HTML is optimized, but also by it’s content and inbound links. In fact, you can think of SEO as being one component of Search Engine Marketing.

Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet Marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, SEM methods include: search engine optimization (or SEO), paid placement, and paid inclusion.

But that’s just a few of the methods. There are books entirely devoted to Search Engine Marketing! So, you’ll need a sound strategy. Identifying one that’s right for your organization takes time, and always begins with a proper analysis of your company, its products and services, the competition and your budget.