Internet Marketing & SEOAt CWD we offer a comprehensive range of internet marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO) services, helping small and medium size businesses get the most from their online investments. Click below to jump to a subject of interest: Just like shops on the high street aim to get as many customers through their doors as possible, so publishing a successful website involves generating as much traffic or getting as many visitors to your site as you can. Once there, you want them to stay as long as possible, explore the site and eventually buy your products and services. There are three principal ways you can achieve this: traditional advertising, online advertising and generic search engine results: Traditional advertising, like newspaper and magazine adverts, is an effective but often an expensive way of promoting your website. Traditional advertising campaigns are generally more successful if you target your local market using local newspapers and local radio. Nevertheless, print media is suffering from a decline in readership and advertising revenue as more and more people turn to the internet for information. Internet marketing and online advertising, on the other hand, is increasing in popularity. It's a highly cost-effective, targeted and efficient way to promote your website. There are various ways you can advertise and publicise your website on the internet, from paid banner adverts to distributing free press releases and articles about your products and services. Generic search engine results are, however, the most effective way of getting visitors to your website. It involves getting your website to the top few pages of search engine results on Google, Yahoo! and MSN, for relevant keyword phrases associated with your business, like 'Cambridge plumbers' or 'search engine marketing', for example. This is often called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.
We will cover the online marketing methods below, but none of the methods mentioned are mutually exclusive; a successful marketing strategy for your website may well include a combination of all three. It's a myth to think that once your business has its own website, the customers will simply start rolling in. Like anything else in business, you need to work at it. First of all, there are literally billions of websites on the internet and it's a sure bet that a good number of them will be offering products and services similar to yours. The offline importance of 'location, location, location' correlates directly with the online importance of position, position, position. Position, that is, of you website on search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN, when people search for relevant terms associated with your business. So, as the principal objective behind internet marketing is to get as many people as possible to visit your website, it's important to be able to measure this to determine how successful you marketing campaign is and to ensure you're getting value for money. You can get this sort of feedback from website statistics software, which is included in our web design and hosting packages. Website statistics software or website analytics provides detailed, real-time information about your website's traffic, i.e. the number of unique visitors, how many pages visited (hits), the number of visits (sessions), pages visited and even information on how they found your site. This is all valuable information to help you fine-tune your internet marketing campaign. The are many website statistics or analytics software packages available on the market. The software we include in our web design and hosting package is sufficient for most users, but if you're spending a lot of money on online advertising you may consider a more sophisticated package like Google Analytics, for example. Online advertising is a sure way to increase traffic to your site. There are a host of online advertising schemes and many websites that charge for displaying various size banner ads that link back to your website when clicked. You can also advertise on most search engines. Probably the most successful to date is Google AdWords. You bid for keywords and your adverts appear alongside search results or on sites that participate in the AdWords program. In addition, you can have your ads appear on Google search partners sites, including Ask Jeeves, DealTime, BT Openworld and NTL. 
When people click on your ad they will be taken directly to your website and you are charged for each click, up to the maximum amount you have specified for a particular keyword phrase. Google also offers a scheme where you select the sites you want to advertise on and you are charged per thousand impressions of the ad. Google AdWords also has an excellent control panel so you can monitor how successful your ad campaigns are and you can even limit a campaign to a specific country and set daily budgets to control your expenditure. For as little as a pound per day, online advertising can start bring qualified visitors to your site. It's a fast and cost-effective way for new sites to started getting traffic while they are waiting to be listed by search engines, which can take a few months. Running a successful AdWords campaign requires the advert to be carefully crafted to attract the right visitors and keywords need to be thoughtfully selected so your advert is only displayed to people search for terms relevant to you products and services. Cambridge Web Designers can help you set up and manage your AdWords campaigns, helping you maximise the return on your investment and increase sales. As in the offline world of marketing, publicity is an important method of promoting your website online. There are various methods of generating interest in your site and getting it noticed: BlogsBlogs or weblogs are basically online diaries where people write about their lives, comment about current events or generally ramble on about things that interest them. They are currently all the rage and having your own blog with a link to your site is said to be a good way to increase your site traffic. There is probably more hype than truth in this as there are now so many people "blogging" with literally millions of blogs out there covering every possible subject imaginable that its doubtful that people have the time or the inclination to read very many of them. Nevertheless, used sensibly, blogs can be an effective way to communicate with your customers. So, if you have a flair for writing and have something of interest or amusing to say and the time to write a daily or weekly blog, you might be one of the lucky ones that attracts a significant readership, which would in turn help boost traffic to your business website. Press ReleasesWriting a press release is an excellent way to broadcast newsworthy events like new products or staff appointments. There are various sites that will distribute press releases free of charge or for a fee. Be sure to include a link to your website in the press release. ArticlesLike press releases there are sites that will take articles and syndicate them across various sites, some are free, some charge. Articles need to be on subjects that are of interest to potential customers without overtly selling to them. Its a soft sell approach, so you need to include lots of general interest content, but cleverly include reference to your products and services without it looking like your actually trying to sell anything. Discussion ForumsAnother way to get your site noticed is to join discussion forums and include a link to your site. There are forums on every imaginable topic, but be careful to contribute something positive to the discussion, as if people think you're just joining in to sell something it won't work. However, if you can contribute some free advice or help and then casually suggest people can get further information from your site, it can be another way to increase your site's traffic. Most people find what they are looking for on the internet through search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo! When they type in a keyword phrase like "Cambridge web designers" they get a list of potential sites. Where your site is on that list (your search engine ranking) will determine how many visitors you receive for relevant search terms for your business. By improving your ranking you can increase then number of visitors to your website through these generic search engine results. To achieve high search engine rankings your website needs to be optimised so the web-bots, robots or web spiders (names of the software the search engine companies employ to crawl the web) can not only find but interpret the subject matter of your site. The term Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is commonly used to refer to the process of tuning your site so that it is "search engine friendly". Search Engine Optimisation is a cross between an art and a science. Once you know the basic techniques, the clever part is being able to write good page copy that is not only interesting to your visitors but also relevant to your business and includes a sufficient number of keyword phrases for the web-bots to interpret your site's meaning. There are many companies that specialise in Search Engine Optimisation and some provide a valuable service. Optimising a large site is time consuming and requires researching which search terms or keyword phrases are the post popular and relevant for a particular business or site. However, beware of companies that guarantee "top ten rankings" on Google, MSN or Yahoo!, as there are many less reputable companies making exaggerated claims and even some that use tricks well known to search engines, which can actually impair rather than improve your site's ranking. At Cambridge Web Designers, we only use search engine optimisation techniques that are accepted by search engines, ensuring your site has the best chance of being found for relevant keyword phrases for your business. All our website design and hosting packages include basic search engine optimisation, but we also offer this service to sites that weren't developed by Cambridge Web Designers. Search Engine Optimisation is not about stuffing your page copy full of keywords, or hiding popular or irrelevant keywords by using the same colour for the text as the page's background. It's really about following a few basic rules, common sense and writing natural and relevant page copy. The basic rules of Search Engine Optimisation involve choosing three keyword phrases for each web page that you think are the most relevant search terms for your business, for example "Internet Marketing" and "Search Engine Optimisation" would be keyword phrases for this page, and then work them into your web page so it reads naturally. The three keyword phrases need to appear not only in the page copy, which visitors will read, but also in things called Mata Tags, which are read by the web-bots and cannot be seen by normal visitors. There are several types of Meta Tags, but the most important ones are listed below: 
Example HTML code for this page showing Meta Tags in the Header Title TagThe Title Meta Tag is the most important as many search engines present it as the heading in their search engine results and it also appears at the top of people's browser windows so they know what site they are on. 
Title Tag appears in search results Your most important (primary) keyword phrase should appear in the Title Meta tag and the Meta tag should be between 40 to 80 characters long (including spaces). 
Title Tag also appears in a users browser window Description Meta TagThe Description Meta Tag should contain a brief description of your pages subject matter. This should also contain your primary keyword phrase and be between 150 to 250 characters long, including spaces. Keyword Meta TagThis contains a list of keyword phrases relevant to the web page and should including your three most important keyword phrases mentioned above. Keyword phrases are separated by commas and the whole Keyword Meta Tag should be less than 1,000 characters, including spaces. You shouldn't repeat any word in the Keyword Meta Tag more than 4 times, i.e. if "marketing" was part of a keyword phrase it shouldn't be used more than 4 times throughout the Meta Tag. Page CopyYour page copy is the actual text your visitors will read. Make sure its text and not images that look like text. Some web designers use software design programs that generate image files, which include both text and photos in the image. Search engines cannot interpret the meaning of an image and sites that rely too heavily on image files will rank poorly in search results. You should try and include at least 200 words of natural, well-written, grammatically correct copy in each page. Your primary keyword phrase should be included at least four times and each of your other two keyword phrases at least twice. ImagesAlthough search engines cannot interpret images, photos are excellent for providing a bit of impact and colour, breaking up the text so the site looks more compelling. You can, however, use something called an "alt" attribute, which displays text when your mouse hovers over the image or when the image is being loaded. Each image should include a description containing a keyword phrase in "alt" text that relates to the image. Try and include each keyword phrase in an image's "alt" attribute at least once. 
The "alt" attribute displays text when your mouse hovers over the image. Hyperlinks or Backlinks to Your WebsiteGetting good quality relevant sites to link to your site will improve your search engine ranking. Its important that the site is a quality site and relevant to yours. A few quality links are better then loads of links from irrelevant sites, some of which have probably been set up as "link farms" to try and fool search engines into thinking sites are more popular than they really are. Search engines are generally one step ahead of these tricks and you can do more damage than good by using what's often called black-hat SEO tricks. Internet marketing is about attracting visitors to your website. A well designed website, optimised for search engines can be a highly cost-effective way of marketing your business. Combined with a bit of advertising, some free publicity from syndicating articles, press releases and forums, having your own custom-built website will go along way towards bring in new customers to your business. | 