Free Online Marketing and SEO Tools? Why not!

Marketing Communications are becoming more than essential for business today. Consumers integrate more and more communication technology into their daily activities. This makes it extra easy and difficult in the same time for companies to communicate their messages. And extra expensive.

Starting and maintaining a business is an economically challenging task. No matter in what branch you operate you will need a lot of visibility, both online and offline. This requires as a minimum a website – web host, domain registration, website building, website optimization, SEO monitoring, updating and maintaining on ongoing basis. And this is just the beginning! You have not even thought about advertizing, offers, newsletter, teasers, etc. Here I am not even mentioning all other costs in connection to renting an office or simply maintaining the daily operations.

Looking at it from this perspective it looks like running your own business is next to impossible. The question here is whether it necessarily should be like that.

All the great and free business and marketing tools

If you really think that paying for services and software is absolutely necessary maybe you will miss the point here. If you though consider that price is simply a marketing trick after all you might realize that the price of opening your own business might fall drastically.

Let’s explore a few of the options you have for making you life easier and your business low cost.

1.       Webhost: There is a wide range of webhosts out there and it is important that you research a bit before you make a decision about who should host your website. Consider the importance of 24/7 live support and Control Panel with all the cool features and extra services you can use. The technical characteristics of a webhost are also very important. How much space and what speed your website requires? Is there an option for secure server? Are there website import/export features or databases? After being clear about what you need you can choose webhosting that ranges between 1 USD and over 10 USD per month. Do not limit yourself to webhosts from your own country. In many cases the big international providers will be much better for you.

2.       Domain name: Choose carefully your domain name as it is going to shape your image. Just as with webhosting you have the option to buy (actually rent) your domain name anywhere in the world and with any suffix. Prices vary a lot also there so research can save you around 10 USD per year if not more. If you need sub-domains make sure that your domain registrar allows that.

3.       Website design: I read an article for entrepreneurs written by Region Midt in Denmark and in it I saw a price of 700-800 Euro for getting your website running. Be careful as you are going to stumble upon such offers by designers, IT-specialist and many other consultants. In reality you are able to build your website on your own. It is a myth that you need a programmer for that task. Nowadays website building is made accessible for non-specialists. You only need to understand how and what your website should communicate. For this task you might want to consult a Marketing Communications Specialist or someone specializing in Online Marketing. Using Wordpress for example can give professional results with almost no effort. On top of everything else you can find countless themes and plugins in Wordpress which will make it easy for you to integrate exactly the design and the functionality you want.

Do not get carried away with buying expensive Wordpress themes. Here I want to use a moment and mention Graphene Theme. It is a completely free and fully responsive theme which can be used as you like and adjusted beyond imagination. My special thanks to the developers!

4.       SEO and Online Marketing: We are trained to think that SEO should cost a lot. It should not. Not so many out there know that Microsoft has developed a free SEO toolkit which does a lot of the work. Furthermore you can facilitate many small and bigger SEO plugins directly into your Wordpress website allowing you to count social conversion, visits, perform on-site optimization and set custom micro data, meta titles, descriptions and keywords. You can learn a lot about your website’s effectiveness by signing up for Google Analytics – it is a free and great service! Google Master Tools provide you with a lot more control and optimization options in connection to managing you website and authenticating it which helps your SEO. Last but not least you can draw on the keyword and search activity analysis provided in Google Trends and Google AdWords. You can even see your ranking in connection to different key words in Google Webmaster Tools. The only thing you cannot see there is a competitor analysis. But I am pretty sure that there is a simple and free tool for that too out there.

Yes, it might seem a bit overwhelming and it is true that it requires a certain level of understanding of those systems. But it is just like with everything else – you need to learn it in order to use it.

If you though think that it is way too complicated for you to handle, there are even free consultancy options online. Just check http://www.dcommunication-group.com/ and learn how to make your life easier and your business low cost.

DIDI

Online Marketing and Website optimization. Corporate Communication in practice.

Online Marketing and website optimization seem to be the future of communication. Therefore finding the answers of the following marketing questions is essential: When setting up a website how do we do it? How do we communicate with consumers? How do we make sure that our website reflects who we are? How can we be found by consumers? What about SEO?

Setting up a website as a communication tool

We are used to think that setting up a website is a programmer’s job. They know how to do it and we trust them. However, a website is not simply a bundle of code made to look good. A website is a business’ face towards millions of consumers online. As such it needs to comply with business strategy reflecting image, vision and mission. Even more importantly, it needs to represent the business in a way communicating branch, niche, products, services and all subthemes relevant to consumer searches on the web.

There is no doubt that a website needs to be set up by a programmer. To ensure high quality though a close collaboration between the programming team and the company’s marketing or communication department is necessary. Naming, tagging, titles, highlights, products, etc. need to be done in a way facilitating both the company’s best interest and consumer searches. This is done by reviewing business strategy and pointing out what you want consumers to find about you the easiest. After setting your communication goals for your website you have different options in terms of how you are going to implement your communication strategy. You can do it either through careful coding and content management or through helping search engines understand your content (if your website has already been set up and recoding/content optimization it is not an option). Ideally, you could use both strategies.

What does our website communicate?

Monitoring your website performance in terms of visitors, time spent, visitor behavior, returning visitors, keywords can help you understand the way your website functions and is used by consumers. That is done by your Webmaster using tools as Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Analyzing those parameters can give you an overview of how good a work you have done setting up a website. If for example you only have new visitors you might want to rethink website structure or content. It might be a sign that your consumers do not like either your website or your business. Which is the case, you might more or less determine by evaluating time users spent on your website. A quick look to your website’s top keywords will give you a good opportunity to find out whether you have made coding/content mistakes.

It is also very important to control how your website appears in searches and on which position it appears. As search engines (mostly) try to provide the most relevant and highly rated results to their users a low position in a search result might signal problems with either popularity or keywords settings and website structure. Keep in mind that the quality of the website in terms of speed is also taken into account when showing search results. Last but not least, be aware that a lot of the content which is not in plain text form might lower your website’s relevance evaluation as it is often skipped by search engines. Therefore you need to provide your key information in a text form.

Consumer searches and SEO

We are made to believe that SEO is the key to success online. However, Google warns that the SEO business has become a bit shadowy and thus not always a good idea. If you though decide that you want someone specializing in the field to optimize your website, you might need to take a look at Google’s warnings and guidelines. The truth is that in most cases you do not need a SEO specialist. What you need is to keep track of your website’s data and optimize content and structure in such a way that you make it easy for both search engines and consumers find what they need.

Still one of the best ways to make consumers aware of you is advertising and marketing yourself both online and offline. In addition to advertising you have the option of establishing links towards your website from different relevant web places. Some of those links you would need to pay for but others like the links on your Facebook or Google + pages will be free.

 

Basically, one of the most prominent rules in Business is to create something of value. Only after you are sure that your product is sellable it makes sense to start marketing it. Therefore think of your business and the process of communicating it as a process of discovery. You have discovered something which you want to share with others. Who are the others and how you get their interest should be what should guide you, not SEO concerns.

A small tip: when starting a business you often lack resources. But you already have a large public thanks to Social media. Use it. Use your friends as your marketers. Asking them to like your Facebook page or share it (once, do not abuse your friends) will instantly give you access to a larger target group than you have imagined.

SEO and website visibility

Today I had to search for a particular book which everybody told me cannot be found. I of course did not go down the street looking for it in the local book store. I found in Australia never bothering to make sure there was no seller closer to me. Maybe they had it in a neighboring town or in Germany for example but I did not know about it. Then I started thinking about the crucial importance internet has for the success of business today. It allows for a virtually unlimited market on minimal cost. It connects a seller and a buyer. It boosts brand communities. It increases the awareness. It allows us to talk directly with our consumers and understand in a crystal clear way what they want, need or think.

Businesses use internet in many different ways – websites, blogs, commercials, social media, newsfeeds, email marketing, recommendations and references, networking, sourcing, researching, etc., in most of the cases combining them. All of these tools have as a purpose either profit by sales or profit by efficiency.

To achieve those goals though a company should make sure that it’s content is visible. In other words, when people type a search for your kind of a product or company you should pop us among the first search results. That is what guarantees you success.

If we focus on websites visibility that at first seems to be mission impossible – internet is flooded with similar products, services and companies. So you should either be truly unique or smart.

There are several tips repeated by specialists which should help you increase the visibility of your website:

1. You should make sure that enough websites and publications are linked to yours. Search engines discover content by “crawling”, a process of accessing billions of pages with interlinked content. More links equals more visibility.

2. You should optimize keywords according to expectations (even better research, for example through Google AdWords or trough testing keyword effectiveness on different search engines) about what key words consumers would use while searching for your type of a service/product. Key words repeated many times on the website give better discovery results. “Long tail” keywords will reduce general traffic but will direct those who know exactly what they want (and that they really want to have it) to your pages.

3. Give a title to each page according to its content. Be precise and short as that will ensure you better discovery by search engines. Concentrate the important content in the first three words as search engines read the first 70-75 characters of the title tag.

4. Provide quality content. As increased traffic is perceived by search engines as increased importance of the search result, it as a rule increases traffic further. You should make sure that visitors get what they want. Do not alienate readers with overwhelming selling efforts.

5. Use text links. When explaining content by referring to a different web address, use a hyperlinked text instead of typing URL strings. It is not a good idea using your keywords as links to other pages or web addresses. Be warned that too many links on a page mean that they will not all be searched.

6. Make sure that the structure of your website is accessible through linking all pages. If not, you risk that search engines will not find the not-linked pages. This will greatly lower the chances of your content being found.

7. Content which requires a login is generally skipped by search engines. If you aim for visibility, avoid that kind of barriers.

8. Get listed in as many relevant directories as possible. They exist in different shape and size and provide different options for listing. There are also paid options, however, as a consumer myself I have my doubts about those few search results that appear as first and are marked “sponsored”.

9. Use HTML coding for your main content in order for it to be visible to search engines. Java, Flash and images are still ignored by them. Check how your website is read by a search engine to ensure it will be read and listed. That you could do with a tool as SEO Software tool.

10. Research by SEOmoz shows that social features on the site and the domain are becoming increasingly important. However, it is still the link metrics on page level, the link authority features on domain level and the page level keyword usage that count the most when it comes to search engine ranking factors.

11. Search engines guidelines read that URLs should be created with appropriate and human friendly keywords.

12. Aside of key-word-rich content ensure regularly new content.

Those are just a very few ground rules as ensuring website visibility is a process that goes all the way to programming the website and to agressive marketing on the other end. However, I am sure that most of you are already lost. That is why I am going to say it as simple as possible:

What you are really supposed to do as long as you do not possess IT qualifications is to make sure that your URL is user-friendly, maximally descriptive and clear; that all relevant keywords are listed and repeated as much as possible in the relevant texts; that the website is listed in as many directories as possible; that content is readable by search engines; that meta description tags provide clear and appealing description of your content; that every page is titled accordingly and linked to the website; that there are credible external links to your site which you can ensure by negotiations and networking; that keywords match consumer search.

The rest I would leave to the IT specialists.

DIDI