Best Practices: E-Business and Online Marketing

Search Engine Optimization Matters

These days, Internet search engines use robots or "spiders" to automatically navigate and read a website's HTML content. So if you want to generate good search results, then you'll need to include the search terms most commonly used to find the products or services you're offering. Remember, over 75% of users who search on key words or terms ultimately select from the first three "natural links" (non-paid) listed in their search results.

The vast majority of searches are text-based, so your website's ability to turn up on search results pages depends on the text it contains. Here are some suggestions to improve your search rankings:

• Use text that includes your target keyword phrases on your website home/index page, making sure you include generic search terms, not just your product names; to get a sense of which terms work best, conduct your own searches with a variety of terms until the search results turn up your competitors in the top three or four results positions.
• Important images should have a short, descriptive text alternative (ALT tags).
• Title tags (<title></title>) should include your most important keywords.
• Meta tags (especially "description" and "keyword") should also include your target keyword phrases, but just once.
• Text on all your pages should use your keywords often, but in appropriate context, since search engine robots can now recognize when keywords and key phrases are spammed (i.e., repeated over and over to get a higher search result ranking).
• Make sure your website uses HTML navigation.
• To increase your site's popularity, link it to other sites, and vice versa -- but do so judiciously, making sure to keep it relevant to your purpose.

Web Marketing Techniques to Remember

Even before you consider online advertising and e-commerce, there are some web-based marketing techniques that can benefit your business with the most important being "driving traffic" or "lead generation".

Using the Internet to generate new lists of potential customers can pay off in big ways. Here are some suggestions:

• Talk with your current customers about why they do business with you; this will help you profile potential new customers.
• Use email to build and maintain relationships with prospects. This may include both personal contact and sending regular email news and information that's relevant to your prospects.
• Use search engines, industry-focused directories, and trade group websites to discover new prospects.
• Offer prospects something for free that they want or might need -- and enable them to get it by allowing you to put them on your email list.

Another important issue to keep in mind is "opt-in marketing." If you send emails to prospects without their permission, you are sending spam, and it's likely that your emails will be rejected before your prospects ever see them and your company domain name will be blacklisted.

Instead, develop techniques to capture prospects' -- and customers' -- email addresses at every opportunity (such as offering something for free on your website that they must opt-in to get), and then maintain regular, consistent contact with them via email newsletters, e-catalogs, white papers, surveys, netseminars, and/or similar vehicles that include useful information as well as helping to brand and market your products and services.

Use customer relationship management (CRM) tools to automatically track customer and prospect behavior so you know when a prospect becomes a customer and what each customer wants from your business (so you can offer more of what each one wants and even identify when they may want it). This will help you track the value of each customer relationship.

Another popular technique for driving traffic to web sites is "blogging and Really Simple Syndication (RSS)." Most of the nine million weblogs -- that is, blogs on the Internet -- are primitive streams of consciousness which deserve to be ignored. But new blogs are being created at a rate of 40,000 per day -- and, because they can include links, commentary, and feedback from readers -- they present a marketing opportunity rarely equaled in this or any other era.

Meanwhile, RSS makes it easy to track blogs and, according to BusinessWeek magazine, has already attracted about 5% of the U.S. online audience (or approximately six million people). A XML-based format that contains short descriptions of web content along with a link to the full version, it has become a major vehicle to share content -- especially blog content -- between sites.

So consider establishing a blog focused on the issues and concerns your customers care about. Resist the urge to create a fake blog by a pretend-person who's not your employee (these are called flogs and are much denigrated). When blogging, keep it simple and direct, make the content scannable (lots of headings and visual cues), post new content often and regularly, encourage feedback, and include links to others.