First impressions last. That’s why, when it comes to marketing yourself through a website, your homepage will have to be love at first sight. And while the other pages of your website deserve equal attention, they aren’t necessarily of equal importance. A homepage, by its very nature, will typically have a unique set of design goals, content objectives, and mood in order to catch and sustain the attention of visitors. Here’s a list of seven best practices for a more effective homepage: Communicate concisely who you are, what you do, and what your site is for. Don’t leave people in the dark – show them the light, and show them the light in the first five seconds upon arrival. Your company’s name is Charlie’s Tees, and you sell funny shirts and vintage shirts, and your online store is the source of sartorial awesomeness. See? Concise and clear. Do that and you’re off to a good start. (Bonus tip: Make sure that these – Read the full article
So you’ve e-Commerce’d your site up. (Hopefully with Magento, our favorite.) And you’re ready to roll. The homepage is ready. The product shots have been Photoshopped to perfection. The design and the color schemes look very cool (ahem, an aesthetic term) and you’ve set up your checkout process with a secure third-party payment gateway. That’s it, right? Well – not if you haven’t dedicated as much effort as you already have to your product pages. Here’s a list of awesome tips for turning your product pages into awesome sales magnets: Optimize it. This, really, is a given, since you want the search engines to find you as easily and as often as the human visitors do. Great ways to make your product page SEO-friendly include: avoiding duplicate content and duplicate URLs; writing up unique and compelling text descriptions for each product (don’t just copy the manufacturers’ descriptions); and editing this content in a way that makes it relevant to your – Read the full article
SEO is simple, right? That’s what we SEO professionals would like you to think – so you do it wrong. And we win. Lots of people move to that “advanced beginner” stage – where they think they know what they’re doing, but in reality, have no clue what they’re doing at all. It’s impossible to avoid until someone would point out gaffes in your SEO strategy. I’m not trying to be egotistical or anything here: definitely, I made these same mistakes at the beginning, and I’m only pointing them out so you don’t. Looking at your own site at a high level – but not others’ sites: Many people are capable of deeply analyzing their own website for things like crawl errors, indexation, and the like, but when they see a link target, they completely throw it to the side. In my early days, I would find link directories and blindly submit because the homepage was a PR4 (PageRank) – – Read the full article
Whether or not you’ve been following this Internet marketing blog (which we hope you’ve been), it has now become obvious how huge a role online presence plays in helping businesses succeed. Increase web traffic, generate more sales and opportunities, and increase profits: it’s a simple equation. But it’s also one that can be solved using countless methods and formulas. Keep in mind, though, that not everything has to be done online. SEO, online advertising, and social media management are great ways of enhancing your web presence, but there are offline ways, too, of achieving just that. In fact, one can go so far as to say that in order for your small business, store, restaurant, civic community, etc. to succeed, you should close the loop between online and offline. Remember: you can get away from the computer for awhile and still be able to take action. Wonder how that’s done? Here’s a list of the top 5 ways to promote – Read the full article
Unless you’ve been living under a rock or haven’t touched a computer at all for two years, you would know by now that Microsoft has rebranded their MSN search engine to a product called Bing. It’s the company’s answer to Google, the search giant that owns a large part of the market share and which continues to lead over Bing, Yahoo, and its other search competitors. Microsoft has shown, however, that it is willing to invest and make Bing a better search product for its users. It has also spent a huge amount of money in heavy marketing spending in order to gain a bit of Google’s portion of the search space – a move that has helped Bing consistently inch upward every month. While comScore recently reported that Google still has 64.4 percent share of core searches, Bing continued to gain in April 2010 and upped its search share to 11.8 percent. Which leads to the question: should search – Read the full article
Internet marketing gurus have said over and over that “content is king” – but some people seem to think that in order to be crowned as royalty one only needs to dress up their website with blocks of text here and there. This isn’t the case. The content and copy on your website may be a product of good writing, but it’s important to recognize that good writing doesn’t necessarily translate to a better, more engaging website. So be vigilant not just of what you write for your website, but also of how you present it to your readers and visitors. Avoid these common mistakes that suck the life out of your website copy. Website design makes the text hard to read Colorized text. A diverse range of font types and sizes. Embossed letters and sentences with shadow or “blinking” effects. They’re all pretty tempting, and all those colorful text editing tools on the dashboard don’t make it easier for – Read the full article
Millions of people watch the NFL Super Bowl every year because they love American football. That’s why it’s consistently one of the highest-rated programs every year. Millions more watch it even though they don’t like football. Those of the second kind watch primarily because of the ads. And why not? So many commercial campaigns have made the Super Bowl their ultimate showcase: from Apple’s 1984 commercial to the Budweiser “Bud Bowl” campaign, to the dot-com ads in 1999 and 2000, Super Bowl tradition has proved that the game is where high concept ads and extravagant, expensive commercials are often placed and broadcast. It’s not just the people in advertising watching and talking about the Super Bowl ads. There’s a whole nation of armchair critics out there, eager to compare opinions with other armchair critics. That’s why Boston ad firm Mullen has partnered with social media monitoring company Radian6 in bringing the ultimate Twitter / Super Bowl experience, the Brand Bowl – Read the full article
This week we received an email from a DePaul student (Go Blue Demons!), who was looking to interview a web design company about usability. I spent some time thinking about it and developing some answers and I thought I would share it on our blog- Enjoy! (1) Describe the company. Briefly describe the products they build and/or the services they provide Here are some quotes from our website but basically we are a web design company that focuses on Search Engine Optimization and Conversions by using the latest W3C complaint coding (xHTML and CSS) and also using the latest usability compliance. “Web design is more than just creativity, it’s usability. Understanding your visitors and how they use your website will lead to increased conversions. For each new website, our team of graphic designers, SEO consultants and marketing specialists work together on strategy, design, usability, and goals.” Lakeshore Branding, what started as a small marketing firm in 2007 has evolved into – Read the full article
