Multiple divisions, how many websites?

As companies become larger, often times they start to break down into divisions. For example a furniture company many break down into two general divisions such as commercial and residential. They may also break down further into sections such as bathroom, living room, etc. The question is, do you create different sites for these different divisions?

Now there is no hard and fast rule for this, but at Ignite we would tend to lean towards the answer NO and/or probably not. We realize this doesn't sound very convincing but let us explain. In the case of the furniture company our answer would almost always be hard no. A company like this will benefit from having all avenues available on one site. The cross selling potential far outweighs any reasons you may have been thinking to have more then one site.

How does it affect the search engines?
Of course there are search engine reasons why one site is also beneficial. With one website you are able to concentrate your marketing efforts on that site and that site alone. You don't have to decide when you are requesting a link which site you should point it to. Also, the amount of content on your site will be far greater which will allow the search engine spiders to index more.

Won't it get confusing?
A large site can get confusing if not planned out properly. However, a large site can be as easy to navigate as a small site if some thought and planning is put into it. Take that furniture company again, their home page can be setup to drive people into either the commercial or residential sections of their site, which would have the same effect as two sites would. Once the visitor is in that section you can break down further into the different categories and also allow them at anytime to jump over to the other section.

There are times when more then one site makes sense. If you have multiple businesses that really do not have anything to do with each other, or you are testing the effectiveness of one site over another. However, for most businesses having one website is better for your customers and the search engines if built correctly.

Remember to plan before you build, otherwise plan to rebuild!

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Ignite Media LLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization

Planning a website for visitors and search engines

When planning out a website you want to be sure to focus on your audience. This may seem like pretty logical statement, but what happens when your audience is in two very different groups? Even more compounding is when one of those groups isn't actually human, but rather a robot! That's right I said a robot, as in a search engine robot that will crawl your website to see if they should index and rank your site for any phrases.

Many people in my opinion make the mistake of "optimizing their sites for Google", rather then creating a website for their potential and desired customers. What good is having #1 rankings in Google for a particular phrase if when you get that traffic to your site they don't understand and cannot intuitively navigate your website? You've now lead a horse to a dried up river bed, at this point even if you could force it to drink there is no water left!

I do not mean to suggest that you should completely ignore the search engines, especially not Google. What I do mean is put them in priority order. Make sure that your number one concern is your website visitor. Ultimately these are the people who will become your customers/clients and will pay the bills so to speak. The search engines comes second, but not a very distant second.

A rule of thumb that we like to go by at Ignite Media is that if it comes down to being either more visitor friendly then search engine friendly, the tie should always go to the visitor. Perhaps with a little creative thinking you could accommodate both, but if that has been thought through always let the visitor have the best experience.

Remember, search engines are a means to an end, which is your website, not the other way around.

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Ignite Media LLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization

Is a blog right for my site?

Blogging over the years has become more and more popular and businesses are starting to wonder if they should be in on the "trend". There are many interesting and informative blogs out there, but there are just as many uninteresting and, dare I say, useless blogs out there. You want to be sure you are one of the interesting and/or informative blogs.

You also want to be sure you have the time to dedicate to a blog. It's not an 8 hour a day project, but it does take some time and a regular routine. Blogging needs to be done on a set schedule, ideally 2 to 3 times a week or more. People who subscribe to blogs want to be updated regularly and they will move on to the next one if you are constantly delayed or not posting at all.

Many companies think that they are not in an industry where a blog would be useful, but this is where thinking outside the box will come in handy. Take for example a company that does fish hooks. This is their sole business and they make every type and style of fish hook, but nothing else. At first you would think that a blog for this would quickly become dry and the writer would run out of things to blog about. Who says you have to only write about fish-hooks? Your blog can be about anything to do with your industry, just because this company only makes fish hooks doesn't mean they don't know anything else about fishing.

That same company could have a post about the top 10 spots they love to fish, or the fish you will find in their local area. You need fish hooks to fish and you'll likely want to know where to go fishing so it all ties in. You could even write about local fishing events or fishing excursions that you and your employees have gone to or on.

Now there is a limit to how far outside the box you want to go. For example you wouldn't want to start writing about the car show or the local town fair, as this might annoy some readers. You want to be sure you can always relate your story back to your main idea which in this case is fishing and your fish hooks.

A blog might not be right for everyone, but anyone who is interested and can set aside the time on a regular basis should give it a shot. Just remember, always think of your readers and how it relates back to the purpose of your blog.

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Ignite Media LLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization

Email Blasts - Do they work?

Email blasts are usually thought of in one of two ways. 1) A great marketing approach that is easy to implement and measure results or 2) Spam that people think of as a headache!

Sure, email blasts are certainly both of these things, but you ideally want people to think of your email blast as the first not the second. Done correctly email blasts can keep your customers informed and help increase business while not annoying them.

5 suggestions to keep in mind when sending an email blast:

1) Short and sweet:
Email blasts should not be filled with text about your company or anything else for that matter. They should be straight forward and to the point of the special or deal that you are pushing at that time.

2) Use a service:
DO NOT try sending out an email blast from Outlook or another email program on your own machine. Typically when you are sending out email blasts they are to more then 10 or 20 people and this can be caught in spam if not done correctly. Services such as Constant Contact are great for sending them

3) Light on the graphics:
With spam filters checking very little bit of an email these days you don't want to leave any room for error here. Images can be good, but should be used sparingly with an email. You also do not want to rely on the image being your entire message. Text is best with email, images should only be used to support, not to convey!

4) Stick to one or two offerings:
Don't fill your email with tons of savings and offerings. One or two really good specials will be more appealing. This way the email is focused and you can even segment your customers to those who have bought this type of item before.

5) Follow the Can Spam Act:
Using a service as mentioned above will most likely keep you in compliance with this act. You have to make sure people have the option to OPT-OUT and that they wanted the email to begin with. You will usually see a better response with people who wanted your email anyway.

There are certainly more things you can think about when sending an email blast, but these should get you going in the right direction.

Remember, think of how you receive emails and what you open and what you don't.

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Ignite Media LLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization

A case study for knowing your audience

Last week I read a very interesting blog post at SEOMoz. The post was titled "Colloquial Copy: When Perfect is Wrong" and was written by jkellygarrett. It is one of the most interesting and educational posts that I have read to date at this site, and most of their posts are very interesting and educational.

The post talks about jkellygarrett's brother who is in the long haul trucking business and was upset that he couldn't find a website that used to be extremely helpful for his travels. With some creative searching they were able to eventually find the site again and realized something very important. The site was SEO'd but for the wrong audience! Seems a bit like an oxymoron, that you could SEO a site for the wrong audience but indeed you can.

Instead of thinking like a trucker the company or person that did the SEO for the site was thinking and writing like you and I would write. What they must not have realized was that truckers have their own language of sorts. This language carriers over to the internet when they are doing a Google search, and they aren't about to start using other words to find what they want.

So what does this tell us? Well for one thing you have to know your audience. You have to know where they come from, how they speak, what they want, and how they search to get what they want. It's not enough to do keyword research and get a list back that tells what words the search engines find relevant for that group. It's not enough to look at statistical data. You have to realize that perhaps the group you are optimizing the site for is too small to show any relevance on those statistics or keyword lists.

In this case truckers are a group of their own. They use a different language to communicate and they probably use the internet a little differently then you and I. To optimize this site to it's fullest potential the company should have taken the time to really get to know the industry as much as possible. Then they might have realized that the direction they were thinking of going would have lead the site to a dead-end.

Remember, your audience is your customer, don't leave them out in the dark.

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Ignite Media LLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization

I want a full Flash website!

This is the phrase that a web site design company that also does internet marketing hates to hear! Sure, Flash is great and makes your sit interesting, but what about the search engines and being indexed by them? What about the load time and the intro player that will cause many people to hit the back button on the browser, never to be seen or heard from again?

Flash is a very good application and used appropriately it can be a very powerful application. A website selling products should in most cases not be doing a full Flash website. A website promoting a rock band might be ok with a full Flash site, but not if they want to be found in the search engines any time soon!

The problem with Flash is that as of today there is no way for the search engine spiders to crawl through a Flash website to see what it is all about. A Flash website is like a movie when it comes to the search engines. For the most part it sees a page that calls a file (SWF file in most cases) and that file is unreadable to the spiders.

Flash can be effective if used appropriately though. For example a website that is built in HTML using style sheets that also has a small Flash banner with a marketing message is effective. The visitor is not required to wait for the movie to load to read everything else on the page and doesn’t have to hit “Skip Intro” in order to see the rest of your website.

Remember, when it comes to Flash less really is more!

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Ignite Media LLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization

Couldn't I just do it myself?

Of course you can. You can build your own website, do your own marketing, write your own email campaigns, setup your own server, host your own site, and more. You can do everything; but should you? Probably not!

We all work in a particular business. We all have a particular job. There is a reason why the mechanic is not building your website and the fruit stand carrying ignitions. The reason is, they don't know what each other knows about the business they are in. This may seem like a simple concept when talking about tangible products, but for some reason people seem to forget this when it comes to the internet.

Everyone seems to think they are a web designer, and everyone seems to know how to market themselves on the web. At Ignite we won't stop you from trying it, but we certainly will be here when that doesn't work out the way you had hoped. What we do is not rocket science and we don't kid ourselves into thinking it is. But what we do does require skills and knowledge and what we do is not just something we play around with. There are many things that we've learned over the years that can't be taught without experience.

We realize you want to understand what it is we do, and we will be more then happy to explain it to you. We are not looking to keep information from you, or make you think it is some hidden secret. But what we do want you to know is that although it can be done by yourself, it probably is not going to be done as thoroughly and with the depth of knowledge as ourselves or any other professional in the industry.

You certainly wouldn't walk into your accountants office and tell him you can do your own business taxes this year. So why do that with your website which could help to drive business further up?

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Ignite Media LLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization

Content is King. But who's job is it to get the content?

We have all heard the saying that "Content is King" when it comes to building a website and marketing it for the search engines. It makes perfect sense, the search engines index content and if you have more content on your site then you have a better chance of showing up for specific terms/phrases. But who's job should it be to get that content together?

I believe it should be a joint effort from someone that works for the company and the optimziation/marketing company that has been hired. This approach will ensure that you are building content that is relevant to the company at hand. Yes content is king, but relevant content is the supreme ruler!

Why a joint effort?
Who knows more about your business then people who work for you? Yes a search engine marketer should be able to pull information and learn about your company, but they still will not know everything. An employee can tell the search engine marketer what differntiates you from your competitor, a new product/service that is coming down the line, the largest segment of your business, and so much more. Why leave it to the search engine marketer to guess at these things when you could have more impactful content by providing them with this information?

Once that information is given to the search engine marketer then they can work their magic. They should be able to sell that product/service, and make it interesting to read about. They should be able to create keyword/phrase specific pages and sections of the website.

Remember, good content is only as good as the source from which it came. If you leave it all up to your search engine marketing company you may not be as happy as you would be if you worked with them to build out that content.

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Ignite Media LLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization