AIMS Canada

Using Web Content Management Software to Drive Traffic to Your Web Site

Post by Michael Assad

Does your content management system have what it takes to capture and retain new Web traffic?

Download this article in PDF from the Agility Web site  

More is Better

Your Web site serves many purposes.  It helps to raise awareness about who your company is and what you do.  In many cases, your Web site is used to sell your company’s products and services.  In other cases, your Web site provides content that draws users to your site for educational or entertainment purposes.  Whatever your Web site is used for, the more traffic it gets, the better known you are going to be and the more products and services you are going to sell.
Increase your Web site Traffic

How do you increase your Web traffic?  That’s the million dollar question, but there are easy ways to create a measurable increase in traffic with a relatively small amount of effort.  First, you have to attract new visitors to your site.  Then, you have to give them a reason to come back for more.

How do you capture and retain your Web audience?  Read on.

Capture your Web Audience

If you want to generate more traffic to your site, people have to find it.  The three main ways people are going to get to your site are from entering the URL directly, linking to your site from another source or finding your site using a search engine.   The following sections discuss how to increase traffic from these sources.

Optimize your Content

No matter what you are trying to achieve with your Web site, it is critical that the content on each page is relevant to your audience.  Think about what search terms your audience are going to use and make sure that they are contained within the content of your site.  Make sure that your content is concise and consistent with your corporate message or sales strategy.  Don’t try to trick search crawlers by incorporating invisible text with the keywords that you want to get hits for – that will backfire and you will get poorer results!

Tag your Web Pages

‘Meta tags’ contain the information that search crawlers use to learn about your site.  While not visible to your human visitors, it is often the first thing that robot search crawlers will see when they visit your site.  It is important to utilize the ‘meta keywords’ and ‘meta descriptions’ on every page. Also, Meta tags should be relevant to the content on the specific page, not just to your company or products in general.

Set up Paid Search Ads

Paid search ads are a great way to supplement ‘organic’ search results.  You can set up accounts on all of the major search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN.  Paid search ads are displayed on top of or beside organic results.  When someone starts a search using the keywords you’ve listed, your ad will appear.  You only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad.  The more you pay the higher up or more prominent your ad will be on the search results page.  Paid search keywords can fit into any budget and are easy to adjust as your budget fluctuates.  Ads are easy to set up and maintain and results are easy to track.

Use Search Friendly Technologies

One of the first things to consider when building your Web site is what technologies you should use.  With the vast array of options, this can be a daunting decision, even for the most tech-savvy.  In general, you want a system that generates pages with ‘human readable’ URLs for every page and pages that aren’t bloated with unnecessary code.  The more streamlined the code is for your page, the more likely search crawlers are to index the entire page.  Be careful with Flash-only sites – you have to be clever if you want search engines to find them at all.

Syndicate your Content

Syndication using a standard called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is becoming a common way to open up new channels for Web content.  RSS helps drive traffic to your site from new sources.  Syndicate your product list, blog posts, show times or event dates and people can pick up your content using a variety of programs and devices.  Syndication also helps to retain your audience because once they are hooked up to your feed, they will automatically receive updates to your content.

Retain your Web Audience

Return visits can make up a significant proportion of your Web traffic.  Here are some ways to make sure that your Web audience comes back for more.

Make Your Users Feel at Home

If you want visitors to come back, make them feel comfortable on your site.  Make sure that you have a clean design with a consistent, usable navigation system.  It is very important to have an accessible search function that returns relevant results.  A sitemap is also a useful utility to help visitors get around.  Avoid the use of slow-loading flash elements or cheesy sounds.  The more comfortable users are on your site, the longer they will spend on it and the more likely they are to return.

Keep Your Content Fresh and Relevant

Each page of your site should have content that is consistent with your message or sales strategy.  Put new information up quickly and take stale content away.  Offer promotions to move products, or develop a column dedicated to relevant industry commentary.  To expand the reach of your content, syndicate it using RSS.

Target Your Content using Analytics

Monitoring the behaviour of your Web traffic can help you learn about your audience.  What is the percentage of new versus repeat visitors?  How are they getting to your site?  What pages are they leaving from?  How long are they staying?  These and many other questions can be easily answered with an analytics package.  There are a wide variety of tools available from the free Google Analytics to the more sophisticated commercial solutions from WebTrends, HitBox and others.  Analytics will help you determine where the “high priority content” is.  Once you know that, you can further tweak your content for your audience, place ads on the more highly trafficked pages and set up cross-sell or other product promotions to direct visitors to other areas of your site.

Allow Your Users to Contribute

The Web is all about community and sharing.  Giving your audience an opportunity to contribute to your site will help them feel part of your brand and will give them a compelling reason to revisit your site.  Add a “reviews” section to your product catalog; allow users to comment on news articles or blog postings; set up a rating system or a poll - the possibilities are endless!

Make Sure That Pages Load Quickly

The faster your pages load, the more pages your users are going to visit.   This means more exposure for your products and services, more ad sales, and a greater likelihood that users are going to come back and/or recommend your site to others.  Slow pages will turn away both human and search crawling visitors.  With so many options on the Web, visitors are rarely going to stick around to wait and see what you’re trying to say or sell.  It is also important to make sure that every link on your Web site works.  There is nothing more frustrating to your visitors than seeing a cryptic error page.

Web Content Management Systems

The Web content management system (CMS) industry emerged when CNET Networks spun out their internal publication system as Vignette in 1995.  Since then, thousands of systems have been developed for publishing content to a Web site, each with its own capabilities, strengths and weaknesses.  When choosing a CMS, it is very important to determine the current and future requirements of your business and your Web site.  A magazine Web site for a publishing company will have drastically different requirements than a corporate Web site for a law firm, for example.  Budget is also an important factor when choosing a CMS.  With options available at every price point, it is important that you don’t pay too much for features you don’t need, or too little for a system that doesn’t fulfill your requirements.  Lastly, it is important to consider the resources you have available to you.  Most CMS implementations will require multiple resources from marketing, IT and creative departments.  Depending on your available resources, you may choose to have your CMS implementation outsourced to one of many companies who specialize in this service.

For a full history and overview of Web content management systems, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system

Author info:

Michael Assad, Co-founder, CEO
Edentity Web Systems Inc.

Constructing a Link Building Strategy

Posted by Helen M. Overland, Search Engine Marketing Specialist, non~linear creations...

Since the recent firestorm over paid links on Google Engineer Matt Cutts' personal blog, it seemed like a good time to visit link building.

More and more frequently recently, we are finding companies asking for help with link building. For those of us who are very familiar with the topic, this may not be the most fascinating topic. However, for those (most marketers) who are not savvy link builders, understanding the link building process can present a real bottleneck.

As search engines continue to value links as a ranking factor, more and more ambitious marketers are launching link building campaigns. The real roadblock that many people seem be running into is the basic understanding of how to go about link building effectively. Here are a few simple tips for creating a simple, but effective link building campaign.

First and foremost - you must identify your market. In general, visitors arriving at your site from an average link may not be as targeted or action-oriented as those arriving from a search query (link marketing is really more contextual in nature), and so it is absolutely vital that you understand WHO your customer is, and WHERE they might be online.

For example, a website that is targeting chefs may look to an industry association, a quality ingredients supplier, a trade magazine, etc. Links from such sites are not only subject-related to your website, but more importantly, they target the intended audience where they may actually be online.

Second, it is important to understand that "free" links can be more effective than paid links. Obviously, if someone recommends your site to your target market, that link could be more valuable than a paid link at the side of an article on a high profile website. If a link has the weight of positive opinion behind it, the traffic it refers could be your highest converters.

Third, provide something worth linking to. You may believe your snazzy new site is worth linking to, and maybe it is, but what is the incentive for someone to actually add a link? Links are generally not gained "simply because you have a website" - this is usually not enough of an incentive for most people to create a link to you. You may find it easier to offer something "link-worthy", such as a whitepaper, article, interesting blog post, joke, video, or freebie. Offer something of value to the people arriving at your site, and generally, people may be more willing to link to it.

Fourth - identify the Influencers in your niche. You can frequently do this just by searching for your industry keywords and seeing what comes up. You don't have to get links from all the high-ranking sites, as was practice a few years ago. Simply identify the pages that may have the most value for your business, and try to get a link.

When it comes to actually requesting a link, there is no one tactic that is best for every site. The most appropriate tactic for gaining the link will depend both on your site and the site you are approaching. For some sites, you can simply email and politely request a link. For others, a phone call is the best tactic. Still other sites are best approached with a physical letter on company letterhead. As a marketer in your specific niche, you may already have a good idea of how the influential sites in your space should be approached.

Bear in mind that a link is best valued by the traffic that it brings, not by the "search engine brownie points" it might (or might not) be worth. The best tips are to identify and target reputable sites, and try to make sure that your site will offer value to the audience of the linking site.

From Acquisition to Developing Customer Relationships: Measure What Works

Stefan Eyram from Exact Target is an AIMS member and a volunteer on the AIMS Web Analytics Council. He sends in this post about acquiring customers, developing relationships, and measuring  success along the way.

I often get asked about renting email lists for acquisition programs. With recent statements by the large ISPs and webmail providers like AOL and Hotmail indicating that 85% or more of all emails they handle are spam, it is important legitimate marketers, like AIMS members, don’t add to the issue of spam. Unfortunately email list rentals do just that!

Even if a list owner captures permission to send third-party emails the recipients of these emails don’t often realize this when they receive these emails. Often they will consider this spam. If they are using one of the common webmail solutions they will often hit spam reporting button and the email is considered spam. In practice Spam is not what the legal definition is - unsolicited commercial email - but instead, whatever the recipient thinks is spam. This is often the case with email list rentals.

Email is not an acquisition tool! It is a relationship tool. Something you use to develop a “conversation” with a prospect or customer. In fact, as Jim Nail, Former Senior Analyst with Forrester, said in a recent report: “One of the real strengths of email is its ability to finish the customer acquisition job started by media advertising….Once the customer has been attracted to the web site, email can move a prospect through the consideration and preference phases all the way to purchase...”

Email finishes the customer acquisition job and moves prospects through the sales cycle!

How do we acquire these customers or prospects? That’s where mass media and advertising comes into play. And online acquisition has to include SEM.

Surprisingly, I recently came across a stat that says only about one-third of companies with a website are doing any form of SEM. That means 60-70% of marketers that are online are missing a valuable opportunity. Why have a website if you don’t want to get people on it?

We have the AIMS web analytics event coming up and it’s all about measuring what marketing tactics are working, including SEM/SEO and email.

If you are not doing SEM now I came across a complimentary SEM event in Toronto on Wednesday, November 29. It seems to be aimed at all marketers but more for those that are looking at starting SEM. More info on this event from non-linear creations can be found here… http://www.nonlinear.ca/pages/51_1815.htm. It looks as if their main focus will be to educate people about the real value that SEM can bring to their company, and make a case for adding it to the marketing mix.

I believe SEM is critical when it comes to online acquisition, just as email marketing is key when it comes to finishing the job of acquisition. In fact, before a website visitor makes their first purchase there is a high degree of defection. In his book “The Loyalty Effect”, Frederick Reichheld tells us that only a 5% reduction in defection rates can increase profits by 20% or more. Once you get people on your website good email marketing helps reduce defection, increase loyalty and drive both top and bottom line results.

For online marketers SEM and email marketing go hand in hand…and web analytics helps you determine what parts of these tactics work.

See you at the AIMS web analytics event Nov. 30.

Search Engine Relevancy: Pay Per Click vs. Organic

Thanks to Sanj Selvarajah, AIMS member and volunteer for sending in this perspective on search engine marketing. Sanj raises a good question for discussion at the search engine breakfast event next Tuesday.

"I wonder to what extent small office and home office businesses in Canada are using search engine marketing to promote their products and services?  It seems to me that this would be a cost-effective and more targeted way to promote their business and reach consumers compared to other mediums.  The fact that it has not been adopted as well in Canada as it has been in the U.S. tells me that the case for search engine marketing needs to be made more often to businesses.  In this article by Sheena Daniels, she makes a case for pay per click advertising compared to search engine optimization.

Jill Whalen has an interesting post on the notion of trust and how it applies to criteria for businesses that hire search engine optimization firms.

There seems to be a bit of controversy over paid inclusion and whether it is misleading or justifiable for companies.  My question is doesn't paid inclusion go against the reasons for an internet user using a search engine, which is to obtain results and ranking based relevancy rather than how "affluent" a website is?  It seems that Google is not following this practice."

SEO/SEM Event: Final Panelist Confirmed

The final panelist has been confirmed for our - Search Engines: Get Results with Your Organic Listings and Pay Per Click Campaigns - event next Tuesday, Oct. 24th.

Jason Dailey is the Lead Search Media Strategist from Microsoft and will be talking about how search engines are developing audience intelligence technology and giving marketers the ability to target searchers by age, gender and other demographics.

Jason will join Jeff Quip from The Search Engine People and Linda Burlison from Brandworks on the panel.

Full bio's and session descriptions are on the website - http://www.aimscanada.com/Default.aspx?pageId=322&eventId=361&mode=2

Search Marketing: Misunderstood and Growing Quickly

Thanks to Michelle Tampoya, AIMS member and volunteer for sending in the following post in preparation of our SEM/SEO event next week...

The AIMS Search Engine event is coming at a good time.  The Globe and Mail released their 8-page report on “The Future of Media” last Thursday with an online focus on the growth of search marketing.

“Despite being one of the fastest growing ad media, search marketing is still misunderstood by many marketers.  That’s even more true in Canada where Internet marketing – and search in particular – lags behind spending in the United States.

Some other great articles to help you prepare for the event on October 24^th include posts of click fraud, SEMPO’s new Best Practices program.  Read Charlene Li’s great posts on Search as well as One Degree’s post of Keyword Strategy.