It amazes me as a website designer / programmer, how many websites are built with little or no SEO and often the small amount of SEO on the website can even be detrimental instead of helping. SEO (search engine optimisation) is a technique that includes a number of different elements that if done correctly will help improve the ranking position of your website on the search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Any programmer should be able to do the basic elements of SEO and even if someone else is going in to fill in the title tags etc the programmer needs to understand how it works to ensure that it is programmed in the correct way. For example H1 (heading one tag) should be found once on every page and above the H2, H3 tags etc. This is basically a title for a page and should be highly relevant to the rest of the content on that particular page. Google often uses this title to find out what the page is about.

 

A landing page or often also referred to as a splash page is a page that a visitor first lands on with the option to then proceed to the main website. Often landing pages are used for a number of reasons, such as promoting a particular product or service.

The advantages of creating a splash page allow you to design the page with that particular product or service in mind and tailor the content of the page to be very specific to the product or service you are promoting. It also makes it easier to optimise for the search engines as all the tags can be relevant.

If you use Google Adwords, you can create landing pages for your ads that are highly relevant to your Google Adwords ad group content. This will not only give the user a better experience but also allow you to improve your quality score, and a better quality score meaning you will be paying less for each click through.

 

In internet marketing you may have heard the term traffic sources, this relates to how a visitor has come to find your website. There are many different forms of traffic but the main ones are referrals, direct, organic and paid for. Below is a quick over view of what they all mean:

Referrals – this is the number of visits to your website that have come through another site. This may be a link that you have on another site to yours, through social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook or from links within articles you have created.

Direct – this is the number of people that have come to your site by typing your address directly in to the address bar. Often these are repeat visitors or ones that have got your address off a business card, signage or maybe by calling you first.

Organic – An organic visit is counted when someone finds you via one of the search engines such as Bin, Google or Yahoo. Organic listings are the ones that do not have the words “Ad” next to them.

Paid for – This is a visitor that has clicked on a paid for link on one of the search engines, maybe via Google Adwords etc.

 

If you are using pay per click, such as Google Adwords for marketing purposes then you need to keep a close on o what is happening and know how to improve your conversions. Adwords like most pay per click programs charges you a fee for impressions or for clicks.

If you notice that you are getting a lot of clicks through to your website but no or very few conversions then you need to spend some time investigating why. This often happens when companies advertise a product or service that they do not sell. People will see the ad, click on it and then leave the site if they don’t see what they expect to. Making sure that all your keywords point through to the relevant pages on your site is vital, do not necessarily send all your traffic through to the home page of the site as this will put people off as they do not expect to have to then search again.

Videos can be a great way to interact with your audience. It may be that you want to show your customers a new product or service that has come to market or maybe to introduce your team and the premises that you work in. Video is also often used as a training tool. Companies can create videos and tutorials about services or products and upload them to their site or link to them to allow their users to learn in the comfort of their own home or office. Some companies even offer this as a package allowing them to create a number of informative videos and selling them to people who wish to participate in the training. This involves little overheads, once the initial video is created, allowing them to resell it quickly and with little or no ongoing costs.

If you are looking in to video production, then I would advise using a professional company or individual to create them for you as it really can make a massive difference.