Periodically we do a search for our own company, Lakenetwork.net, to see where it is turning up in the search engines.
Horror of horrors! Last time we looked, we found that some of the search engines and sites are displaying the wrong web site address. They are sending people to www.lakebusinessjournal.com, which was our very first client back in 2005, rather than our own site, www.lakenetwork.net.
Thankfully, we are displayed correctly on the two largest search engines, Google and Yahoo. And our paid listings in the AT&T family such as Yellowpages.com, which we control, are also correct.
But the third largest search engine, Bing.com, somehow picked up the wrong information.
It looks like the culprit is Citysearch.com, one of the places that Bing gathers its information.
Although it is relatively easy to change information on these listings such as addresses and your company’s products and services, we’ve learned that changing the web site address is a different kind of animal.
We have submitted online requests to both Citysearch and Bing with no luck so far. As you have probably guessed, we’ve not been able to make contact with a single human being on the other end.
We are having a similar problem with the listings for our church, which has the same name as a church in Oregon. Guess where Yahoo directs people, in spite of our best efforts to change it? Oregon, of course. At least Google got it right.
It’s unfortunate that wrong information on the Internet spreads virally–like the worst kind of gossip.
We’ll keep you posted and let you know when we’ve had success in changing our information. Meanwhile, here are two bits of advice:
1. Do a search in Google, Yahoo and Bing for your company name, your products, your market area and so forth to see if people are getting the correct information.
2. Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet!
Are you relying on your Web site to do all your work for you? If that’s the case, you are probably pretty disappointed.
Some people have the idea that once a Web site is up, all they have to do is wait for the orders to roll in or the word-of-mouth to catch on. And then the Web site just sits there. And sits there.
And sits there.
If that’s the case, it’s time to go back to Marketing 101 and recall a few of the ways a business or organization can become known: through advertising, public relations, email marketing and community involvement. We at Lakenetwork use them all, and more.
Advertising
Try local advertising. We budget for advertising in the Lake County Business Journal, in a professional organization’s annual directory, and other places where we can be exposed to potential clients. We pay AT&T for an enhanced listing on YellowPages.com and in the phone book. Yes, people still use the phone book! A lot!
Public Relations
Send out press releases to online services, local newspapers and, if the announcement warrants it, national trade publications. Don’t neglect your small neighborhood paper, your professional organization’s newsletter, your Chamber of Commerce, your alumni newsletter. Make sure your press release has news value. News implies “change.” What has changed in your business lately? New hires or promotions, new clients, new technology, new products?
Email Marketing
Can you offer a monthly coupon or special? Do you have knowledge to impart about your specialty in an occasional tip sheet? Develop a system of sending regular (no more than once a month) messages to consumer or business acquaintances on your email list. We do email marketing by writing the e-newsletter you are reading now.
Public Involvement
Volunteer! Get involved! Give until it feels good! Offer your services to the local Chamber of Commerce, professional organization, church or other group. You will make new friends, widen your exposure and help the community. Just keep in mind that your primary purpose is to do good, not do business. No one wants your business interest shoved at them.
Some of these suggestions are high-dollar; others take more energy and time. There are many ways to get publicity, both traditional and off-the-wall. Visit the public library’s business section and take out a couple of primers on marketing. Find out what your peers are doing. Talk to a marketing professional—you can find a directory of local marketing people at www.lakecommunicators.com.
Make sure your URL (Web address) is in all of your communications—email, advertising, public relations, public involvement. And watch your Web site activity grow.
Have you ever noticed how your company or organization’s Web site looks on different computers? What comes up on your neighbor’s computer may appear quite different from how it looks on yours. That’s because he could be using a different browser from yours.
Web site developers have absolutely no control over the software that will end up viewing their Web site. As a Web site owner, you need to be aware of the complications involved in viewing your site. As an Internet user, you need to be aware of the hidden issues brought on by not updating your browser regularly.
There’s a good chance that you yourself are using either Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 or 6, but there are many other options out there. As it stands, Mozilla’s Firefox is a strong third in the browser wars, with Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, and now Internet Explorer 8 filling in the minor ranks and nine more that are too insignificant to list. Not including the smart phone market, that leaves you with 16 different ways to view the same site.
Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) was launched in March 2009, and already one percent of your customers have installed it or a previous Beta test version.
It is a good idea to have your Web site maintenance person test your site on the new IE8 browser. At Lakenetwork, we are systematically going through the sites we maintain to fix the few glitches we’ve found. Nothing serious, just annoying: missing borders, error dialogues when you hover over a menu, the content in the header being pushed down a few pixels beyond the header. Incidentally, when your site was first launched, your developer should have tested the site on a variety of browsers beforehand.
We’re going to get a little technical here, but our main point is to make sure that your site has no issues with IE8 compatibility—or for that matter, the remainder of the browsers.
So much choice for consumers introduces some significant problems for developers. What browsers do we develop the code for? Can we even get the feature we want in a site to work in an older browser? These problems are best exemplified by Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). Released in 2001, there are many code features that IE6 simply does not support and will never support. Sites like Wikipedia, YouTube and MySpace that define the current generation of the WWW didn’t even exist when IE6 was released. Yet, with around one quarter of your users using IE6, developers are stuck creating workarounds to make new ideas work with old technology.
As a Web site owner, you should be aware that these problems mean that your site may not display on all computers as you expect it to. Sometimes these differences are minor, like an extra bit of space between lines here or there in your content. Other times they can be absolutely catastrophic to the point where your site fails to display at all.
At this point, it’s a good idea to have support for IE6, IE7 and Firefox. Generally, if a site displays well in Firefox it has industry compliant code and will display across most non-Microsoft browsers.
Conversely, if a site displays well in Internet Explorer 6 or 7, don’t assume that it will display well in non-Microsoft browsers. (Microsoft is notorious for incompatibility even in this environment.)
As a user, you should simply be aware that the browser you’re using right now makes a difference in the grand scheme of things. In the early days of the Web, browsers were introduced regularly and the more tech-savvy user base updated regularly. As the user base has spread to the less tech-savvy, fewer users overall are updating regularly. In this constantly changing, technology driven world, it really is every user’s duty to keep their personal platform up to date. (It’s even free!) But until updating happens universally—which may be this side of never– it is best to make sure your company or organization’s Web site is compatible with as many browsers as possible.
Recently a small retailer approached us about taking over her Web site hosting and improving the site. She had paid the designer to develop her site a year ago. Her hosting contract was up for renewal.
Much to her dismay, she discovered the Web site did not belong to her business. There it was on the contract: “The developer maintains the rights to the Web site’s design.”
She wanted out. She wanted a divorce from her Web site hosting and design company—but unfortunately she was locked into this relationship. Redesigning the site would cost too much. The retailer had learned a costly lesson.
This is not your usual and customary way that Web site ownership is handled. Usually the site belongs to you, the client. But it happens often enough that I thought it was worth a column.
Locked into a bad relationship
In another instance, a local membership organization paid a rather large amount for a software service that handles similar Web sites for clubs and organizations. In addition, they are locked into paying a monthly maintenance fee for three years.
The organization created their own site using the software, but they were disappointed to find that it didn’t really match their needs. It couldn’t be customized, and it didn’t have all the bells and whistles they needed.
They are looking for us or another Web site developer to help them iron out their problems, probably an expensive proposition. Can this marriage be saved? We don’t know yet.
Furthermore, because the organization is using proprietary software developed by this company, if they ever get the kinks worked out they will still have to use that company. If they move, more than likely they will lose their Web site. And then they’ll have the headache-y task of creating a new one.
This is not to say that the Web site company is unethical. They probably spent considerable time and expense developing the software. But it does present a problem for their clients.
“Free” sites
What about the sites you can create for free on some of the major search engines, who will host the sites for a few cents a day? I’ve always wondered about that, and I finally took a look. The design is yours to keep—but when you leave, the functionality stays. In other words, you can have the “picture” of your Web site—but you won’t be able to make it function, which is a major part of the expense in creating and maintaining a Web site.
“You need to protect your company’s ability to make changes to the site down the road. You should always think about — and ask prospective developers about — what will happen if you end your relationship with the developer in the future. If the developer creates the site with proprietary technology, you may find it difficult or impossible to make changes without using the original developer. More than a few businesses have learned this lesson the hard way and have had to create a new Web site from scratch after ending their relationship with a previous developer who refused to grant permission to the business to make changes to the code the developer owned.”
In the wild and woolly world of Web site development, it pays to talk to friends and associates who have needs similar to yours and are happy with their developer. Make sure to ask one essential question: Who owns your Web site?
By the way, most local Web site developers don’t have a problem with your leaving the relationship if it’s not a marriage made in heaven. It just hurts our pride a little.
Changing Web site companies requires willing cooperation between the new developer and the old developer, and all of us developers know that. There are domain names that need to be pointed in a new direction, sites and functionality moved to a new host, access granted, and so forth. It’s not the happiest of tasks, but we all—well, most of us—know that we need each other’s cooperation to get the transfer completed. We know that while we may lose a client today to another developer, the same developer may be losing a client to us next week.
So we help each other out. It’s not only the legal thing to do, it’s the smart thing.
They say availability is the mother of invention… or is it necessity? Whichever it is, when you’re choosing a domain name, you may not get your first choice. What’s the next best thing? It’s time to get creative.
Your domain name should mirror the image you want your company to project. The URL you choose can have an impact on brand identity and help with keyword ranking. Choose carefully.
One Lakenetwork client, Healing High Rise Inc., chose www.healinghighriseinc.com. But people couldn’t seem to remember the “inc” at the end, so they’d end up at the wrong site. We changed the URL to www.learnefttoday.com, EFT standing for Emotional Freedom Technique, an energy healing method taught by the company. The company still uses its business name in the header on the site. A bonus to using learnefttoday is that EFT is in the domain name, therefore helpful in getting search engines to pick it up.
Something else to consider when deciding on your domain name is to choose one that describes your company or its product or service. Lakenetwork designed a site for a pest control company called Green Pest Control. The owner came up with www.stopthecrawling.com, memorable with a humorous twist.
CamelotHomeInspections.com wasn’t available when Erick Miller, president of Camelot Home Inspections, Inc., was registering his domain name. Miller chose www.weinspectforyou.com for the Willoughby, Ohio company, leaving no doubt as to what service they offer.
“I tried to make it coincide with what the company does, something that was catchy and easy to remember,” said Miller.
Here are some does and don’ts:
Don’t use free e-mail accounts for business such as Yahoo!, AOL or Gmail. Instead use your business domain name for all business communications. For example, use JoeSSS@AcmeWidgets.com instead of AcmeWidgets@yahoo.com or JoeSSS@yahoo.com.
Do purchase multiple versions of your domain name, including .com, .org, .net, .biz, hyphenations between words, and common misspellings. You could also purchase alternate domain names such as product names, brand names and any other keywords that might be typed in randomly.
Remember, a name that makes perfect sense to you may be too hard for other people to remember. Is your domain easy to say? Is it hard to spell? Do you have to explain why you chose it? Keep it short and memorable, use keywords in your business name, and don’t use underscores. Register your domain name for five to 10 years at a time rather than renewing every year, because some search engines give more credence to a company that has confidence it’s going to stick around.
This month we asked our staff for their pet peeves regarding Web sites they’ve visited. Here are some of their suggestions:
Sometimes it is hard to figure out how to reach someone in a company, according to marketing manager Laura Freeman. Make sure your contact information is clearly visible. Put contact information on every page, traditionally in the footer (bottom of the page). Or, have a “Contact Us” page. Preferably do both.
Resize your photographs before you put them on the Internet rather than relying on your browser to resize them, says developer Corey Green. Large photos dramatically increase the time it takes for a site to load. Also, the photos look jagged.
Organization is important, especially for larger sites, according to developer Kathy Smith. “I’ve gotten totally lost on sites that don’t have links presented in logical ways. A site should be easy to navigate, and easily expandable without compromising the navigation.”
She added that making a Web site as informative as possible is the best thing one can do. “Put resources online. Give your customers a reason to visit, bookmark, and come back.“
It’s important to not overwhelm your visitors with needlessly long pages or over-elaborate navigation systems, says developer Alex Roys. The more concise you can be, the more effective in getting your point across–rather than burying the visitor under a mountain of information that they can’t use.
Keep these suggestions in mind, and half the battle is won in giving your company or organization an attractive and useful presence on the Internet.
p>Businesses could be faced with lackluster sales during these challenging economic times. It’s always important to ensure your Web site is working to increase your profits and productivity, but it’s doubly important now. How can your Web site build profits and increase productivity with limited resources?
Here are some ideas:
Make sure your pricing is competitive. Is there any way you can shave costs in your pricing structure?
Tell the viewer how essential your product or service is. For example: Now, more than ever, you need to look your absolute best to get the sale, so come to our salon.
Offer extra value that saves your customers money as they gear up for the holidays.
Point out to the visitors to your site that with today’s gas prices, shopping online saves not only time, but gas money as well.
Post a downloadable holiday budget planner on your site – your customers will thank you for helping them track their spending.
Offer buy one, get one specials, or discounts for those who make a holiday purchase to use next year. This will bring them back in January.
None of these ideas will matter if you’re not getting the traffic you want to your site. Here’s where search engine optimization (SEO) is important. How do you know if you are getting the right traffic? Get statistics from your Web site host on what search terms people are using to find you.
How do you do that? Have your Web maintenance team add Google Analytics to your site. A lot of people think backwards about this – they think SEO is when someone plugs in the name of their company and it comes up. No! SEO is for when someone doesn’t know the name of your company or maybe doesn’t even know you exist! Find Google Analytics at www.google.com/analytics to be able to learn where your visitors come from – and how they interact with your site. Not to mention that it’s FREE to all Internet advertisers and Web site owners.
Whether you are working to create or improve your Web site, there is a mountain of minutiae you need to keep in mind. Technology changes fast, and you have to run to keep up.
But there’s one element that never changes: Writing words that sell.
“Words That Sell: A Thesaurus to Help Promote Your Products, Services, and Ideas” is a classic marketing book available on Amazon.com, published in 1984 and reprinted in 2006. Words That Sell has come to our rescue many times in creating vibrant copy that persuades and informs powerfully.
If you get stuck for just the right word, most regular dictionaries and thesauri can leave you cold. You need words that grab ya.
Does your company “pride itself on its reliability?” How dull. Add some zing with words like:
High-performance
Durable
Built to last; ruggedly built.
Why not say that you have high standards, stringent standards, rigorous standards, or that it’s laboratory tested or precision engineered? Heck, why not say it will “last a lifetime” or “last for generations”?
Is your product powerful? Or is it dynamite, high-voltage, Herculean, titanic, Promethean, muscular or masterful?
Author Richard Bayan wrote that he rummaged through huge stacks of magazines, newspaper, brochures and catalogs, listened for compelling phrases on television and radio, and combed dictionaries to create “your personal magic kit.”
Words That Sell is a super tool for creating great copy. Hmmm . . . maybe we should reword that:
“At last! Now there’s an even better way to write mesmerizing copy! Words That Sell stirs the imagination and adds professional writing skills to your toolbox. You’ll wonder how you ever got along without it!”
A client recently asked us to do some SEO on their Web site. (SEO, or search engine optimization, is about designing your Web site so it achieves a high ranking on search engines such as Yahoo and Google.) We were alarmed to see what the previous company had done – lots of repetition of the same term on the site and in the metatags, the descriptive code that tells search engines what is on your site. Most search engines regard both of these methods as spamming and count them against you.
What to do:
Consider a “Link to Us” page on your site Include your logos and HTML text people can use on their sites.
Syndicate your articles to other Web sites and e-mail newsletters. By putting your articles up for grabs in this way, other sites will link to them. Every article should include your site name near the top. Work a link to your site into the article a couple times, but don’t overdo it.
What not to do:
Don’t waste time getting links in guest pages This early link-building technique no longer carries any weight with search engines.
Likewise Free-For-All pages These automated directories bring virtually zero traffic to your site, but are a great way to generate a lot of spam and don’t help with search engines.
Especially avoid link farms These highly automated link-exchange systems designed to generate many links quickly won’t help and might get you penalized by search engines.
Remember, it’s not all about search engines; it’s about getting the word out about your site. Syndication gives you relevant links – and search engines like relevant.
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Lake County Portal:
Lakecountyoh.net, designed and developed by Lakenetwork, is a directory for businesses and people who want information about Lake County, Ohio.
Lake County provides a wealth of prime development property, business and economic resources, skilled laborers, abundant energy, a diverse housing market, excellent education opportunities, attractive landscapes and countless recreation choices, including all that Lake Erie has to offer.
E-mail campaigns: Best practices for the best response
Want to increase readership of your e-mails? Using the same tactics as you would use for direct mail will help increase readership of your e-mail copy, according to an article by Pat Friesen in Target Marketing magazine’s July ’08 issue.
Here are some basic rules to live, or write, by:
Use Hot Spots – Put important benefits in copy hot spots such as subject and “from” lines, headlines, sidebars, bulleted copy and in a P.S. (30 percent of readers read the P.S. first!)
Write (and Design) for the Scanner – Rarely will anyone read every word you write. Think about your own habits. Do you?
Briefer is Better – Use short sentences (one and a half lines) and short paragraphs (six lines or less).
You, You, You, NOT Me, Me, Me – Use the word “you” twice as often as “I” or “we” to increase reader involvement and create rapport.
Be Specific – Use exact numbers and numerals (469) instead of spelling out numbers like four hundred and sixty-nine.
FREE! – In today’s world of “if it’s free it’s for me,” the most powerful word is “free,” not “complimentary.”
Call to Action – Tell e-mail recipients what you want them to do and how you want them to do it. Repeat the directive in each e-mail and on each Web page.
No Pulitzer – The job of direct response copywriter is to generate a response – either immediate or delayed – not to win awards.
Direct mail and e-mail are eternally linked. What’s good for one is most likely good for the other, with the same basic practices working for both on- and offline copy.
Lake County Portal:
Lakecountyoh.net, designed and developed by Lakenetwork, is a directory for businesses and people who want information about Lake County, Ohio.
Lake County provides a wealth of prime development property, business and economic resources, skilled laborers, abundant energy, a diverse housing market, excellent education opportunities, attractive landscapes and countless recreation choices, including all that Lake Erie has to offer.
