cultureblog

Imagine this if you will; you have an amazing vision for a new restaurant. You decide on the cuisine, and the decor and ambience are nothing short of fabulous. You hire a world famous Chef and you bring in only the finest ingredients. Your wine selection is filled with the creme de la creme. Yet you don’t have any patrons. What happened you might ask yourself?

Then you realize that the location you have chosen to open your restaurant is in the middle of nowhere and in the back of an old strip mall where all the other stores are closed down. You have no visibility. Sure you can pay for advertisements but that will only get you so far. Location, location, location – this is perhaps the most important factor to any brick and mortar business’s success. Life isn’t different on the World Wide Web either. So many people have great visions of creating an online business or presence and put in an amazing effort to produce a beautiful web site, only to find that they don’t get any traffic. With the amount of like businesses to be found on the web, what are you doing to stand out in the crowd?

This is where SEO “Search Engine Optimization” comes in to play. Although SEO is not a new term, you maybe hearing more and more about it everyday when it comes to your online presence. The term, which was first used back in 1997, is one of your greatest weapons when it comes to the exposure of your web site. Research will tell you that the majority of “searchers” will skip over the pay-for-placement ads and go right to the top of the organic listings (those listings usually after the top 3 shaded ones). This is where you want to be.

The good news is that you can get there; the bad news is that it will take more effort than simply adding a few choice keywords to your code. At Durrani Design, as a San Diego based business, we know how much competition is out there. The quality of your work may be the best around but if people can’t find you then the opportunity to be noticed is drastically reduced. Our suggestion is to take pride in every aspect of your business and don’t be fooled by people claiming they can get you to the top of the listings by just adding 5 keywords to your site. This would be like claiming you have the best burger in town all the while using frozen patty’s from your national food distribution chain.

When it comes to SEO there should be no backing down – it’s a full time job, making sure that you not only get to the top of the list, but that you stay there as well. Just like anything in life, the more you give to something, the better results you get.

Want more business?  Of course you do.  What better time to focus on taking your business to a new level than a new year – and a new decade?  Read on, and make it your resolution to follow these tips in 2010:

1.  Be your own editor.  Read through your site.  Does it contain statements that are outdated?  Is your sales pitch lackluster?  Are your product descriptions descriptive enough?  How about the Copyright date… at the very least, that should changed to 2010.  It shows your visitors that you’re on top of your online presence.

2. NEW NEW NEW! New banner graphics, promotional boxes, and details on your website will show your audience that you’re investing back into your business, and it will keep them coming back for more!

3.  Start (or ramp up) your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.  At Durrani we say that having a great website without SEO is like throwing a huge party and not inviting anyone.  The goal of Search Engine Optimization is to capture your target market and lead them to your site – SEO gets people to your party.   In 2010, invite more people to your party.

4. Put your email account to work.  Email campaigns are one of the most effective and inexpensive marketing methods out there.  With a professional, branded design and targeted, concise messaging, an email campaign can create a sustained connection to your audience, and get the word out about important news, offers and promotions.

5. Here, take my card…  Even in an era dominated by all things digital, there’s still something to be said for strong print marketing.  Consider business cards – being able to hand out a well-designed, branded business card adds credibility and makes a good impression.  And print collateral – including brochures, one-sheets, and postcards – gives your target market something tangible that will remind them of your services.

6. Everyone loves a “deal.” You know it’s true, we all love a good promotion.  Getting something for free is even better.  We encourage our clients to offer incentive, especially for e-commerce business.  Promo codes in an email campaign, free shipping, or even a referral incentive program can go very far in getting that business that’s been sitting “on the fence”.  

7. Blogging: not just for the young folks anymore.  When a blog is built and maintained properly (read: often, but not too often), it can be instrumental in Search Engine Optimization efforts as well as steady viewership.  It can also give your business an easy and quick outlet for your press releases, news, and promotions – one that you can update yourself.  Durrani can create a blog that is fully integrated with your existing website design, so that it looks professional and thoughtful – and we can be as hands-on or hands-off as you’d like in your blogging adventures. 

8. Get social with your media.  Whether you love them or hate them, social media outlets are here to stay.  LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr… they can be used to your advantage in business, if they’re done specifically and surgically.  We can help you assess which of these avenues would work for you, and help you get started.  At the very least, one media outlet that every business should utilize is press releases.  Press Releases help with SEO as well as public perception, and we can handle the writing and release for you… no-hassle PR!

9. Educate yourself.  What’s new in your industry?  Are you keeping up with the metaphorical “Joneses” or are your website, your branding, and your marketing falling behind the times?  It’s always a good idea to keep a finger on the pulse of your business in relation to your competition – and to know when to make changes or additions.

10. Give your brand a facelift.  Every company needs a good makeover once in awhile.  Is 2010 time for yours?

Overwhelmed?  Don’t be… Durrani is here to help!  We want to assist our clients in growing and expanding their businesses.  That could mean designing a new marketing piece, launching an SEO campaign, or re-branding… it could also mean sitting down and creating an effective marketing plan involving many of these pieces.  We want to make 2010 the best year ever for our clients!

Post 4 of our ongoing case study – Project Tee Compressed

In our last post, we discussed kicking off the design process, some logo ideas and coming up with a draft sitemap. While our design team is busy being creative, our web development team has a task list of their own to start. We’re going to illustrate how it’s important to get some forward momentum by doing a quick "under construction" page and plugging in some basic SEO can get your new domain indexed by the search engines weeks or months before your launch.

If you are doing a redesign of an existing site, then putting up an "under construction" page isn’t appropriate. You will simply develop the new site in the background and then just switch over to the new site when ready. Your visitors will continue to see the old site until the redesign is launched. But if you are building a site for the very first time where a domain name had no existing site, then it’s a good idea to put up a new public "under construction" page while you develop the site in the background.

This helps in a few areas: First – it let’s people know that there is a new business coming in case they stumble upon your website for some reason. Much like any retail business would put up a coming soon banner, you should also let passers-by know that you are opening up shop soon. People interested in your product or service may want to bookmark your site for future reference. Another option to consider is to put up a simple newsletter signup form as your homepage to begin capturing email addresses for your mailing list. This puts customers on your mailing list to be notified when the site is ready and your store is open.

The second major reason to put up an "under construction" page is to start the SEO process. It takes search engines a while to work their way around the internet and find your new domain, so the earlier you get site content up there for them the better. It can take Google as long as 6 months to index a new site for the first time. They do this on purpose to keep their search engine index from getting overwhelmed by quick build-overnight spam sites. Putting up a very basic "under construction" page with some text and images lets the search engines know about your site and gives them a headstart on ranking your site.

At a minimum, you should provide a quick text write-up of your new site, what it’s about, what products you are going to be selling and maybe some images. You should also cover the basics of search engine optimization techniques:

• Give your images ALT and/or TITLE tags with your most prominent keywords
• Include your TITLE, KEYWORDS, and DESCRIPTION META tags in the page header.
• Use as much text as possible that includes your prominent keywords.

The other thing you can do to give your site a major jumpstart on the search engines, is to Blog about your site or business and get it cross-linked on sites such as Digg, Reddit and Sphinn. These aren’t fool-proof ways to get indexed but they help get the ball rolling on your organic rankings.

For our new site at TeeCompressed.com, we put up a static screen shot image of our new site design with an "under construction" graphic – (at the time of this post, you can see it at www.teecompressed.com).  We optimized all our images using ALT and TITLE tags for our favorite keywords and put in the appropriate META tags. You can view our homepage source code if you want to see what we used. This new "under construction" page has now been up for about a month and we are already seeing some activity on the major search engines. We are also blogging about our new site (obviously, you are reading about it now).

To track keyword performance and measure other SEO analytics, we use a great tool called Web CEO. I’ve pulled the most recent report of our keyword rankings on the major search engines for TeeCompressed.com. The results aren’t spectacular, but considering we don’t even have a functioning site up yet, the fact that we are even listed in Google is a pretty amazing achievement.

The major rankings to-date are:

All The Web:
page 5 – compressed tee shirt, compressed tees
page 2 – tee compressed

Altavista:
page 5 – compressed tee shirt, compressed tees
page 2 – tee compressed

AOL:
page 3 – compressed tees
page 5 – compressed t-shirts
page 1 – tee compressed

Google:
page 4 – compressed tees
page 5 – compressed t-shirts
page 1 – tee compressed

Yahoo:
page 3 – tee compressed

There are several other search engines on the report but many get their data from the same place.

Click here or the image below for an HTML popup version of the report:

As you are beginning to see, launching a successful online e-commerce website involves more then just throwing up a couple of basic web pages with products. It requires planning, research, tracking and knowledge of your industry. Building your online business from all sides – design, programming, SEO and marketing is a keystone to your success or failure. You could say it’s like building a new house… you "could" skip hiring an architect and contractor and do it all yourself, but honestly should you? And having a team of professionals to guide you along the way is a must.