Website Marketing Tips
Based out of Forest Hill, MD, Coastal Web Services provides web site marketing and SEO services for Maryland residents in Baltimore County, Harford County, Cecil County, Howard County, Anne Arundel County and Carroll County, as well as customers in Delaware and Pennsylvania. However, we will accommodate any customer in the U.S. As our company's name suggests, we serve customers from coast-to-coast.
Your website marketing will be an important aspect within your company’s overall marketing strategy. Every year more and more people use the Internet to search for an unlimited number of products or services. Web surfers will then contact those they view as helpful in the process of finding the right solution for their wants or needs. With website marketing, your site will become more relevant and visible to those searching for those specific services that your company offers.
Search Engines are responsible for a larger portion of visitors to your site. The remaining visitors stem from your marketing efforts such as existing customers, business cards, advertisements, and from people who already know of your business and have been encouraged to visit your site.
Listed below are a few questions you should ask yourself about your business:
- Does your website domain name reflect your business?
- Do you use your domain for your e-mail address? (No “@aol.com,” “@gmail.com,”etc.)
- Do you have your website address on your business cards?
- Do you have your website on the following advertisements?
- Flyers
- Tri-folds
- Brochures
- Newsletters
- Yellow Page ads
- Online Yellow Page ads
- Radio
- TV
- Newspaper
- Magazine
- Do you have a list of your customers e-mail addresses?
- Do you have a list of your potential customers, including their e-mail addresses?
- Do you hand out a coupon to your customers, to look at your site?
- Do you have a page on your site that includes a coupon?
- Do you actively look for industry websites to link back to your site?
- Are you using any Pay Per Click programs?
- Who are your 3 biggest competitors?
- Are you using social networking tools to advertise your business?
- Are you performing better than your competitors online?
Additional Important Notes:
- The older a site is, the better it will rank.
- It doesn’t take that long for a site to be recognized by a search engine. But it can take many months (approx 9 months) before it is ranked within your prioritized geographical key phrases.
- More money is spent offline after online research than is spent online after online research.
Major Search Engines
Although we submit your site to thousands of search engines, there are really only 4 that are worth spending your time, efforts and money on. They are:
- Google (approximately 65%)
- Yahoo (approximately 16%)
- Bing-formerly known as MSN (approximately 11%)
- Ask.com (approximately 2%)
The remaining search engines include:
- AOL (which uses Google)
- All others (approximately 6%)
Link Importance
Links are used to help search engines determine the relevancy of a site. The more links pointing to your site, the heavier the search engines put value into that site. The links must contain link verbiage relating to your keywords.
Text Writing Tips
- Site must be useful and informative.
- Site must be specific to your products and/or services.
- The most important terms should be at the top of the page and frequently included in text.
- Includes text that can be linked to additional pages on your site.
- Should have anywhere from 250 or more words per page (150 minimum).
- You can put keywords in bullet lists in pages.
- Add advertising or marketing pages such as a specific landing page.
- Include manufacturer or main terms that could help sell that product.
