Getting Noticed
On the Web
For many projects, products and companies the WEB has become a critical marketing space. How can we best get noticed? What are the best strategies, and how will we know that we are being noticed?
Chris Jennings - PageToScreen
The Way:
- Search
- All in the details
- Referrers
- Including print
- Noise
- join the blogosphere
- Portal
- something useful this way comes
- Checkback and feedback
- stats are crucial
Seeking and Finding
- Search is the most likely way that users are navigating the web
- Google is the most likely search tool
- To Google is a new verb - have you been Googled?
Word Search - some advice:
- Include honest text content in your web pages
- profile typical users and try to best guess the words they will use in search
- Use words that you expect your potentials to search on
- Use key words in titles and sub-titles and use HTML heading tags (h1, h2 etc)
- Don't use graphics as heading unless you can style a hidden replacement
- Caption your images
- Title your pages
- This gets used by Google to head-up the summary
- Use metadata: description, content, keywords
Success through Referrers
- Google ranks pages:
- according to their importance and popularity
- this means number of referrers
- Referrers are web pages that are linking through to your page.
- These referer pages have hyperlinks pointing to your page - and are used
- Some paid-for services falsify this by generating pages with links
- Web-bots are spamming some commenting services to make links to their own web sites
- They do this to get their pages referred
How to get Referred
- Choose a URL / domain name
- Consider the name of your domain to catch your intended market
- eg: podzilla, basecamp, moondog
- best ones are gone so you may need to compromise or change your product!
- Use this in print
- make sure that it is easy to write and spell
- Keep pages fresh
- Update and publish frequently
- Publish RSS feeds that others can exploit
Join the Blogging classes
- The web is a participatory medium
- The most popular way to build a web presence is through blogging
- Engage with user generated content methods
- Blogs, WIKIS, Forums
- Let your users / customers participate through comments
- Let your staff blog the progress of projects
- Let your authors blog or participate in a WIKI
Provide Something Useful
- Build a Portal on your site
- Provide some service for users to return to
- Give something away:
- software
- Book chapter
- Tips on writing / designing
- Encourage returners by:
- freshening the content
- making a compelling experience
- usability testing
- providing accessibility
- providing expertise / usp
Measure the Results
- Check out Google
- Try different search terms
- Try Google UK / try Google.com
- How does your site rank
- Get statistics on your web site (Google Analytics)
- Review the key word searches coming from Google
- Review the Referrers