Linking Basics

I've been a bit more tuned into "linking" recently (when somebody else's website links to yours) and how it can help our business - from a marketing point of view of course.

Some things are so obvious you wonder how you miss them but in case you're like me and walk round with your eyes shut sometimes, here are some of the main ones. Who links to you now? That's a useful starting point and although obvious saves you time trying to target people who have already found you. Then who links to your competitors? This is brilliant! There's your ready made list of people to target for your website, (so long as they're relevant). That saves some legwork and if your competitor has been around for a while you'll have a really good quality list.

Another way to do this if your competitors aren't lurking at the front of your mind, is to type your search terms into Google and see who comes up. Then check to see who's linking to them.

There are a couple of really good sites you can use to check links: www.linkpopularity.com, or Yahoo by typing in: Linkdomain:url.com into the search box on Yahoo's home page, this shows you all of the pages that link to your website. This is quite good fun (well it is if you're easily pleased) as you're often surprised at new links that have appeared.

When you're putting together a marketing plan, linking should now be a key part of your strategy if you have a website. It's critical if you trade online as it ultimately drives more traffic to you.

So, happy link hunting!

Karen McNulty
www.marketingplanwiz.co.uk

Planning a website

I know I've got to produce a marketing plan if I want my marketing to work and that I'll be asked for a business plan by the Bank Manager when I need a loan.   We threw together a list of bullet points and general guidelines when we started the marketingplanwiz website but they were brief (we didn't think so at the time I have to say) because we'd written all the rest of our plans in the "business plan" that we'd laboured over and were justly proud of.

I was reminded today that producing a proper plan for a website is important.  Not just what we ask the web designer to put together (as we tend to think of our websites as a just another promotional tool) but the real purpose of building the site in the first place.  Of course we know it should look the same as our other marketing materials and show our products and services, "contact us" and the rest. Then we end up spending a lot of time building the site with ideas for navigation, functionality and "look and feel" (feeling very pleased with ourselves for remembering all of this), completely forgetting in the process that we haven't worked out the objectives of the site (is it for information or do you want people to buy?), how it will display our branding values? Who is the target audience?

I always think I know these things of course (I'm a marketer so I'm supposed to let's face it) so off I go and ask somebody to make a website somehow imagining that they'll be on my wavelength and just do it right.   Obviously they don't so it's back to square one - planning.  

Karen McNulty

MarketingPlanWiz

Welcome back to our marketing blog! 

This week I've been thinking about SEO - having just been learning more about it.  It's absolutely fascinating because there are so many basics that you have to get right before your website can get even a chance of being picked up by search engines such as  Google.  Did you know for example that your "Title Tag" (the heading that appears at the top of your browser once your website has loaded) is absolutely critical, but so many of us forget about it!  This is where you get the chance in a sentence to say exactly what your website does... so if you sell flower pots and your company is called Smith and Co., don't have "Smith and Co. as your Title tag - say something like "Flower pots, all sizes and made to order" then search engines can immediately see what you do.  Of course if you're like me and haven't a clue how to make your website do that, you need to ask your lovely website designer to add it for you.  It's apparently not difficult - but that's easy for me to say...

The other thing I discovered is a website (www.ranks.nl) that tells you if you've got your "keyword density" right (sounds uncomfortable).  This is getting just the right number of keyword phrases on any page of your website.   Too few and the search engines won't be able to match you to relevant searches, too many and you've "over-egged" it.  The golden rule is 3 - 5% of your text should contain keyword phrases.  So if you had 100 words on a page, there should be no more than 5 mentions.

See, simple really! 

Karen McNulty

MarketingPlanWiz