Web Design And Internet Marketing TipsBy NetSpeak Solutions – NH Web Design & Internet Marketing Specialists

Working with a Web Design and Internet Marketing Company
by Stephen Dow, NetSpeak Solutions. A NH Web-Site Design and Web SEO Marketing Company

I was on the phone with a potential client for “umpteen thousandth” time, and I realized that sometimes, no matter “how or what” you say on the phone – or in person, many people simply can’t fully grasp what is involved with integrated web design, search engine marketing, social network media, PPC, hosting, etc.

So, figuring that most people have more time to read and thus “absorb”, I decided to put together an article that includes a basic list of what I feel you need to know about how a web design and Internet marketing company goes about analyzing what they need to do FOR you; including how they do some of it. Anyway, I hope this approach helps at least a few of you out there. It won’t answer everything. But it should fill-in some gaps.

Initial Questions for Those Who Need a Website, and for Those Who Have an Existing Website That Needs Help
If you already have a website you shouldn’t simply be asking a web design company / marketing company, “I need you to make me rank higher on the free results so I can make more money by increasing rank”.

You may think this is the only thing you need, but it’s not.

We first need to know a lot more about your website. For example, who is your hosting company, how sound is your web code, how good is your navigation scheme, how well have you assembled web content in relation to your keyword phrases (if you have any). These items enable us to help decide whether your existing site needs re-design work up-front. As for hosting, many people I speak with don’t understand at all how important a good hosting company is. Well, for example, moving a website with one or more databases is fraught with issues, but it may be necessary. Also, did you know that if you are using a poor hosting company, this can actually limit your natural rank results (as well as provide you with fewer inherent features – like automatically helping you setup a blog on your own sub-domain)? Did you also know that a good hosting company provides software that allows you to analyze keyword phrases used to get your site as well as to tell you how many unique visitors come to site – by day, by week and by month, and from where – and more?

On Web Design
If you don’t have a website yet, besides beginning the process of design, we may recommend that you use a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign after your new site is “live” (for a relatively short time). This is because it can take 2-6 months to obtain optimum “natural” rank keyword results on the major search engines. You don’t necessarily want to continue overlapping paid and natural results, since research has shown that 75% of the click-throughs on search engines come from the natural results. The PPC campaign is really the way you make your website visible on search engines to generate traffic – until you rank optimally (and naturally).

Website design should be about ease-of-use along with the inclusion of excellent content for its visitors. This takes a good amount of forethought. You need to gain knowledge about competitive sites and gauge how to provide better ways of saying and doing the things they do best, and, do what they aren’t doing. However, keep in mind that Rome wasn’t built in a day. Well, neither will any good website.

It’s so essential to take the time to gain a complete understanding of both your competitors and your customers to design or re-design a website with a user experience that will be special to them. If this is done you’ll not only increase your sales, but your company will be building its brand by “leaps and bounds” via the positive unsolicited PR that will be generated by many happy visitors.

Search Engine Optimization
An obvious issue is Internet marketing SEO. As the process of website page layout and navigation are being ironed out so should your choice of page content – and thus your keyword phrases. This is because we still are living in a website and search engine dominant world.

To help with the proper choice of keyword phrases, most web design companies with Internet marketing expertise use some very powerful software tools. They help a copywriter make pages “readable” to both the human and the search engine. You also need an inbound-link building campaign. The intent here is to use the Google algorithm to your advantage. And since inbound links figure heavily, it’s necessary to use them to help push you along “up the charts” so to speak – especially with Google. These inbound links are frequently referred to as “back-links”. Their content must be choreographed carefully so they work optimally with the home page as well as any internal pages they are intended to point toward. There’s more that could be discussed here on SEO and SEM, but key points have been made.

Beyond Search Engines and Rank Optimization
This is where blogs and social networking media sites come in. They all serve to increase traffic and branding in different ways than search engines.

Whether you already have a website or not, be prepared to spend a fair amount of time on social networking media sites and their optimization. This is because social networking is growing rapidly, and you can no longer afford to ignore them. But just how do optimize social networking media exposure since there are literally hundreds of social networking media sites on the Internet?

Well, many are great sites, some are good and many are worthless. After looking at the demographics of your customers versus media site user demographics, you will likely want to get a business presence up on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and a YouTube Channel to start with. Then, you need to build “a community” based on your business on these sites. This takes time, but it also has been shown that “community building” eventually builds momentum that ultimately generates interest, leads and then sales.

Another content medium which has dropped in popularity slightly, but is still important, are blogs. Therefore, you need to have one. The best blogs are ones that are on a sub-domain of your “top level” root domain name. You can add others that are not part of your domain, but only after you have established a community built around your main blog. But remember this; any blog that is on another site sub-domain is one you DON’T own. So if you plan on taking in ad revenue and/or to sell it then forget it. The only way to do this is to have a blog on a sub-domain of a top or root level domain name that you own!

Here’s an example of what I mean by root domain level versus sub-domain level; http://www.domainname.com is the root, or top-level domain, while http://blog.domainname.com is a sub-domain of the top-level domain.

What About Cost for All This?
So now you’re probably saying, “How much will this search engine marketing optimization, social media optimization, website design and/or re-design, and content analysis work cost”? Well, it sure will cost a lot less than any money you may be planning to spend (I mean waste) on “push” marketing techniques (like unnecessary brochures, flyers, business cards, ads in magazines, going to trade shows that aren’t absolutely necessary). As an example, if you spent around $5,000 on any one of those items, you can pay for all the items mentioned above. E-commerce websites and sites with large a large amount of video media would be an exception.

The bottom-line is simply this; if improving company branding, website traffic, and the user experience is what you are looking to do with your website, then you’re on the right course – because these tactics all lead to higher rankings, better conversions and a better ROI.

If you’d like more information on the topics covered, then contact me at info@netspeaksolutions.com. NetSpeak Solutions is located in New Hampshire and provides web-site design services and Internet marketing services to companies near Epping, NH and across the USA.