Internet Marketing - Web design and SEO Blog by Optimind

I just finished reading The New Rules of PR and Marketing by David Meerman Scott. The book is all about how to use online channels to reach customers and build media relations. Part of our Philippine SEO services is to do online promotions for our client’s company or product.  Some notes from the book that are useful for online promotions are:

• use rss feeds
• focus on keywords and phrases your buyers use
• add links to your news releases
• use the appropriate social media tags
• non-targeted, broadcast pitches are considered as spam
• pitch to bloggers and start your own blog (for more about blogging, you may read Janette Toral’s Blogging from home book)
• include an about page on your blog
• comment on blogs related to yours

In our company, we make sure that we don’t just create a fancy website design, we also consider the functionality and experience that it should offer to your customers. Here are some tips on website design based from Nielsen/Norman, Human Factors International.

1. Do not obstruct or compete with user’s critical tasks.
2. Present elements related to specific tasks based on frequency, importance or sequence.
3. Use buttons and links consistently. Always use the same label for the same function.
4. Pages should push no unexpected animation or sound at users.
5. Allow users to purchase without registering.
6. Lay out objects hierarchically to match the user’s expected task flow: left to right or top top bottom. Most users start by scanning the content area.
7. Ensure manageable page lenghts. Don’t use scrolling on home pages and make sure interior pages are fewer than 2.5 screens.
8. Ensure that pages can be easily printed and that printing does not cut off critical information. If this is not practical, provide a printable version.
9. Don’t design critical information os it looks like advertising.
10. Don’t force users to hover over something to see options.
11. Link names should communicate the content of the page they link to. Avoid generic links such as Click Here and More.
12. User your user’s vocabulary.
13. Write content that is short and simple, correct, in the active voice and interesting.
14. User bulleted lists, introductory summaries, clear titles, and stand-alone chunks to facilitate scanning.
15. Display a search box in the upper-right corner of every page.
16. Chunk search results into categories.

When submitting your website to directories, make sure that the directory is credible enough that it may not affect your Google page rank. The top directories that Search Engines trust are:

• Yahoo! Directory ($299 annual recurring fee)
• DMOZ (Free, but it takes time to get listed)
• Business.com
• BOTW ($99 annual recurring fee or $249 one-time review fee)
• JoeAnt (one time fee of $39.99)
  
• GoGuides

Before submitting to a directory, make sure to evaluate its quality. Try not to list under directories that:

• requires reciprocal link
• clones DMOZ
• has zero page rank (or clones its page rank)

Several clients have asked our guidance about the best type and size of font for their site.The answer is, there is no best type and size. Types are limited to certain fonts that are supported by the operating system (Mac, Windows or Linux). As for font sizes, the standard for web browsers would be 11px or 12px but that is just for web browsers. Nowadays, we have to cater to the iphone, pda, and other mobile devices.

Survey of supported font types

. Info sourced by Codestyle.

As you can see, only a few have 90% or more supporters. The recommended is to use the fonts with 90% or more installations. Other fonts maybe used using an image or a flash container.

Here in the Philippines, most of the businesses are just starting to go online. Since we started in 2002, most of our clients are usually from overseas with US and Singapore being the majority.

Yesterday, I’ve met with a businessman who owns a local travel agency and is now willing to expand his market using a web channel. One of his questions was how to get people into his website. I gave him the following online marketing tips:

• Use Pay-per-click (PPC) while SEO is underway.
  With the current trends on Search engine optimization (SEO), it will take a longer time for new websites to rank up higher in the search results. While waiting for your site to climb up the ranking, it will be better to implement a PPC campaign to get traffic for your new website.
• Join the online community.
  Interact with people on social networks like Facebook, Friendster, Myspace, etc. and be involved on forum topics that are related to your business. This will make it easier for the market to know about you. Check out Optimind’s Social Media Optimization (SMO) services.
• Reward your visitors and customers.
  Implement a rewards system or give your customers or visitors prizes whenever they buy or refer someone to your website

For more information on how to promote your website, please check out our SEO and SMO services.

I attended the 2nd Internet and Mobile Marketing Summit last August 13-15, 2008 to learn about the current trends in online and mobile marketing in the Philippines. Here are some noteworthy facts and figures presented at the summit:

• only 18% of TV Ads generate positive response
• internet and mobile marketing campaigns are the most trackable and cost effective ways to do marketing
• Filipinos send 2 Billion text messages per day making the country the SMS capital of the world
• Ratio of Cellphones to PCs is 2:1, it will be 4:1 in 2 years
• This quote shows that interactive marketing is the best way to market:
  Tell them and they’ll forget
  Show tem and they’ll remember
  Involve them and they’ll understand

You may download presentation materials from the organizer’s website: www.immap.com.ph.

Smiley Cat offers an interesting showcase of design elements. The showcase ranges from registration forms, log-in forms, carousels, etc. This is a great resource if you are planning your next website redesign.

Optimind is an offshore web design company located in Manila, Philippines. 75% of our clients are overseas. Based on our own setup and experience, these are the top 5 online tools that we can’t live without:

1. Website Designed for Conversion and SEO
   To enter the international market, you need a site that has a world-class design. Before designing or redesigning your website, you should consider SEO and Persuasion Architecture. Your great design work is nothing if you can’t be found by your prospects and if your website visitors don’t contact or order from you.
2. VoIP
   Communication is essential for any business. There are free ways to talk to your overseas clients. You may use Skype or Yahoo Messenger. There are also a lot of low-cost VoIP providers that you can subscribe to for you to get a US number (even a toll-free number).
3. Merchant Account
   Making it easier for your clients to pay you is a must. Wire-transfer fees and process might turn-off some prospective clients. You may shoulder some of the cost by getting a Merchant Account. Most Philippine-based companies use xoom.com or paypal but I prefer using other online payment options because their FX conversion rates are way too low.
4. Web Analytics
   Review how your website is doing. Are you getting enough visitors from your target geographic location? What keywords are your prospects using to find your website? Will it be better to target other long-tail keywords as well? These are questions that can be answered by your web analytics software. Most web hosting companies provide this for free or you may get a Google Analytics account. Google analytics is by far the best analytics tool in my opinion.
5. Basecamp
   One of the most important investment we did this year was to sign up for a Basecamp account. Using basecamp, we can easily monitor the progress of our projects anywhere we are. Client requests, comments, revisions are easily monitored using this online tool.

Recently, we’ve redesigned our corporate website. The current site is not yet final as we are still lacking some pages for our new services. I am personally working on the content structure and decided to outsource content production to my favorite copywriter. (You can find our old website here)

The main objective for this revamp is to increase our search engine ranking and our conversion rate. So far, so good. Although we are already ranking on the top 5 spots for keywords like web development philippines and seo philippines on Google, Yahoo and MSN, I noticed a big drop on web design philippines keyword (from rank #10 to spot #26, we’re back to #10 spot today but still hoping for #1).

While fixing our drop ranking problem, I noticed that a lot of our client demo websites are being crawled by Google and appears on search results. To fix this problem, I had to create a robots.txt (which I thought was unimportant).

Robots.txt are used by search engine crawlers to check on which directories and files should and shouldn’t be indexed. In-depth explanation on how it works can be found on the robots.txt website.

You can create the file using any text editor and just upload it to the root directory of your website. The basic stuffs that you should know (the ones I used to block some directories from being crawled) are User-agent and Disallow.

sample content of a robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /d*
Disallow: /name_of_directory/
Disallow: /name_of_filename.file_ext/

on the User-agent line, you may specify the crawler name (e.g. googlebot) or just use * for all crawlers. On the disallow line, you have to specify the names of the directory of files that you don’t want crawlers to index. Disallowing d* (Disallow: /d*) tells the crawler not to index all directories that starts with the character d.

You may find additional information on how you can improve your robots.txt on the Google Webmaster page.

I am currently blogging at Cordillera Cofee in Riverbanks. They provide free and fast Wi-Fi access and good food and coffee!