Considering a fancy Flash intro animation for your new website design?  Before you dive into it, consider these tips.  Flash is an entertainment medium.  It can be a wonderful tool for expressing a great piece of art, promoting a film or music, or dressing up a special invitation-only promotional event.  But if the primary focus of your website is not to entertain, but to bring in business – Flash might not be a good solution for you.

It is possible to have a better balance of Flash with other web content, such as a simple top banner followed by mostly text and basic optimized graphics. However, we also have other options with new technologies that allow us to create some of these same basic effects with faster loading, lighter weight code.

Increased loading time and excessive animation lends to poor SEO, since search engines are challenged in reading these kinds of websites.

Remember to consult your web designer for advice before planning an elaborate presentation.

Everybody and their mother now owns a blog. It’s a simple fact of living in the same age as Nintendo, Teletubbies, and web 2.0. Any leg up that your business might have received by simply owning a blog is now gone. You can’t just casually have a blog if you’re going to be using it for your business. You need to make sure that it is integrated directly into your website (and your general marketing strategy). Why is that? Two important reasons:

1) Seamless User Experience

Did you know that the average internet browser spends a whopping six seconds on a web page before they move on to another one? Every second of your visitor’s experience is a tooth ‘n’ nail fight for their attention. If your blog is hosted separately from your website on a third party service like Blogspot or Wordpress, your visitor needs to be directed away from your website when they visit your blog. This creates a functional interruption as they leave your webpage, thus taking your traffic away from your website, even if it is to your blog, because it is hosted on a third party service.

If your blog is hosted along with your website, but not custom themed to match your website design, it creates a visual interruption, and the sudden interruption in visual theme throughout the site could cause your visitors to reflexively leave your website (think about the sudden visual change that pop-up adds and on-site advertisements cause).

2) Search Engine Optimization

The content that you publish through your blog is the cornerstone of your website’s online marketing potential. Blogs are commonly used as an easy way to promote interactivity within a website and publish useful content to which other people on the internet will link. If your blog is hosted by a third party service and NOT integrated with your website, you are putting your online presence at a huge disadvantage. By integrating your blog into your website, your blog content will be living on the same server as the rest of your website files. This makes it easier for Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines to index your content and properly attribute all your hard won search engine traffic to your website.

By integrating your blog into your website, you take a simple online publishing tool and turn it into an invaluable online marketing hub through which you can grow your online presence and seamlessly promote interactivity with your business both on your website and throughout the world wide web.

A creative and effective way for your business to help out non-profit organizations and charities is to use your company’s online resources.  Consider some of these ideas:

• If you don’t already have e-commerce features on your site, you can easily set up a pay pal account to accept online donations without having to purchase complex a shopping cart system.
• If your site currently incorporates e-commerce, add an option at check-out to include a donation into the purchase total.
• Use your social media outlets to share your support of your organization and let others know how they can help.
• Link your organization’s website to your own site and social networks to help out their SEO.
• Have an online contest.  For example, whenever your company’s facebook page reaches 1000 fans, you will donate $X to Organization X.

By using these and other tactics, you will not only be supporting a good cause, but you’ll be building your online presence and improving your site’s SEO in the process!

You need “link juice” to increase your site’s ranking in the SERPs.  Here are a few easy, free link building tactics that can be used by any business owner!

• Donate your services to a good cause or have an event that will draw media attention.  Remember to take lots of pictures and video for posting on social media outlets!
• Write expert articles for an industry newsletter as a guest writer or even become a regular columnist.
• Run a comprehensive search of mentions of your company on the web and if you are not linked, ask for one!
• If you’ve received sincere thanks and praise from a client, ask them to post a link to your site on their personal website or profile.
• Be sure you are linked in the directories of all chambers or business organizations you’re a member of.
• Exchange links with business partners and referral partners.  Make sure you are “fans” of one another.

Still racking your brain to come up with a quick way to build links to your website and increase your online exposure?  Fact: YouTube consistently ranks as a Top 5 Search Engine; last month alone it was used by 125.5 million Americans.

YouTube, like every search engine, uses its own algorithm and delivers unique results… video results.  To access the 125.5 million Americans using YouTube each month, you must have video content on the web.  This doesn’t have to be an elaborate short film by any means– it can be as simple as a slide show, webinar, or a quick infomercial.  If you want to get more creative with your search marketing strategy, try releasing a viral video!

You should use the same principle SEO tactics with YouTube that you would with more tradtional search engines.  When submitting content to YouTube, be sure to sign up for a director’s account.  This will give you more room to describe your business and you’ll also have the capability to put live links in video descriptions.  Video content is a great and relatively easy way to get top-ranking search results, so what are you waiting for?  Grab the video camera and GO!

If your company is serious about seeing significant ROI from their search marketing efforts, it’s a good idea to hire an outside firm. Oftentimes, tedious hours of link building and keyword research are assigned to the intern… the secretary will tweet to an audience of three followers once a week… and every once in a while, an article will be posted to the company blog.  Newsflash: This strategy will not get you anywhere.

It is unlikely that anyone around the office has the time or skill set to manage a successful SEM campaign.  Unless your company has hired a full time, in-house SEM expert, it is in your best interest to consider outsourcing at least some of these tasks.  Consider which aspects of your SEM campaign you wish to hand over to the experts: Search Engine Optimization? PPC? Social Media?  Most firms will offer a package deal that includes all these components.

Outsourcing your search engine marketing is one of the best investments your company can make.  It will end up saving you a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of headaches.  Ready to give it a shot?  Call one of our SEO specialists at WEBii and get started today!

Fads of the decades:

1960’s: tie-dye, lava lamps, and ouija boards
1970’s: tetherball, pet rocks, and Farrah Faucet hair
1980’s: parachute pants, Rubik’s cube, and Jazzercise
1990’s: Tamagotchi, chat rooms, and spandex
2000’s: Crocs, Hannah Montana, and… social media??

Consider the following (adapted from Erik Qualman’s article, Social Media: Fad or Revolution?):

• By 2010, Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers — 96 percent of them have joined a social network.
• One out of eight couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media.
• Eighty percent of Twitter usage is on mobile devices. People update anywhere, anytime. Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences!
• What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (Web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook daily.
• Wikipedia has more than 13 million articles. Some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica.
• There are more than 200,000,000 blogs.  Fifty-four percent of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
• Years to reach 50 million users: Radio, 38 years; TV, 13 years; Internet, 4 years; iPod, 3 years. Facebook added 100 million users in less than nine months; iPhone applications hit 1 billion in nine months.

So… you decide.  Is social media just another fad, or has it completely revolutionized the way people across the globe do business, connect with loved ones, share information, and live their everyday lives?

Need help revving up your company’s presence in the social media world?  WEBii can help!  Contact one of our specialists today to talk about starting a customized social media plan for your business.

2009 is proving to be a turning point in the number of small business owners who have asked us about using audio and/or video media in their web sites.  But while awareness of these interactive mediums have grown, it isn’t always advisable to start plastering video and audio files all over your web site. Remember to go back to those standard marketing rules – who is your audience and what do they want?

How large are your files and how will they affect the performance of your site to those visitors? Do they have a fast enough Internet connection?  Will they likely be viewing your site at work when they might need to mute sound from playing?  Is the primary purpose of your web site to entertain, for brand recognition, or for making sales?  Will a video detract from another key call-to-action?

For many businesses, marketing with online videos and audio is a great tool, but it might be better served on a particular web page instead of your home page, or only on third party web sites like blogs, community forums, Google, and YouTube.  SEO and marketing consultants can often make recommendations in this area that are tailored to your campaign.  Ask WEBii about SEO Marketing Services.

Okay, you’ve got it. You have the perfect message (and ravishing design to go along with it) and now you are charged with the task of figuring out which medium works best for your message/design. All mediums are not created equal for every message, idea or campaign.

Picking the right medium means you have to be smart. You certainly wouldn’t want your best marketing efforts to call out to a crowd that can’t hear you, do you?

Looking at your various options (and thoroughly examining them) will give you better insight into where you can put your message so that it gets you the most bang for your marketing buck.

Example: You have a creative series of images, all of which need to be seen to fully understand the concept, and you have enough text that you need at least 30 seconds for people to read your whole message. Putting this on a billboard probably won’t work out for you. People only have a few seconds to glance at your billboard ad, and they aren’t really able to piece together a stream of images and text in the short amount of time it takes them to drive by. However, a catchy idea like this would work great on a postcard. Let’s face it, most postcards don’t have the most attention-grabbing images. The ones that do tend to stand out. If your images are strong enough, and your message clear, putting your design on a postcard is likely to be your best bet. Plus you’ll have gotten their attention with your images, and your copy can pull them in and make them want to learn more about your products and services.

Another example … say you have a single captivating image and under ten words in your whole design. This will likely translate better onto a billboard than our last example. With billboards, you have to keep it short and sweet, while still being striking enough so that your audience takes notice. Postcards, brochures and flyers give you the option to add support text to more abstract images that need a bit of explanation, where you can’t do that with billboards. Make sure your message, design and ideas translate into mediums that can actually help your marketing efforts.

Creativity doesn’t have to get lost on mediums, like billboards, and it shouldn’t. You simply have to be careful to make sure you pick the right medium for each message you have.

Example contest web page

If you are looking for a way to encourage people to visit (and revisit) your web site, try an age-old marketing tool: a contest.

Think of a simple give-away item that relates to your business – small items could be: a book by an industry author, a how-to publication that you wrote, a white paper, t-shirts, other promotional items; larger items could be: a plane ticket, a vacation package, cash, etc.

Now create an enticing and simple online form on your web site, and make sure it is easy to find.  Post links and “ads” about the contest on your homepage and other popular pages.  Make sure the rules and dates of the contest are nicely spelled out and do not scare your participants away.  Include a newsletter subscribe option in the form.  Make the confirmation page (thank you page) of your form valuable also – direct the user to particular information that you want them to see.

Take advantage of any marketing channels you have to announce the contest and create buzz about your business – submit the story to your Chamber newsletter, post it on networking web sites, mention it in your e-mail newsletter.

Once your contest is over, remember to follow through with the promise of selecting a winner and delivering the prize.  Take the opportunity to follow up again with your customers and mailing list contacts by announcing the winner in an e-newsletter and other marketing media.

What this does for your business:

• Creates brand (and web site) awareness
• Offers opportunity to gather new contacts for your mailing list
• Invents an excuse to contact and follow up with people
• Generates news about your company
• Increases traffic to other areas of your web site