I am well aware of the economic difficulties facing small businesses during the continuing recession on Main St. (Wall St. is another matter!). To hold costs down, small businesses often resort to stretching or reducing their marketing expenditures. And one way to do that is to accept a cheap, or even free, web development and hosting package that allows a business to establish at least a modest web presence. Such packages come with ready-made templates to which a business owner contributes his/her own content. How can I tell? Because the design and the content together resemble those awful TV commercials. In any event, these websites generally prove to be ineffective. The search engines can’t find them, and customers who stumble across them have difficulty locating the information that they seek.

The good news is that remedying this situation does not require a business to pay for the services of an expensive media marketing firm that caters chiefly to large corporations. There is no need to acquire a fancy website with a lot of Flash video (search engines hate that anyway). But some expenditure is necessary in order to create a website that is professionally designed so as to make browsing and navigation a pleasant experience. And provison of well-written content that directly meets customers’ most pressing needs will attract more visitors to the site and, therefore, more business.

Consider for a moment how most of us are willing, sometimes desperate, to pay for the best medical or dental expertise that we can find. We recognize that an undiagnosed ailment or an untreated tooth infection can kill us, and we decline, therefore, to rely on self-treatment. “But,” one might object, “a professionally created website is not a life-or-death matter.” Really? When some 80% of all potential customers conduct online research before entering a store or contacting a provider, how can a business continue to live without an adequate presence on the internet as part of an effective marketing plan? And if a business dies, how do its owners eat?

Because of this situation, those of us who design or create content for our clients’ websites must do a better job of marketing our own services to those small businesses nearby who are struggling. Our doing so is not only good for our business, but also a way to meet our social responsibility to our business community. And businesses who wish to attract more customers should carefully reconsider their marketing priorities.

Web writing has to be different because we don’t read web pages in the same way we read a book or magazine. The light given off by a computer screen can be harsh on our eyes. We may struggle with glare and inaequate contrast between the letters and the background. We may also have trouble adjusting our screens and chairs for comfort.

Plus reading on a computer reminds us of looking at a TV, another box that emits light. And a mouse seems like a television remote, also a device for controlling a light-emitting box. So most of us treat web pages with the same short attention span we bring to TV programs. It’s click, click, click away.

The typical web reader will quickly click off your website if the page seems boring or complicated. She scans text, avoiding areas of densely written content and can easily miss information. To slow down the clicking:

• Get to the point fast. Think like you’re writing an ad.

• Use short sentences and paragraphs.

• Include informative subheads.

• Put information in lists with bullets or numbers.

• Put key information in bold.

Mara Braverman
Braverman Marketing & Communications, LLC

Three Tried & True SEO Techniques

Title Tag
Title tags are within the head section of the html code and it is what appears in the blue bar at the very top of the browser screen. Titles tags should succinctly describe (using 6 -12 words or about 60 characters) the content on that page and they should be unique for each page.

Meta Tags
Meta description tags are also included withing the head tags of the html code. The meta description is often used as the text that the search engine displays below your link. So it is important that this text is keyword rich and accurately describes it’s page. Meta descriptions should also be unique for each page on your website and should be written in a way that would make a potential customer want to visit your website.

Use the meta keyword tag to focus on what’s important on the page. Again, make it unique to each page and don’t stuff it with every imaginable combination of keywords. Pick a few keywords that focus on the content of that particular page and list them. Search engines may or may not use the tag to list your site, but they won’t penalize you as long as you don’t stuff it with excessive versions of keywords.

The Heading tag and Content
The H1 tag is an html tag that identifies an important heading. There are actually 6 levels of heading tags within html with h1 having the most importance. Your content (that means the content that people read on the page) should use appropriate keywords and should be well-written and structured for easy reading. Use the H1 tag for important keyword rich headings and write content that clearly and quickly identifies the focus of the content and supports the heading. Use video and graphics to support your concepts too and remember to use descriptive alt tags for images.

What if SEO doesn’t work as well as you expected?
These search engine optimization (SEO) techniques have been around for at least a decade or more and while I highly recommend optimizing your website for search engines, you should be aware that SEO in itself will not make your website successful and may not provide your site with the desired search engine rank.

If you’re confident that your site has been optimized well but you’re not happy with your current search engine rank, it may be time to analyze the competition. Which websites consistently rank higher than your site in the search engine results? What differentiates the top-ranking sites from your site?

Typically, I find 2 or 3 obvious factors that seem to contribute to the higher search engine rank.
1.Their site has better content – it’s more in-depth, it’s better written, it appears to be the better resource.
2.The site has been established longer and has been managed consistently and kept up to date.
3.It has current information and uses current techniques for presenting information.

There are of course many other factors that can come into play. But given that your site is free of technical errors and is coded to be crawled easily by search engine bots, probably the most important thing a website owner can do to optimize their website for search engines is to optimize their site for their customers.

The search engines’ goal is to list the best resources – it should be your goal too.

1.Continue to add depth to your content. You might add a blog or a user forum that will encourage customer participation while building the depth of content on your website.
2.Reach out to your audience – participate in social networks and give freely in the areas of your expertise.
3.Ensure that your site makes your customers feel secure with appropriate security measures and easy to find contact information.
4.Set a schedule to review your site regularly and edit dated information with updated content.

Your website may not be an overnight success, but with continued diligence in managing your website it will continue to improve as a source of referrals for your business and will become more and more valuable over time.