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WHAT I DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT
By: John McWilliams, MAS
The web has presented some awesome opportunities for
those willing to embrace new technology. Make no
mistake. The web is changing the face of the world.
Some are good changes and some are bad ones, but
when it comes to growing your business, learning the
basics of internet marketing will enable you can
leave your competition in the dust.
Over the last two years the search engines have
given us so many tools to actually measure how
successful our web based marketing is and adjust
quickly. Within a few days and sometimes within just
a few hours, we can see the results. Recently we
have tracked people visiting our web site from at
least 30 countries, even though our present business
model focuses on just North America and the UK.
Until just earlier this year, I thought we had a
fairly descent web site. We never intended it to be
an “ordering” site because I didn’t feel people
would understand the complexities of ordering
imprinted items over the
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internet. There are just too many variables. You
would think that putting a logo on a shirt wouldn’t
be a big deal, until you consider: style of shirt,
material, color, size, is the logo ready for
digitizing, what thread colors, the location on the
shirt to put the logo, is there more than one
location, how many shirts and when are they needed?
In order to have effective web marketing you need to
understand some basic terminology. I have listed
here just a few of the terms used with today’s web:
Home page
Landing page
Squeeze page
Web 2.0
Blogs
Google Analytics
Google Adwords
Facebook
Social Networking
Twitter
Page rank
WordPress
Opt in
Double Opt In
Links
SEO
RSS
PPC
Keyword Search
HTML
Frames vs. tables
These are just a few of the terms you will need to
learn if you want to have any success at all with
internet presence that I could take a client to
while talking to them on the |
presence that I could take a client to while talking
to them on the phone, show them what they were
interested in and write up the order. All of that
has changed.
Consider that the web is all about driving traffic
to your online “store”. It really doesn’t matter
what the store is, it’s all about how people get to
you and what you are offering. In other words
….traffic. The higher your page rank, the greater
your traffic and if your web pages are laid out
properly, your sales can soar.
When two of our sites went from not even listed on
the search engines to the number one search result
in less than 2 weeks, we were very excited about the
volume of traffic and orders that are coming with
it. Web traffic drives sales.
I strongly urge everyone who wants to improve their
understanding of effective internet marketing to go
to www.ezine.com
or
http://www.undergroundtraininglab.com. There is
a wealth of free information available there that
will quickly bring you up to speed. Within a
relatively short period of time, you and your
business can also be receiving the benefits of the
power behind the internet.
John McWilliams is President of Keystone
Specialties, Inc., located in Butler, PA. Keystone
specializes in creating new income sources for
chambers and non-profit organizations. Their web
site is
www.keystonespecialties.comCheck out our
other
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