notes

A great looking website can have a really positive impact on your business. After all, it's the first impression many of your potential customers will have with your organization, product or service. Your website should reflect your company's identity, look professional, and be easy to navigate. But perhaps most important, your website should work for you behind the scenes to get you noticed by search engines and improve your overall ranking.

There are many factors that impact your ranking on a search engine. Some are easy to tackle, and some take a little more time. Below are a few things that can have a positive impact on your website traffic:

Do a Little KEYWORD Research to learn what words people will use when searching for your product or service. Using these keywords as text in the overall design of your website will increase website traffic.

Create Good Meta Tags - Each page on your website should have a unique set of Keywords, Title, and Description hidden within the page. Although you won't be able to see it, search engines use this information to rank and categorize your website.

KEEP IT SIMPLE - Although Flash animations look very cool and are impressive, they are not always a wise choice for an effective website. Many computers just are not set up to handle them well, causing your website to load slowly (or not at all). And, when it comes to increasing your ranking on search engines, these "cool" pages will actually work against you.

Use Your Home Page to attract search engines with the most important keywords. Whatever you think are the best words that someone would use when searching for your product or service should be used to attract people to your home page first. Use the less important keywords on other pages of your website. Remember, the goal is to get someone to your website. Once they are there they can easily navigate to other areas on your website.

Consider Adding A Blog to your website where you can post regular updates related to the products and services you offer. Linking from blog posts back to the content of the rest of your website can have a positive impact on your search ranking.

Continually Monitor Your Web Pages to make sure they are improving and maintaining your desired ranking.

Update your Website periodically to show the search engines that your website is alive and active. Search engines like seeing that a website is changing from time to time instead of just sitting there for years with no updates.

Encourage Other Websites to Link back to your website. If you have good, high-traffic websites linking back to your website it will have a very positive impact on your search ranking. Posting articles on professional websites, and setting up pages on social networks can also show those search engines that you have a valuable website.

Getting your website noticed by search engines can certainly have an impact on your website traffic and your business. Sometimes it moves quickly up the ranks, and sometimes it takes a little more time. Incorporate some of these tips and you'll definitely see some improvement on your ranking with search engines.

Affinity Marketing Services is ready to serve you with your website design and development needs. We can handle everything from design, to copy-writing, hosting, email support, and search engine optimization. We'd love to learn more about your website development needs.

Labels: Website Development

The recent economic outlook appears to be the worst in recent memory. Michigan is clearly one of the worst hit states with the devastating impact the drowning automotive industry has had on just about every business in the state. The housing market is still very slow with home foreclosures at record numbers, credit sources have dried up as banks continue to absorb losses from failing mortgages.

While it may seem smart business to cut back on your marketing budget during tough economic times that may not always be the best strategy. A common assumption is that since money is tight everywhere, customers will be spending less and funds spent on advertising will be wasted. The fact is that families will continue to eat, entertain themselves and buy other goods and services. History shows that people will still be spending money during tough economic times – they will just be spending their money in different ways and their motivation will come from different reasons.

The key to advertising during tough economic times is to make sure that your message resonates with your prospective customers and appeals to their current physical and emotional needs in some way. Effective ads sell your message, company, or product. They are convincing and engage prospects as if you were speaking directly to them. Package a strong need-based message with some good creative and you are well on your way to making that important connection with your prospective customers that will motivate them to purchase your products – even during a difficult economic climate.

Once you have achieved the enviable position of having a provocative ad execution with an effective message, your work has just begun. Getting that message out to your customers and potential customers in many different ways to make a real impact is a crucial part of your strategy. Every communication your company puts out into the marketing place should reinforce the message. There is no quick “drop-in-the-bucket” approach. Your strategy must be long-term to ensure success.

History has proven that business success can still be had during a recession, with a sound advertising strategy. Businesses that aggressively increased media advertising expenditures during the last recession (just 25% of all businesses) increased their market share 2 ½ times the average for all businesses in the post recession period (CARR Report, Aug 13 2001).

Now is a perfect time to reposition your company, product or service to meet the changing needs of your marketplace. Affinity Marketing Services can help you develop the perfect message combined with excellent creative, and execute an effective strategy to ensure success. Soon, with the right message and planning your investment will generate the response you are looking for… even in a difficult economy.

I was excited to learn of a new trend effecting how we approach marketing. Although it may seem as though 'now' is the current wave we are all riding, there are equally strong currents favoring the 'forever.' Dubbed "FOREVERISM," this new trend reflects the many ways that consumers and businesses are beginning to embrace relationships and products that are never obsolete. Driving its popularity is technology that allows us to find, follow, interact and collaborate forever with anyone & anything, the most popular being FACEBOOK.

FACEBOOK now has over 200 million active users worldwide, each building an online profile and relationships that are potentially 'forever.' Literally hundreds-of-millions of personal pages, status updates, tweets, feeds, profiles and blogs are gathering an eternally up-to-date storehouse of easily accessible information about individuals that would blow away even the most futuristic predictions back in the early days of the worldwide web. Amazingly, experts say the information will last forever in cyberspace. Not just because the web stores everything, but because the younger generations will never want to dispose of their carefully crafted online presence.

This great new insight can really open up entirely new opportunities for anyone developing and marketing products. Are you ready to begin embracing "Foreverism?" Your customers are!