6 ways to make sure your website is in shape for 2010

From time to time it’s important to check on the health of your website.  During these next few days, which are likely to be slow in most offices as the year draws to a close, why not take some time to give your online presence a quick inspection?  These are things we might not regularly give much thought to, but it’s important to check on them from time to time, to make sure a site is in shape.  Here are a few things I recommend:

• Check your domain registration renewal date.  How long is it until your domain name expires?  SEO experts agree that it’s advantageous to register your domain name for a long period of time.  It could help to boost your rankings, since Google and other search engines are less likely to find spammy pages on sites that are registered for a long time.  At $10/year or so for a .com domain name, it’s a no-brainer investment for businesses.
  
• Return Path’s Sender Score email reputation checker (hat tip to Jeanne Jennings at ClickZ) is a great little tool for making sure your email deliverability is strong.  It rates your overall sender score on a 100-point scale.  The basic version of the tool is free, but by completing a free registration on the site, you’ll get details on several other key metrics that factor into your overall score – including number of complaints, volume of email sent, external reputation, number of unknown users, and the number of spam traps your emails have hit.
  
• Hubspot’s Website Grader is an excellent tool that measures some of the most important metrics for your site’s search engine effectiveness, blogging and social media presence, etc.  This is a must-run report for your website as you think about your 2010 plans.
  
• Marketleap’s Link Popularity Check and Search Engine Saturation reports used to be some of my favorite tools for checking on the SEO health of a website.  But when I tried to use them about a month ago, they didn’t work.  Then I spotted a small blurb on their site explaining that as of Nov. 15, 2009, these tools have been discontinued.  The pages still exist on their website and you can enter your site, but they don’t appear to work anymore.  (I’m not sure why a company would discontinue this type of a tool, which probably generated millions of page views over the years.)  They recommend two other tools, SEObook.com and SEOMoz.com, but I haven’t gotten nearly as much value out of these sites’ tools as I did from Marketleap.  If anyone has a good suggestion for tools to replace Marketleap, please add a comment below.
  
• Google Trends (one of the Google Labs tools) allows you to estimate the size of multiple sites in a graph.  Just go to trends.google.com/websites and enter multiple sites in the search box.  This is a quick and handy tool for figuring out roughly how big a site is.  Trafficestimate.com is another.
  
• WeBuildPages.com has a number of helpful SEO-related utilities, including a Spider Viewer that shows you what the Googlebot sees when it visits your site.  This can be quite enlightening.  Make sure you’re putting your best foot forward with search engine spiders!

Photo by Usodesita

2010: The rise of social-enabled web advertising

If 2009 will be remembered as the year social media went mainstream, 2010 will see an extension of the social media proliferation into more traditional media platforms.  One example I’m keeping my eye on is SocialMedia.com, and its goal to incorporate social media into different types of web advertising.  (Just to clarify, I’m not talking about buying ads on social media websites like Facebook.)

This year was a perfect opportunity for marketers to experiment with social media, since marketing budgets in all industries were slashed and marketers had fewer dollars to spend on traditional marketing programs.  You can’t beat the price of setting up a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page – free!  But those same marketers also realized that while the cash outlay might be nil, a significant amount of time and effort is required to do social media the right way.   Social media can be a powerful mouthpiece, but to be most effective it needs to be used with other forms of marketing and promotion – and that’s where I think we’re headed in 2010.

More than a decade ago, banners brought advertising to the web, but they often weren’t relevant to the viewer and didn’t receive much interaction.  Then Google AdWords made advertising relevant by placing ads alongside search results, but Google’s text ads aren’t social.  What if you could make web ads both relevant and social?  That’s the next logical step – and it’s exactly what companies like SocialMedia.com are trying to do.  Click here to see a simple explanation on the company’s website.  In a nutshell, this new form of web display (banner) advertising brings social media directly into the ad, to allow users to interact with their social network through the ad.  In some of SocialMedia.com’s examples, their ads allow you to tweet about a movie to your friends, pass along your thoughts about a product with your network, or even share a video virally with your social circles – all without leaving the ad.

Social-enabled web advertising addresses several realities marketers are facing:
1.  Web display ad clickthrough rates are plummeting, so advertisers want to find ways to boost interaction and engagement with their ads
2.  Everyone’s flocking to social media, and a marketing manager’s boss is likely to ask “What’s our company doing?”
3.  Spending money on social media is harder than spending an advertising budget

I expect digital agencies to embrace in-ad social advertising, because it gives them a bigger role in social media.  It lets companies spend money through a more traditional channel – on advertising – but in a way that supports the brand’s social efforts.  Plus it’s easily scalable, to give companies the ability to funnel money toward a particular social initiative quickly and easily.  And perhaps most importantly, it’s a really sexy recommendation to make to a client!

I’m not prepared to say social-enabled web advertising is the next Twitter.  But as the social media stakes get higher, I believe plenty of marketers will turn to in-ad social advertising to boost their Twitter following or juice their Facebook page’s impact.

How to make your industrial website more than just a catalog of products

I spend a lot of time poking around manufacturing-related websites.   This includes companies that are making products, but also companies who are trying to sell to the companies that are making products.  One thing that has become very clear to me:  Most manufacturers’ websites fall short.

Some manufacturers are good at presenting their products on their website, providing pricing, and sometimes even sharing ordering or detailed distributor information.  But very few manufacturers unlock the great amount of knowledge that’s present in their employees and provide this information to potential customers through their site.  They’re makers, not marketers.  They’re engineers, not communicators.

Whether your company is a small manufacturer of commodity products, or if you’re a huge global maker of highly specialized goods, you need to figure out how to produce content.  When done properly, online content is a differentiator, a competitive advantage, and a tool for winning and retaining business.  Your company is an expert at what it does – so why not show the market how smart you are?

There are dozens of ways to get into content marketing, but some of the easiest can be started by a small company with very little effort.  For a larger manufacturer, a more coordinated strategy is probably necessary, to ensure the information is distributed consistently and your different divisions or departments aren’t talking over each other.

A few ideas to get you started:

1.  Start a blog.
Begin slowly at first, until you develop a consistent frequency and voice.  Then once you get going, you can launch a promotion strategy to ensure your blog is seen by the right people.  There are hundreds of tutorials on the web that can teach you how to use a blog for establishing your company as a thought leader.  One word of advice: Don’t just blog about your company’s new products or when you do something newsworthy.  That misses the point.  People skip those blogs, so you’re just wasting your time.  You should be blogging about topics and issues that matter to your customers.

2.  Use Twitter.
If you don’t have the time or discipline to do a blog the right way, a Twitter presence can help you get a simple voice into the market.  (Of course Twitter can complement a blogging strategy nicely too.)  It’s now relatively easy to embed your Twitter feed into your company’s website, so you can offer your tweets to anyone who comes to your site.  The drawback is Twitter’s 140 character limit – which is great for sharing relevant web links with your audience and distributing a few simple thoughts.  But anything more deep will require a different medium.

3.  Write white papers.
This is fairly familiar territory to many industrial companies.  When done correctly, they can be a great vehicle for thought leadership.  However, make sure the tone is correct.  If the white paper is nothing more than a veiled sales pitch for your new product, it will have limited effectiveness.

4.  Try some video.
Thanks to sites like YouTube, web video is being made more simple every day.  There are different levels of sophistication to web video – and each requires an increasing level of skill.  Any beginner can get a Flip video camera, shoot a video, and upload it to YouTube.  It won’t look polished or super professional, but depending on your target audience, it could do the trick for making your company appear smart, nimble, and accessible.

5.  Get a freelancer.
This is a great option for larger companies that have knowledge embedded within a big group of distributed people within their organization.  If you have 50 or 500 experts in your company, it’s often unrealistic to teach all of them how to blog and to develop a cohesive blogging strategy.  But if you find a freelancer who is well-versed in bringing information to an industrial audience, they can tap into the springs of knowledge in your company and pull out the best pieces, then develop it into a consistent voice that can make its way to your market.

In conclusion:
No matter which of these approaches you choose, remember that the key isn’t the production quality or the presentation -- it’s the content.  Of course you don’t want to put something into the market that makes your company look completely unprofessional.  However, an audience will excuse a simple looking blog or a video with relatively low production value if the content is relevant and engaging.  Craigslist is an perfect example of this principle.  It’s one of the most popular sites on the web, but it’s far from the nicest looking.  It’s the valuable content that makes you a market leader.