Sunday, March 1, 2009

As a web freelancer, I often get people asking me about their small business websites. As much as I sometimes have trouble making time for these small sites, the online marketing part of these projects can be both fun and challenging. The excitement of a small-business entrepreneur when he starts to see his site rise on the search engine results is very satisfying.

For a couple small business sites recently, I was tasked with setting up their sites on a major CMS platform and performing the initial search engine optimization. I thought I would share my experiences here. Some of these are quite obvious, but I find that keeping these small basic tasks in mind really help build a good platform for online marketing. When you follow the rules and build the site reputation methodically, you should find that the site has a lot of "staying" power - the popularity of the site rarely decreases.

1. Have a marketing plan

It's important that any marketing project has a plan. In the case of a small business website, the plan does not need to be comprehensive, but it is well worth doing some research. Some tips:

• Spend a long time surfing and reading the competitor's sites
• Do a lot of searches so that you can see what kind of results are available
• Pick the keywords that you think people will use to find you

If you're selling a physical product, it is very appropriate to market locally and try to make sure your search engine rankings are very high for your local area. Google runs country-specific sites (like www.google.ca and www.google.fr), and adding a city name to the keywords usually filters results down further. Focusing on the local search engine traffic really helps narrow the focus and get you off to a good start.

2. Create a sitemap

This is basic stuff, but having a sitemap can really help search engines like Google find and categorize the major pages and categories of your site. A sitemap acts as a list of all the major pages of your site, and so it acts as a jumping point for search engines to find all those pages.

In Joomla, there is an extension called 'XMap' that creates nice sitemaps based on your site structure. It also allows you to upload copies of your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

Useful Links:

• Description of a web sitemap
  
• Google Webmaster Tools
  
• XMap extension for Joomla

3. Measure your success

Anytime you start even the smallest marketing effort, it is important to be able to measure your success. Without the ability to check your results, you have no way to know what works right and what does not. One thing I set up early on for most web projects is integration with Web Analytics applications. In most cases, being a Google fanboy, I find that Google Analytics works really well for measuring traffic to your site.

I also downloaded a copy of the freeware/adware Link Popularity Checker. This tool allows us to see the relative ranking of the site and the leading competitors. This is immensely handy in determining where competiting sites are more popular - for example, if competitor A has a much higher ranking, you can see that it is due to a large number of search results in MSN. You can drill down into those results to see what they are doing to achieve that.

Useful Links:

• Link Popularity Checker
  
• Google Analytics

4. Two online references per week

I started this early on. Every week, I try to post two references about the new site on any site I can, paying close attention to the sites that help the most. There are many sites where you can showcase your work - this is an easy option, discussion forums that are related to the particular industry are even better. Ideally you should get yourself within a community related to the industry. It doesn't take a long time, and I was able to very quickly push my small sites above their local competitors. In reference to the application mentioned above (Link Popularity Checker), you can see the different sites that the competitors have posted to, and do the same.

Don't be tempted to post too much, you may not be spending your time wisely. Post a few each week, and measure the success of those posts.

Don't be tempted to fight dirty and join too many "spammy" sites - these will hurt your search engine ranking much more than they will help.

Useful Link:

• Google Webmaster Guidelines

Conclusion

I recently read an article about the early days of a leading social networking site. They would make personal contact with everyone that signed up for their service. In this day and age of quick web searches and globalization, I think we tend to forget about the importance of making regular efforts to build your online reputation and tweak your marketing efforts. Good luck!