The Invendes Blog

Here is a compilation of 10 guidelines for building the credibility of a web site. These guidelines are based on three years of research that included over 4,500 people by the team at Stanford. Read on…

Today, in addition to familiar Internet Marketing techniques like SEO, we also have brand new sources of traffic and buzz through the social network. It’s important that social media should be an integral part of your online marketing strategy

SMM (Social Media Marketing) refers to the creation and distribution of content and other messages through the ‘Social web’ by some form of ‘viral marketing’. But creating viral content and promoting it is only part of the story. You have to actively create an online reputation and be an active part of the network. Trying to figure out what to do and where to start can be daunting.  Following the steps given below can give you a good start.

1. Optimize your website / blog for social media. You can do these by
   • Increasing your linkability by adding a blog, white paper, articles, resources sections, pods, videos, slideshows etc.
   • Once you have original content on your site, make it easy to be tagged and bookmarked. Buttons to ‘add them’, ‘add to delicious’, digg is a must. Make sure that your pages include a list of relevant tags.
   • Submit your content to strong submission sites, article submission sites or bookmarking sites. This helps your content to travel far. You could also syndicate using RSS
2. Create your profile on Social/ Business networking sites like linkedin (http://www.linkedin.com/) or face book (http://www.facebook.com/). Here you can hook up with your existing friends or contacts and also find new ones. Keep building your network and do it everyday. Keep building your network.
3. Join forums, discussion groups, local communities, interests, groups on yahoo, meet up, google etc. Make genuine contributions. You can make new contacts here from a niche target group. Just make sure that you only influence a sale but avoid hard selling.
4. Start a personal or a corporate blog. Create content that can be useful to your target. Also read and respond to blogs in your area of interest. Submit your contact to sites like digg (http://digg.com/), reddit (http://www.reddit.com/),  etc. if you are looking for global traffic submit it to the sites like meneame (http://meneame.net/) or scoopeo (http://www.scoopeo.com/).
5. Book mark your website (not just the home page) on all the good bookmarking sites like del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) , stumbleupon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/), technorati (http://www.technorati.com/),  furl.net (http://www.furl.net/), etc. Get all in your organization to do this. You could use service like Social Marker or Social Poster to expedite the process.  Other good bookmarking sites are blinklist (http://www.blinklist.com/), folkd (http://www.folkd.com/), netvous (http://www.netvous.com/) and simpy (http://www.simpy.com/).
6. Use sites like yahoo answers (http://answers.yahoo.com/) or the ‘answer section’ on linkedin (http://www.linkedin.com/answers?trk=hb_ft_answers) to contribute in the areas of your expertise. Provide well researched and useful answers and link these answers to your web page.
7. Seek and get good reviews and testimonials on linkedin, yelp (http://www.yelp.com/), epinions (http://www.epinions.com/), google local etc. Today consumers create new customers. Doing this regularly can reap big tangible and intangible rewards in the long run.

To do all this it is useful to get involved in top social media sites to understand these thoroughly. Avoid spamming and forcing content or sale and don’t try to fool the system. Offer relevance and offer value. And finally keep track of what’s going on.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to a process of optimizing your website for higher ranking on popular and custom search engines. As this is an ever changing industry keeping up with the changing trends and algorithms can be very difficult. But the article below gives you the most important and commonly accepted rules of the game.

Keywords
Most importantly, you must target the right keywords. Do a keyword word tracker analysis using any analysis tool (like webceo) and select your set of three keywords per page. And then optimize page every page for the selected keywords.

Just focus on only these three keywords per page. No more. Use the keywords in the title tag on the web page HTML header, in the body text, headlines (H1 Tag) and if possible in the domain name. Also, in addition to using those keywords, try and use keywords which are closely related to the main set of keywords in the content of the page.

You may also add these keywords in H2, H3 tags, alt tags, image titles, meta description tags, meta keywords. But the influence of this is limited. Try to avoid the same title and meta tags on all pages. Do not compete for the same keywords on many pages. Every page should always have a unique title tag at least. Avoid over use of keywords (keyword stuffing)

General Page/ Site Attributes

The older the domain, link and document, the better the ranking. The age of the domain name plays a huge role – the date from which the search engines started indexing the content. But keep the content fresh and updated, and without spelling or grammatical errors. The amount of this fresh content plays an important role. Avoid content duplication

Take care of hygiene factors like avoiding frames, too much Flash text. Ensure HTML links and not just image/ JS links. It’s good to have a W3C validation. Keep your page size below 100k, use CSS, H Tags. Never let your site ‘down’. Select a good host and spend the money if you need a good ranking.

Link Popularity
The single most important factor that influences your site ranking is the quantity and quality of in bound links ie., the number of sites pointing to yours and the page rank or website ranking of those sites. The topical relevance of the inbound link is one of the most important things about ‘good’ inbound links. Equally important is the Anchor text of the inbound link and also the text adjacent to the link.

Refrain from link exchange programs wherein you link to link farms in exchange to an inbound link. Make sure that external links from your site are to high quality and relevant sites.

Though there are many more factors which are apparently good for ranking, too much focus on them usually ruins the page and there is a trade off between optimizing for Search Engines and for people (users). But if you can get it right by using the above mentioned simple rules, you have a 24/7 lead generating engine which will keep you busy for years to come.

General Page/ Site Attributes

1. Pages that are ‘under construction’. Why?
2. Pages that scroll horizontally. Stick to 1024 resolution
3. Pages that use frames. It’s harmful to your Search Engine ranking
4. Auto-play sounds. If you have to use sound, let the user control it.
5. Too many animations, non-stop looping animations, blinking texts etc
6. Splash/ Intro pages. If you have to use them, make sure you have a ‘skip intro’
7. Failure to check cross-browser consistencies.
8. Reliance on e-mail links as against using a form. Most of the users would not have had an Email program configured
9. Opening up too many new windows. Instead, have a better navigational structure
10. Asking for a sign up/ registration when it is not actually necessary. Why waste his time?
11. Auto subscribing your visitor to your newsletter/ email list without his/ her consent
12. Using pop ups. There are too many pop up blockers out there.

Page title and tags

1. People forget to add the most important ‘title’ to their pages (A search of the keyword ‘untitled document’ on google fetched 44 million pages! You can try this out yourself.)
2. And when they do, they give the same title and meta tags for all the pages. Title all the pages with a ‘unique’ and descriptive title and other meta tags. This is extremely important for higher search engine rankings.

Site Navigation

1. Unclear, badly structured navigation. You can easily get lost on 3 out of 4 sites you see around. Important pages are tucked way down. Most sites do not clearly inform the visitor as to where she or he is! Some pages open in a new window without navigation/ links.
2. Using drop down navigation unnecessarily. Most sites use Java Script navigation while they have all the space to keep them open. For example, if you offer 5 services, why hide them under a drop down menu. Keep the navigation simple and consistent. Even if you are using images/ Flash/ JS for the menu, make sure to add HTML links on all pages.
3. Using only image/ Flash navigation. Use text navigation cause some people switch off images while browsing the web.
4. Not declaring explicitly what you are linking to, especially when you are linking to PDF/ Word documents
5. Not providing anchor text to links
6. Not including Alt and title attributes to images
7. Inconspicuous links. Make your links conspicuous in a different color and preferably underline them. Try not to underline the regular text. Make sure to change color of the visited links

Content

1. Useless, bad quality, outdated content is the most common and tragic mistake.
2. Typos and grammatical mistakes can cost you dear.
3. Very long or short pages, orphaned pages, alien pages too are very common.
4. Content that cannot be scanned easily. Make sure that the content is scan able. Use Bullet points, headers, sub headers, lists. Anything that will help the reader filter what he is looking for.
5. Not including your contact details or making it difficult to find
6. Not having a site search feature on a large website

Design

1. Harsh color schemes that can give you a headache
2. Pages that look alienated from the rest.
3. Too many fonts, tiny fonts, too many font colors, weights, styles etc