a. 8 steps to success

This page is part of the StratMedia section of our services, which include: social media package, workshops and conferences, generating more revenue with Web 2.0, 8 steps to success (you are here),  deadly sins of Web 2.0.

A critical issue for any CEO or entrepreneur when it comes to the use of social media is whether it helps improve the bottom line. In order to identify its effects upon revenue, the following eight steps must be addressed.

Step 1: Understand Google
A reasonably high ranking is easily achievable if your intent is to build a valuable website rather than exploit the system. It is important to remember that Google cannot read images, it can only read text. It uses text to understand what your website is about and index it. This means that images must have titles and be labeled to allow Google to index them in the appropriate categories.

Step 2: Define and serve the target audience
People thinking about a ski trip use different search terms to find the information they need, depending on the type of vacation they want.

By the same token, a corporation looking to change its coffee supplier or catering service will use the internet to research products and services. They might even be interested in connecting with like-minded people. To gain traction, any website needs to fulfill a value-adding role for your firm’s target audience.

Moreover, people rarely if ever type a search term, but use a string of words to find what they need, such as <em>cheapest ski vacation Verbier 2008 children</em>, instead. Hence, it is necessary to make sure that when a string of words is entered, your website is listed within the top six search results.

Plus, things might differ depending on where your users are. For example, a Canadian user would use ‘cookie’, while an Australian user would use ‘biscuit’. Failing to consider such issues negatively affects a blog’s or website’s search position.

Step 3: Don’t forget your existing customers
The industrial buyer trying to purchase coffee supplies will use the internet or your webpage differently than a human resource executive looking to outsource payroll.

Added-value for current customers is another important requirement a website must fulfill. Your most important client is your current client – you do the most for them. Keeping existing clients happy reduces your recruitment and marketing costs and increases the stability of your business.

The above seems obvious, but is not always followed! For instance, in the newspaper and magazine subscription business Time, FT, Le Monde, NZZ and others spend much of a new subscriber’s first-year revenue to attract him or her to subscribe at a steeply discounted price. Sadly enough, having been a subscriber for 10 years puts one at a disadvantage, since you are asked to pay full price.

Potential clients are the toughest and most expensive to please because they know nothing about your firm. Hence, a lot of time and money is needed to educate them and determine which value added service is likely to appeal to them.

However, offerings can be tailored to interest current clients and, thus, likely potential ones as well.

Step 4: Make site-indexing easy
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important part of any online strategy.

Accordingly, key terms must appear in appropriate locations and one has to make sure that they are indexed by the search engines.

Just remember, if a person searches your company’s name, you already have brand recognition. In most cases, however, people will not include a brand’s name in their search string. And remember that most searches involve several words. For instance, the human resource expert might search for <em>outsource payroll service checklist</em>.

Another challenge is when people search in the same language, but use different local search engine sites, such as Canada versus India:

chronometer high quality characteristics
chronometer high quality characteristics

As you can see, Google gives slightly different search result pages. But the web content relevant to this search string regarding your product should come up high in the individual’s search results, whether using Yahoo!, Bing or Google.

Unfortunately, not one of the chronometer manufacturers appears in the top six, or even on the first page when we did a search during September 2009. To succeed on the web, knowing how people search for your type of service or product and find your web content must be leveraged.

Step 5: Manage keyword density
Keyword density refers to the ratio of the number of appearances of a keyword (the word being searched for) on a page against the total number of words on that page. Your keyword density needs to be high but cannot be too high for your page to be ranked high.

A page containing 100 words that shows 10 keywords will rank higher than if there were only five keywords. Make sure some of the keywords show up in your headings (<h1><h2>…tags), since words in headings are weighed as more important than other words.

Search engines penalize sites with excessive keywords, since in most cases the page would not make sense and is diagnosed as spamming the index.

Step 6: Create short and informative titles
When you search for a book in the library catalog, all book titles containing that word appear in the results. Similarly, search engines give higher ranks to page titles that closely match the search string. The page title is the words that appear between <title> and </title> in the <head> section of your webpage.

If somebody searches for <em>SME webpage success</em>, pages that contain these words in their title will rank higher than those that do not.

Step 7: Focus on relevant organic traffic
This type of traffic is based on the site’s listing in search engines, bookmarks made by past users and, most importantly, it is free. Hence, if another site links to some webpages on your corporation’s site, this will increase traffic.

To illustrate, entering a string of keywords such as <em>five tips on getting the best health insurance</em>, might serve the user your webpage link at position five of the search results served by Google. As an insurer this might be traffic you want and, most importantly, it is free.

Paid-listings that appear on the right-hand side of a Google results page are paid by the click and can get expensive.

Facebook or Xing (formerly Open BC) linking to one of your stories can result in a substantial increase in traffic. However, one must make sure that this type of traffic fits the online strategy and represents part of the targeted audience, as outlined in step two. For instance, Facebook primarily serves college and university students. Are they potential or existing clients?

Step 8: Update the website regularly
Search engines prefer recent entries, which means the more recent an entry the more likely it will be listed higher in the search results served by Google or Yahoo! This is one reason, beyond the others we would be happy to share with you, why blogs do so well with search engines.

Conclusion
If your firm is ABB, you know that you will not sell the next power plant through your website, but if you are Amazon, all you do is sell your services via the Web.

Accordingly, these two corporations’ websites serve different target audiences and offer different types of content. Plus, the objectives to be served by their online strategy are very different, nor can the metrics used to measure success be the same.

Hopefully, the above eight steps are applied by both firms to achieve success online. Nevertheless, how they go about it reflects their products and target audience.

Finally, successfully implementing and administering your online strategy with the help of our eight steps is a process, not a destination. Accordingly, this requires continuous and regular work to stay on top.