It is especially critical if your site accommodates or is made for mobile visitors that you keep the text sparse and large enough to read. Do not use white or light colored text on dark or black backgrounds. In print that can make a dramatic effect, on flickering screen or on a three inch cell phone screen it is death.

The language on the site should always be written in the first person in an active voice.

“Here is the way your machining costs are reduced by using wonder oil.”

Not:  “Click here for test results.”

Use “you” often and tell the benefit the visitor will be receiving in terms they can relate.

Aspirin may relax muscle tension and relieve restricted blood flow in your head, but

Tylenol stops painful headaches fast.

The first paragraph on each page should give an overview of what the rest of the page will provide. Then the section headings or call outs from each paragraph will guide to or through the stuff they want.

Use lists to allow the skimmers to get the main ideas quickly and then request or click to see the details. By the time someone clicks three pages into a site they are a serious prospect and you can tell them all the juicy details.

Break up your text with graphics. Web sites are somewhere between a textbook and a TV commercial. Make sure the graphics you provide enlighten and illustrate, not distract or worst of all, stop all activity while a video or a big picture loads. Your visitor can click away from your site in less than a second if they get bored or frustrated. Keep them in the flow that will lead them to their goal and you to yours.

How can you find out what users think of your site and its design? Don’t wait for a lack of business or reports of abandoned pages to wave the flag. Include a visitor comments section, or a blog with topics about the site you want addressed. Solicit surveys of not more than six questions to get feedback or your design, but also involvement. Everyone wants to be considered an expert and tell you what to do. Feed their ego. If you add a free gift for their time on the survey it boosts response as well.

We examine the page position and rank in the top 3 search engines of your site and your competitor’s web sites for common and industry relevant keywords.

While a generic term like “Ford Trucks” may describe what your company does or handles it may not keep visitors very long. Website bounces are visitor’s who see one page of your site and leave. If they are looking for brake parts and you sell “refinished Ford pickup bumpers” the visitor may not stay long.

When choosing keywords start with the terms your company uses and your industry uses, but should also accommodate the terms buyers use, even from different parts of the country. You could have an industry buzz word for your product that describes it beautifully, but the customer searchers call the product something else and therefore will not find your site. To determine this we start with the biggest possible list of terms describing your business, what it does, how customers benefit and then compare these terms to those most popularly used on the search engines. Others in your industry may also have found pet words or brand names your buyers use to describe what you do.

Link Analysis in the top Search Engines

Links are used by the search engine to determine popularity and value of your site’s information.  The more information on the web that refers back to you, the more of an authority you are.

One easy way to see what your industry thinks is important is to analyze the links other companies have to their sites. In general ads, news releases and white papers along with social media sites need to have links back to your site. There may be industry catalog or industry analyst’s sites that would boost your page rank and creditability. The best method is to consider as many possible linking options and then eliminate those that don’t fit or require too much nurturing. Like Keyword stuffing, sites that promise hundreds or thousands of links (link farms) may be more dangerous to your reputation than helpful.

PR Web service allows you or us to submit news versions of your product, process or accomplishment information to a number of magazines and commercial news sites. Their job it is to store and distribute industry information. Of course the news about your company will have your web address in it to make the link back to you. Furthermore, journalists often scan such sites for story ideas and details about companies and alternative opinions about issues.

Links can be developed cooperatively on other sites and by webzines. Although link placement, when done properly, is very time consuming and often has a lag time, it is still a critical aspect of the site ranking algorithms used by top search engines.

Site Indexing in top Search engines

While you may have written a thousand pages of text and catalog for your website that does not mean that Google cares or even knows. While the number of pages implies better content and value, the crawlers are looking for text with key words not part numbers dimensions or illustrations.

The best result from a search engine perspective is that the term searched for is found in file names and matching text on pages several times. Then the crawler will say this is a worthwhile page. Another concern for older sites is that the crawler may not count pages that are made of Acrobat documents or done in Flash. However the crawler will read and count the keyword repeated in a picture <alt> descriptions. By analyzing how many and which pages are indexed on your site and others like it, we can boost your creditability.

Keyword Analysis

Key words are the descriptive terms that prospects enter into a search engine that will lead them to you. While “Ford Trucks” may get them to you, would “Ford aftermarket parts” bring you more buyers and less bounces?  We can analyze not only, what is most popular on the search engines, but what is working well for your industry.

These keywords should be used as page headings, in the text of articles and even ads. We will also make sure that the keywords are part of file names and meta tags. Meta tags are a list of topics the web site contains that we put into the code site visitors never see, but the search engine reads.

Keywords can be over used and abused. Some unscrupulous folks have tried to create pages and tags that contain the entire encyclopedia just to get a higher ranking and more visitors. Keyword stuffing is considered spamming and wastes time and web real estate.

The best method to establish your web position is to find out what the terms your customers, prospects and industry insiders call your stuff, or the benefits they derive from your stuff. If you are an industry leader you may want to pioneer a trade name for your product that will get most often searched. That would have worked for “Kleenex” or “Xerox copies” years ago. These generic names though show the variety of words people may search on.

Traffic Analysis

In order to understand site utilization and access to determine where the website is successful and where improvement is needed we can analyze the traffic coming to your site.

Many website hosting services (servers) automatically record and store raw traffic data for 6 to 12 months (if not, we can install Google Analytics). With the client’s cooperation we can access this data and use analysis tools to summarize utilization and examine patterns of use. We examine the client’s website traffic log for the prior six months and use the information about search engine referrals, unique visitors, time spent within the site, which pages are viewed and the sequencing of those pages to evaluate the utilization of the site:

• Search engine referrals – are measures of the origin of the visitors and answers questions like “How many visitors came from Google vs. Yahoo vs. MSN vs. typing the domain into the address bar?”
• Unique visitors – are hits from a single user connection, counted as 1 if the hit occurs subsequent to another within a predefined time period – typically 30 minutes.
• Time spent within the site – connection time by a single user.
• Pages viewed – measures are available for the number of pages viewed and which pages – this helps identify most popular pages, etc.
• Page sequence – is a measure of movement between pages within a site and can provide information about user interest and/or ease of use.

These charts and provide insight into actual site usage and whether or not more effort ($) should be used for further optimization in total or be specifically targeted for each keyword.

Search engine Submission

When a site is built or remodeled we will manually send the information to the big three search engines along with the site map. This moves your site closer to being read by the crawlers because it is new content. Most Search Engine prohibit by terms and conditions, if not also technology, any automated submission.

We provide your site with Google compliant site map architecture to makes Google ranking you easier and faster.

Pay-per-Click Advertising

While search engines give you the information you seek without a charge, they do take money from the people whose information they are leading you to. Like a cyber yellow pages directory with the white pages in the middle.

By paying so much for every person that clicks on your PPC link Google and friends earn billions of dollars. Next to all those sites who worked hard to create good key words and meticulous code and links there are people who just paid to have their name at the top of the list, making them more likely to get clicked.

Prices for the PPC links are sold in an auction form and prices vary directly to the demand. Price can range from 5 cents to 500 dollars per click. Most industrial advertisers are paying less than a dollar per click on the most popular keywords. Another comforting function of the PPC plan is you can set daily, weekly or monthly limits on how much you want to spend. So, if you only want to spend $50 per day to advertise your company the bill will never exceed that. You could also spend $50 per month and when your budget is used up, the next ad that bid on that keyword pops up in the paid search position. This means you could be the number one in the paid search section in the morning and your competitor might be number one in the afternoon.

Pay Per Click moves you to a more visible spot, but may not mean you get overwhelmed with business. For one thing tests have shown that most searchers prefer to click the organic search ads and just because someone clicks to see your site does not mean they are looking for “Ford aftermarket pickup truck bumpers”. Researching any keywords you are going to pay per click is a very smart idea.

Another Smart idea that is challenging to create, but helpful in the long run, is a unique term for the products you want to sell. If you can convince the searching public to call your product by your brand name they will be directed to your site exclusively.

PPC strategies need to include consideration of times, days of the week and time of the year. Please consult with us on the myriad of choices available to get you to the top of the list. For answers to more questions please call us at 440-671-9700 or email paul@mmitco.com or mark@mmitco.com.

Gather Demographic, Firmographic and Psychographic information about users and owners. Query your sales and customer service staff to identify the characteristics of the people they most often talk to, or have to talk to and those they wish to talk to.

Where are the site visitors in the buying cycle?

Exploring, Shopping, buying

Where did visitors come from?

Google, link, ads, Direct mail, referral, sales call

What is important to them?

What is the value each kind of visitor is seeking?

What do they want you to do?

Should you call them, send literature, email, subscribe them, visit them?

How knowledgeable are the visitors?

Are they looking to see what is available or do they want to know the details of your technology or offer?

Here is simple chart that shows some persona thinking.

Visitors of different personas can be shown different landing pages or sent to detail pages based on where they come from. For example: the “Machinery“ search word could lead to a general landing page that talked about the company products. The “splined drive shaft” inquirer could be sent to a page showing sample parts and listing the machining capabilities you provide. The “splined drive shaft reorder” searcher can be sent directly to the shopping cart to expedite the purchase.

By understanding the interests and sophistication of your various kinds of visitors you can make their ordering comfortable and efficient. Modern Media would be glad to help you apply this technique to boosting your visibility and sales.

It is just not quite that simple. First the disclaimer: Modern Media’s policy is that you will own everything that you paid for – this includes you domain name, your website hosting contract and any SSL needed.

A troubling issue is that programming providers will purchase your domain name and hosting package under their name – typically in some affiliate or reseller account they hold. Arguably they should be able to get their cut from the hosting provider, but the big problem with this is that all too frequently, they neglect to properly configure the ownership of the domain name to the client, instead they legally own it. This is all well and good, until you want to do something else with your domain name or website and move away from this provider.

Where have others run into problems with these issues? When you commit to a solution that is not really personalized to your company, but based on an industry wide gang web site. For example, if the Cumquat Growers of America developed a set of master programming principles for their membership, it would make sense to just allow each new member to join the site using the same programming code and modules that already have been written. The gang site would just direct visitors to your site through a common database using the shared programming routines. This can be inexpensive for the new member and work well for all the members. However, like a condo association, the challenge comes when you do not want to be like everyone else. If the grower now wants to sell fertilizer, or Alpacas the gang site may not want to accommodate that activity or charge rates that seem uncompetitive.

Another gang site issue develops when the analytics tell you your site is not generating the number of visitors, inquirers, or buyers that you want or that your competitors are getting. Attempts to alter the site, or keywords or site functionality can be met with indifference to hostility. Their philosophy may be, if it is good enough for the other guys in your industry it should be good enough for you. Or we will work on it on our schedule.

If you decide to take your data, pictures and ecommerce connection and move on, you could find it is not that easy. The group site owns the code, so even if you have a backup copy of all the words, numbers and pictures you cannot make a new site instantly or cheaply. You may also have asked or allowed the gang site to create special code, characters or artwork for your operation and when parting company you find out that your company mascot is really property of the people who designed it. Not good news.

What if the association or gang site goes down or disbands how do you stay in the ecommerce business when they are off line?

There are reasonable steps you can take to prevent these surprises. The first is read the fine print on your purchase, maintenance and server contracts: determine who owns what. You likely will have the words, pictures and numbers, but what about the formulas to calculate sizes, quantities and pricing? What about any artwork created by the designers at the programming company. Do you have a monthly, or quarterly or annual backup of all the data on the server? Do you or the programming company or the secure server operator own the algorithms to convert customer’s orders into money in your bank account? These questions should be resolved whenever you have changes in your business.

While this may seem like extra work that you can get by without, so did regular testing of the back up generators in Japan before the earthquake. Ultimately, the best protection is to be aware of all the components ownership and have a written contract and plan for changes in your business. A typical questions list can be found here.

If you are not sure, let us check for you.

Do you have a copy of on CD of all the code and data on the site?

Even the update from last month?

Do you have a written authorization to use the drawings and pictures on the site from the originator or the picture owner. (web designer, photographer or customer)?

If you subscribe to system software can you retrievethe functionality if you want to leave? (Directory sites and Industry affiliations)

Are their any regular business reasons that prelude you from making design or function changes in the site?

Who chooses and pays the web sever and the SSL server and what are their ownership rights?

Is there a non-disclosure agreement with your designer and the server organizations?

How frequently is the site and the data captured  backed up and to where?

Most times, most people are reasonably happy with their vendors, but we don’t want you to be the exception that becomes the newspaper story.

Consider what your visitor is most interested in seeing on the site. Go directly to their want or your most popular screen. Every time they have to click around the site takes longer and costs the visitor more. For every additional click you may lose ½ your audience.

Include your phone number on every page. Since they are on the phone they can just call if the first look does not answer their question or inquiry. Better they call you with the phone in their hand than they abandon their shopping trip and find a competitor.

Design for Adaptable Screen Sizing:

Smart phone screen sizes range from 120 to 320 to 640 pixels wide.  The mobile site design should automatically adjust to these sizes. Generally your design should not include tables and should never include nested tables.

Simple Images:

Only use images if needed as part of the communication.  Use “alt” tags on every graphic. This means if the pictures do not render, or do not render quickly on their mobile device they will see the text describing what is supposed to be there and understand what to do.

For all the reasons above, limit the size of pictures and logo’s and other artwork. If they must see some items in glorious detail invite them to visit your regular web site.

High Contrasting Colors:

All typography should be in high contrast to the background color.  It is a much better practice for readability on multiple devices, to show dark text on a light background, than the reverse.

No FLASH:

Many devices including the iPhone and iPad do not render flash.

Simple Typography:

Many mobile browsers render h1 and h2 tags the same and do not pay attention to font size parameters at all.   Keep the typography simple; allow the device browser to do it’s thing and stay focused on content and communication versus trying to make the page look “pretty” in a particular browser.

Simple Navigation:

It is neither necessary nor desirable to repeat the navigation at the top of every page since screen real-estate is at a premium.  A very good practice is to provide a breadcrumb style locator/navigator at the top and a simple text menu at the bottom of each page.

Here is a link to an extensive Mobile web site glossary that can help you understand some the details of this new technology: www.mmaglobal.com also see www.w3.org/Mobile/

Are you trying to decide the best way to connect with your prospects?  Which is better; email or conventional direct mail?  Both mediums have their advantages and disadvantages and some products, promotions and audiences are better served with one or the other.

Here is a list of the characteristics of each to help you decide which method makes the most sense for your prospects and your needs:

In Very General Terms:

Direct mail is effective selling to specific audiences, especially with technical interests and especially if they are older or in management positions.

Email marketing does its best work shotgunning large numbers of people; especially younger people, selling items that are lower priced and personally consumed or fashion driven.

When deciding between the methods take into account:

• The demographics of your audience.
• Will the prospects be at their computers most of the day?
• Is your offer response likely to be immediate or after thinking and research?
• Does the medium reach the hot button you are trying to touch with your offering?
• How easy do you want to make response, by what channel?
• What are the competitive offerings these folks have been exposed to?

We will be glad to help you get your sales message out with either transmission method.  From helping you create the message, doing the artwork, writing the code, doing the printing and mailing and giving you the delivery analytics reports, our staff will put your name in front of the people you choose.

So what is the catch? You have to identify the customer’s current order so they can reorder nearly automatically. The magic is a QR code.

The Quick Response type square bar code is familiar to most folks in business. You have seen one version on UPS packages and USPS stamps and on some display cartons of consumer goods. The secret is a two dimensional bar code that allows much more information to be stored than in a linear barcode like a UPC or code 39. The magic of profitable reorders is in your use of that information from the QR code.

The QR code was invented by Denso Wave Corporation to mark parts going into Toyota cars. In Japan the QR code has found thousands of uses from delivering details about CD albums to assembly instructions. The standard configurations of the bar code blocks can hold from 10 to 4296 alphanumeric characters. These messages can be read by QR code reading software that is standard on many modern Smart phones or as downloadable apps.

If you use such a reader on the image above, your mobile device will take you to the following Mobile Page.

The beauty of this application for you as seller is applying your own QR code to your product so that reorders come directly from the cell phone of your customer.

Consider a couple of scenarios:

1. Your customer uses your product in their production. They get to the end of their supply or realize they need more than they have on hand of a particular material. The operator can just scan the QR code on the side of your package and read it on his cell phone. When your ordering information comes on the screen, the operator pushes a button which takes him to the your special mobile ordering web site and allows them to enter the quantity of your product they want and hang up. You get the order immediately, ship it quickly and the customer is happy and both sides of the transaction reduce their processing costs and delivery times.

2. You make machinery or parts that wear out or need regular calibration. When the time comes to replace or remove your part from your customer’s production stream they need an exact replacement quickly. The fastest way to get that exact replacement part is to scan the QR code you have put on the part. The information you have encoded can include not only part number and model number, but detailed specifications even special modifications made to custom parts and the date of manufacture. Your customer orders exactly the correct replacement part and gets the best delivery possible by just using his phone and your mobile website.

Modern Media can help you create your own QR codes of any complexity and they can be printed on packaging and literature for virtually no additional cost. Likewise we can build the mobile web site to handle these orders and provide your order entry process the data in the correct format to make these orders fly right through. If you would like to learn more, call or email us today.

USP is the abbreviation of Unique Selling Proposition. What is it that your company does better, faster, smarter, cheaper than others? Or what is it that you would like to be known for. Not just laying brick, insurance sales or building machines, but what about your trade do you want to do so well, that people will remember you and call you because of it?

In most cases, the new prospects and customers will not be familiar with your company and therefore they will have to find a place in their understanding to put you. You want to create the mental mailbox where they will keep you. That mailbox tag could be “Fast Worker” “Great service”, “Innovative problem solver” or anything else you choose. You have to give them the tag or they will make their own tag which likely not be as positive or memorable. If you have already completed a corporate mission statement, the USP should be easy to derive from that and your sales experience.

It is very important to any sales effort that there is at least tacit agreement from all the management team of what the sales message will be. This ideal message will need to be given not only to sales contacts, but also to all the people who talk to the customers. Even the field people who will talk to customers or their agents should be aware of what your company does best and wants to be known for. It should permeate all the company literature and customer interactions.

If you can reduce that USP to a slogan of six words or less, you can use it on your business cards, your emails and correspondence. Customers will remember the slogan because it is the reason they hired you in the first place.

More than just a slick phrase or idea you should be shaping your company to live up to your slogan. If you are “The fastest tool maker in town” it should not take more than four hours to return calls to prospects. Your thinking and work routines should be adjusted to make the reputation you proclaim visible to customers, inspectors and other trades.

Like that old song, leave them “Something to remember you by”, your USP.

Mark Mutch

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