Smallbox Software Search Marketing and Web Design

Shawn Bouchard, January 30, 2009 at 2:52 AM

If you follow the business news it's a terribly depressing reality. The economic forecasts are getting darker and more foreboding with each day. Adjusting to this new era means that making informed decisions on your marketing spend is absolutely critical. You can't just kill your marketing budget, but you need to make certain that every dollar counts. So what do you do? Investing in your website and online presence makes sense.

Compared to other media, internet marketing is cost-effective, targeted and measurable. The effectiveness of an online campaign can be gauged almost immediately, and changes can be implemented as fast to make a campaign more effective.

Smallbox has put together some considerations for making your website a more effective marketing tool that don't necessarily involve spending additional money on search marketing! That said, here's a plug for our content management system – Smallbox CMS.

Using CMS software like Smallbox CMS is a good investment because it turns your website into a communications platform. Suddenly your web content can be easily updated. People will start staying on your site longer, reading more, learning about your products or services, and getting comfortable with your brand.

The best part is, you won't pull your hair out using our software to achieve this effect. It's not a cure for baldness, but the experience is stress free – kinda like that credit union commercial where all the guys have long flowing locks of hair and a blissed-out glow.

OK, back to search optimization. Knowing where to start can be overwhelming. Do you hire an expert or DIY-it? Should you invest in a PPC campaign, or does it make more sense to tweak your site content to get better search rankings?

The first thing we ask our customers when they come to us for help with search optimization is, "who is your audience?" It's a simple question, but knowing the answer is critical to building an optimization strategy that works. Providing relevant content builds value for both the human and machine visitors to your site, therefore knowing who your visitors are is critical in determining what content to publish.

The next consideration is the overall structure of the site. Can visitors find what they're looking for easily and intuitively? Does your site navigation direct visitors to content or obfuscate it?

Again, not rocket science, but if a site isn't designed properly in the first place then you can end up spending a lot more on search optimization then necessary. Our long held belief is that if you design and build a site correctly from the start then you shouldn't need to spend a lot on search optimization to rank reasonably well. Build on that solid design foundation with relevant, up-to-date and easy-to-find information for your visitors then chances are you've already got a headstart on your competitors.

The last point is a simple one but it's often overlooked in the panic to "get higher search rankings" – don't forget about the real people visiting your site. You need to ensure that the alterations you do to your site to achieve a higher search ranking don't put off the people that end up finding you online. If you've gamed your site to get better rankings, but fail to deliver something of use to the end-user then you've wasted everyone's time, and will likely find your visits dropping off for both people and machines.

There's a ton of information online about search optimization. We recommend checking out the following links for solid information on how to improve the ranking of your site: