Making Your “About” Page Count

How optimizing your “About” page can make all the difference

When was the last time you updated your business’s “About” page? Hopefully, it has not been long because consumers visit “About” pages to find out information about a business, and also to get to know its management. In an article on eConsultancy, Chris Lake attributed “no ‘about’ pages” as a reason that many consumers leave a website. Unfortunately, neglecting this page is a common mistake that businesses make.

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Influential social media star Chris Brogan only recently realized just how important his “About” page was to his readers. As the above video points out, he was so caught up in focusing on what he wanted his visitors to do that he didn’t even realize that his “About” page was the #1 clicked spot on his website.

With Brogan and Lake’s stories in mind, it is clear that “About” pages are important to business. Aside from providing useful information to consumers, “About” pages also give businesses the opportunity to send messages to its prospects, customers, investors, and partners.

So, what should it include? For starters, the 5 W’s of journalism help to cover the basics: who, what, where, when, and why. “How” is often included in those primary elements and is important to cover as well.

It should also be noted that the trite expression “less is more” doesn’t really apply to “About” pages. Details are important, since it gives consumers a greater understanding of who the business is. If the page appears to be too long, you can always divide it up into other pages. For example, you can segment the content into separate pages for staff Bios, the mission statement, and more, and then include links to them on the “About” page.

Another important aspect of an “About” page is personality. A business should try to convey its culture in its “About” page. This can be done through images, videos, and even fun facts about the employees or business itself.

After the content is figured out, the next step is to make sure your keywords match the new text. If you keep your “About” page current, your keywords may change frequently.

Once you do all this work to your “About” page, it would be a shame if people couldn’t find it. To keep this from happening, don’t try to name your page something unusual or witty. Instead, keep it clear and simple.

The bottom line is that you wouldn’t want to do business with someone unless you knew a little bit about him or her. Incidentally, this same principle applies to consumers and your own business.

7 Ways to Drive Traffic through Direct Mail

Using offline channels for online success

Why is it that marketers struggle to blend offline and online marketing efforts? It can be very effective if done right. Take for example, using direct mail to drive online traffic.

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According to ExactTarget’s 2009 Channel Preference Study, 76 percent of all consumers have been directly influenced to purchase a product or service online. As the above video points out, this statistic proves that direct mail is not old-fashioned and is, actually, very useful.

To use direct mail to drive traffic, you need to, first of all, make a compelling offer. Marketers need to give users a reason to want to visit their site. For instance, they could use seminars, coupons, samples, or a free trial of a product or service. Each of these methods would give users an incentive to visit.

Secondly, marketers need to have a readable URL. In addition, it should be memorable in order for users to type it easily. It needs to be something that will stick in users’ minds.

A third way to drive traffic through direct mail is through personalization. Marketers could personalize through teasers, headlines, URLs, and more. This tactic enables consumers to be engaged.

There is a potential downside to personalization since it could be perceived as a sweepstake. For this reason, marketers should use it with caution.

Delivering a clear call to action is a fourth method for driving online traffic through direct mail. Often times, marketers place their call to action in a teaser or tagline, which could cause consumers to miss it. Instead, marketers need to be direct with consumers and tell them exactly where to go and what to do.

Fifthly, marketers should include a deadline. By giving consumers a timeframe, it applies a sense of urgency that encourages them to act. Incidentally, the deadline should be clear and located near the call to action.

Building a unique landing page is another way to drive online traffic. This is important because consumers are often confused or distracted when sent to a website’s homepage. It could, ultimately, result in consumers leaving the site without taking action, since they didn’t know what to do.

On the other hand, a landing page gives marketers the ability to control the message, track response, and collect valuable information for follow up.

Lastly, marketers should try to collect their consumers’ contact information. Marketers could do this on the landing page. This information is not only valuable for future communication via direct mail, but it is also very valuable for other campaigns.

So, does direct mail seem like a powerful marketing channel now? Marketers often get caught up in email, social media, and online advertising campaigns for driving traffic online. While these campaigns are effective, marketers should not quickly rule out offline channels like direct mail.

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Do you consider direct mail as an effective way to drive traffic? If not, you should because it works. It seems as though many marketers focus primarily on email, social media, and online advertising campaigns to drive traffic. However, offline channels such as direct mail, work too.

ExactTarget’s 2009 Channel Preference Study found that 76 percent of all consumers have been directly influenced to purchase a product or service online. This statistic proves that direct mail is a viable offline marketing channel.

In this SBN segment, learn how the following 7 ways help to drive traffic online:

1. Compelling offer
2. Readable URL
3. Personalization
4. Clear call to action
5. Deadline
6. Unique landing page
7. Contact information

Check out all the details right here on SmallBusinessNewz.

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Yahoo Now Including Bing Results – Tips for Optimizing
Chris Crum | Staff Writer

Bing SEO is More Important Than Ever

Yahoo has begun testing organic and paid search listings from Microsoft. Up to 25% of its search traffic in the U.S. may see organic listings from Microsoft, and up to 3.5% may see paid listings from Microsoft adCenter. I guess you could say that the early stages of the Search Alliance’s transition have begun.

Will you place more emphasis on Bing optimization as it integrates with Yahoo Search?
“The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft,” says Yahoo’s VP of Search Product Operations, Kartik Ramakrishnan. “However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you’re used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing.”

Yahoo provides the following example, in which the Microsoft-powered parts are represented by the boxes:

Yahoo provides the following example, in which the Microsoft-powered parts are represented by the boxes:

As far as SEO is concerned, the Yahoo Search Marketing Team provides the following tips for organic search:

1. Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
2. Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
3. Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella also says that “now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition.”

The Bingbot is designed to crawl non-optimized sties more easily. The new Bingbot will replace the existing msnbot in October. More on this here.

Also note that the new Bing Webmaster Tools experience is live. This has been completely redone with a bunch of new features (and more features to come). Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager Anthony M. Garcia summarizes:

The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.
WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo out at SMX a while back. She had presented on the topic of Bing SEO vs. Organic SEO. As she notes, some businesses actually see better results from Bing than they do from Google, and when Yahoo starts fully using Bing for search, Bing’s share of the search market is going to grow dramatically (it also powers search in Facebook, let’s not forget).

Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft’s mobile organic and paid listings in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. The company anticipates that U.S. and Canada organic listings in both the desktop and mobile versions of its search will be fully powered by Microsoft as early as August or September. This of course depends on how the testing goes.

Yahoo and Microsoft have created new joint editorial guidelines for advertisers that will become effective in early August. These can be found here.

As we’ve discussed, Bing optimization is about to get more important, and now the time has come to really look at your Bing strategy if you’ve not already been doing so.

Are you prepared for the transition?

Marketing Tips for Limited Budgets

Don’t let the economy stop your marketing efforts!

As businesses cut back on their spending, budgets are being cut across the board. This however, does not mean that businesses should desert all their business strategies until the economy comes back. As reported in the video below, there are 5 low-cost marketing tactics that businesses can effectively integrate during this difficult economy.

The first area your business should test is  website effectiveness. Your website needs to be well designed and easy-to-use. It should clearly define who you are, what you do, and include valuable content. The products or services that your business provides should be plainly visible and so should your call to action.

Try to keep the lines of communication open on your website in order to draw customers back to it. Online newsletters or product updates are 2 examples of how this can be done. These factors are important to ensure that your site functions as a sales and marketing tool.

The second low-budget marketing factor is search engine optimization. In summary, SEO is a process of improving your ranking in search engine results with the overall goal of increasing the traffic to your site. Make sure your keywords and phrases are relevant to your site’s content and that you are using terminology that people might be using to search for your products or services. One other quick tip with SEO, list your business in local search directories and update your information regularly.

Online forums and social networking is the third factor you could implement and goes hand-in-hand with SEO. Both of these areas are very instrumental in building relationships, which is one of the most important aspects of sales and marketing.

LinkedIn and Facebook help keep former and current colleagues and clients connected. Blogs help to develop your online reputation and can also act as an information resource. The newest “fad” in the social space is Twitter. People can use it both as a real-time search tool and as a method to receive instant feedback.

The fourth marketing factor that is low cost is cooperative and cross-marketing efforts. What better way to cut down on costs than to partner with another business for a joint cause? Cooperative and cross-marketing also allows for additional support and exposure.

Lastly, email marketing and promotion can produce great marketing benefits in spite of the economy. Email marketing is an older area of marketing, but is still effective and most importantly right now, is inexpensive. Your promotional message should be clear and compelling. Avoid using words such as “free” or “win” in order to eliminate falling into spam filter.

Before you drop all your business strategies, consider implementing low-budget tactics such as the 5 discussed here. If you know any other low-cost business strategies, please drop us a line below.