Today we’re dropping a quick blog about the two ingredients of good online presence, namely building an effective website and plugging it into your social media. If you are looking to streamline your brand’s online clout, some of the points below can save you a lot of sweat, maintenance and grey hair.
Starting with your most primo property, your website, it is needless to say that it needs to be built tough – like a Hilux – with bullet proof coding and accommodated on a quality server and hosting package. Then, when it comes to the website’s design and architecture, one of the most overlooked and important elements of a good design is the navigation. This is not only important for your online visitors but for Google’s bots (and other search engines) who can legibly interpret your navigation and page structures and reward you with a good listing on their searches.
But put your human audience first! So many people fret about SEO and gearing their site to perform for Google, cram keywords into their content, and inadvertently overlook the real audience. Your website needs to be more navigable and crystal clear on the message to the peeps with fleshy brains than the spiders that lurk over the code. At the end of the day you do not want visitors to leave in search of alternative info, because of poor presentation. Do you want to learn how to track SEO? Visit Quirky Digital’s website and check out their guide on how you can track SEO.
That brings us to the C word – Content. You need to have clear communication and quality supportive imagery. Content is truly king. Save money and skimp on quality words and sharp photos and chances are you are going to get what you paid for.
Another important element that gets kicked to the curb is analysis and reporting; Google Analytics and AwStats (free) as well as Nielsen Ratings. This is great if you want to find out how many, where they are coming from, and what your online visitors are gravitating to on your website. But the details of tracking your website is for another day and another blog.
In a nutshell, keeping all the above in mind, WildWeb’s key focus when designing a client’s new website is to build a captivating design that follows function and is intuitively navigable.
The second, and possibly the most engaging aspect of a functional online strategy is your social presence work rate – blogs, news content, Facebook fan page, Twitter & LinkedIn, Youtube etc. This is the watering hole of the web. It’s most often where people logging online gravitate to first and you need to have your brands hand in it if you want to be seen and heard.
If you are not constantly updating your media and putting it in the right place you will soon be out of sight and out of mind when it comes to social media. This is why fresh, quality well written, funny, captivating content is key. And let’s not forget about rich media! Great imagery and video, news and features cannot be more effective than when its home is on your website but is delivered, as a teaser, to your Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Cheifly, we at WildWeb believe that a good news/blog strategy is the best way of turning over relevant content and drawing people to your website. For example, we launched a website for a Relationship Therapist, Belinda Perrow, a few months back. Her website was built on a WordPress template with her blog headlines and excerpt feeding into her Twitter and Faceook account. Belinda had committed to blogging on one relationship tip a week, which she uploaded to her website and subsequently filtered onto her social media accounts. The end result; more clients signing up for her face to face consults.
With this simple but far-reaching approach, your target market will become intertwined with your brand and know your location on the web. Pretty much a digital love affair waiting to happen.