MarCom's New Website - SEO Tips for Launching

Thanks to our strategic partner, Rigney Graphics, we just launched our new MarCom New Media website. The reason we changed our name from MarCom Broadband to MarCom New Media, is because today Internet marketing is all about the new media. The term has settled in, and we believe people understand what it means. But what many people still need guidance on, is what MarCom does - search engine optimization (SEO), online PR and social media marketing (SMM) strategies and tactics.

In designing a new website, there are a few rules we thought we'd share based on client experience, and our knowledge:

Be prepared. Have your navigation and content map ready before you meet with a web designer or web design firm. If you have tracking analytics on your old site, then take a look at where people come from and how they get around on your site. This is a good tool for what to do and what NOT to do on the new website.

Talk with an SEO expert early on. Many web designers don't know the details about SEO. They design, and you should not expect them to know what has taken us a decade to learn. So bring in an SEO expert team, like MarCom, to advise and work closely with your design team before it is too late. One client of ours decided to have a new firm redesign three of his sites into one master website. Despite having guidance from Mike Keesling, our resident SEO expert, they didn't listen. They used Flash, and they initially did not have the old websites redirect to the new one. This risked losing all the last year's SEO efforts. Now only time will tell what damage has been done.

Look for a good web design firm. Check their references, and look at sample sites. Do not expect miracles overnight. Our site took about 6 weeks. And any good site will take time. Rigney Graphics is one of our strategic partners, and they design excellent websites - including ours. Also make sure the copy you write and prepare for them is letter perfect before you have them add it to the design, or it will waste their time, and your money with revisions.

Tagging website Pages. This is the magic of what excellent SEO can do for your website so customers can find you. Typically you want your page content to each have focus for one keyword or key phrase in three places per page. Each page then gets meta tagged with that same keyword, so the engines will be able to find relevant content as people in Google look for what they want.

If you have a Flash website - note the search engines can't read it. But the good news is that Adobe Systems Incorporated just announced today that they have teamed up with search industry leaders to to improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs), which is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. It may take up to a year though, so keep an eye on the developments...

Embedded flash will work. Our client The Wiley Protocol uses this in their site with embedded Flash movies. The search engines read content, so the more content with your key words, the better your chances of being ranked on the first pages of the engines, so customers can find you. A trick is that you can post a blog on your home page as long as it is on your site and not on Blogger or WordPress. This will have an RSS function that can help Flash sites until later.

Make sure you have a tracking analytics program. There are free programs like Google Analytics, but others like HitsLink are better at tracking your website traffic. This will allow your SEO team to tweak key words, site content and link building strategies so your optimization will improve month to month.

You need a keyword analysis. Do you know what words your customers use to find you? For MarCom New Media as an example, people may search using Los Angeles Internet marketing firm, or search engine optimization firm in Los Angeles. Note how I have linked to this key word, and it goes to our website page about search engine optimization. That is called a link back to our site. You want many legitimate links to your new site.

Put up a Press Room and post articles and a newsletter. We find that Press-feed offers the best tool for a press room, that includes an excellent RSS feed built right in. Plus it is easy to post releases, newsletter or articles, that are then stored so people can review them later, and that offer excellent content with your relevant key words, which the search engines like. Check out our MarCom Press-feed.

Include an interactive function to get people's names. For future marketing, the best way to build your own opt in list is to have options for people to safely fill out a marketing survey, like we have on our MarCom home page, or an interactive newsletter sign up.

Re-skinning your website. This is a term for re-designing your site without disrupting its SEO. One of our other current clients is about ready to re-skin their three websites - so by the end of July, check back and you can see the before and after: http://www.film-connection.com/; http://www.recordingconnection.com/ and http://www.radioconnection.com/.