Archive for May, 2009
7 Step Web Site Marketing Strategy
To use this web site marketing strategy, you need a website and a free membership with an article submission website. There are quite a few to choose from, but I find that EzineArticles is one of the best. By using this web site marketing strategy, and submitting the articles to EzineArticles.com, there is a good chance they will show up on the first page of Google search results fairly quickly. Plus its free.
1. The first part of this web site marketing strategy is to determine what your website is for. Figure out the main purpose of your website. It could be mainly informational, used to sell a product or service, or both. In either case, you need to know what the website offers. If its information, determine the type of information and the specific topic. If its a product, determine the type of product and what it is used for. This is the first step in any web site marketing strategy.
2. The next step is to decide who will want to visit the website. What kind of person might be trying to find the things on the website, and who will find it useful? This is your target audience, which is also important in any web site marketing strategy. Once you know exactly who the target is, you need to start thinking like them.
3. Think of some problems they might have, that you have the answers to. You can be creative here. It could be a problem that the website solves directly, or a question about something related to the websites contents. As long as its a problem or question asked by someone who would also be interested in the website, it will work. Your articles will provide the solutions to your target audience’s problems. After you think of a few, you can begin the next step of this web site marketing strategy.
4. Now you have to find good keyword phrases. These are the words people type into search engines, like Google, when they are looking for something. This is the most tactical part of the web site marketing strategy because it involves your target audiences behavior and your competition.
First, brainstorm keyword phrases that people would use to find your article, which contains a solution to their problem. In other words, what words would they use to search for the solution to their problem? The best keyword phrases are the ones with the least competition, and the most searches. To find out how many other websites are using a keyword phrase, the competition, type the phrase into Google. Make sure the phrase is in “quotations”, click search, and you’ll see the competition in the upper right above the search results.
To find out how many people search with a keyword phrase, use Google’s keyword tool. Just type the phrase into the tool, click “get keyword ideas”, and it tells you how many people use the phrase each month. When you determine your best keyword, your ready to continue the web site marketing strategy.
5. The next step in this web site marketing strategy is to write an article. The article will provide the solution to your target audience’s problem. It should be about 200-500 words or so, and it has to contain your keyword phrase so search engines show it in search results. There is debate about how many times a keyword phrase should appear in an article. A density of about 1.5%-3% works well for me. For the density, divide the number of times your phrase appears in the article by the number of words in the article. Finish the article and move to the next step of the web site marketing strategy.
6. This part of the web site marketing strategy is simply to add a link back to your website. with most article submission sites, there is a place to do this at the bottom of the article. Use a text link with words describing the page you’re directing visitors too, or with your URL to promote your domain name. Finish this and continue with the web site marketing strategy.
7. The final step to complete this web site marketing strategy is the easiest step yet. Submit your article and repeat the process. More articles equals more targeted traffic to your website.
Web Development Estimation
This article helps you evaluate or justify the projected cost for your Web Development project. If you have been thinking about developing a web based application or even a simple website but are not sure about its costs then this article will help you come to a price range or even exact costs.
First and foremost it is important to know few technical terms. So I’ll try to give you one liners for help as they will provide clarity on costing.
Website – Collection of html pages. These are usually static pages with fixed contents
Web application – Any software that runs on a web browser.
Web Development – Any kind of programming done for a web application. There are few popular languages today e.g. php, aspx, jsp etc for programming a website
If you need an online presence for your company and need a simple and elegant website then it is very easy to evaluate the costs. The main portion of costing here is for designing a custom layout for your website and translating it into an html page. This cost varies depending upon who is designing it for you. It should cost you in the range of $75 – $ 200 at max for this work. Oh yes, there are few websites which sell ready made templates and they are as low as $50 for each template. Then comes the costing for inner pages on your website like ‘contact us’ page or ‘about us’ page. This should range from $10 – $30 for each page. This way, you can come to a very close estimate on what your website should cost if you need to establish a basic online identity.
The task gets tougher when you have programming involved on your website. This essentially means that you have few pages that pull data from the backend database.
The complexity of the programming needed will usually depend upon how big is your database and what are the dependencies involved between different sets of data.
On larger websites or web applications there are various components that contribute for its costing. The easy part is to separate out the static pages, which are like simple html pages with no database. These pages usually have fixed text or image based contents. Their costing can be estimated based on number of such pages you need on the website.
You can apply the costing formula given in above paragraph for this costing. Do not forget to add the cost for custom design of home page or the template here. It will be needed regardless of any programmable pages on your website.