Planning a web marketing strategy

This article discusses web marketing and how to do it without costing the earth. Web marketing is a fairly recent phenomenon, as businesses finally latch onto the idea that rather a lot of future business will be done via the internet. Companies have noticed that if you get into the first two pages of Google they’ll send traffic to your website without having to pay for it. This has generated a whole industry for companies like ours who spend their time trying to get their clients into the organic listings as they produce customers for no cost.

It is an ongoing process, because the Google rankings change all the time and you can be very high up one week and nowhere to be seen the following week.

Partly because of the complete uncertainty as to how the Google calculations take place, there was little known about the actual definite structure that goes into deciding who goes to the top of the chart and who stays at the bottom.

One thing is clear, that websites with webmasters who work constantly at trying to promote their site and their business will almost always see returns, and those websites that are just produced and then left to their own devices will rarely get anywhere unless very lucky.

There are two main features of web marketing which can either be very expensive or low cost. It is these two features that I want to discuss today. The first is press releases & blog writing and the second is ensuring there are lots of links and referrals and references to your website on the internet.

How important is the location of your ISP?

Recently we have done a report for a local company with strong links to the local business community with a well known brand name and a web site.

The web site has been optimised to a certain degree, in that there are Meta Tags, some pages of information and action for people to take and look at, and the site is known a little bit by Google and Yahoo.

Despite it having some visitors, and some information and key words, it has a zero paid ranking from Google in the UK.

One of the main reasons for this I suspect (obviously because nobody actually knows) is that the ISP is German, and when searches are carried out using specialist software the web site shows up as being registered in Germany as well.

This is obviously a bit of an issue, as if this is showing up on a normal search, then the Google spiders are going to recognise it as a German web site which is not very helpful when it is aimed at the UK market.

So what can you do to change this?

First thing to do I suspect will be to change ISP provider. Our company uses two providers, Namesco and UK2.net. UK2.net has suffered over the years with bad publicity from various users, as it had a terrible customer care service and I speak from direct experience of this. It does do very well for rankings though, and pages that our SEO company have set up personally and developed have had good page rankings and been picked up fairly quickly by Google and Yahoo. There are certainly strong suggestions that with a site like this, where the name is quite well known and you would expect to see at least one page ranking if not two, that the ISP was playing rather an important role in preventing that site from gaining any ranking.

In summary, I would advise anyone who has an overseas ISP to strongly consider switching to a UK provider. Email us your web site address and we can have a look and let you know where your provider is located.

You can contact us at enquiries@chesterwebmarketing.co.uk or visit www.chesterwebmarketing.co.uk

Low cost marketing

Marketing does not need to be expensive. Some of the best marketing is done for no cost at all. Have a think about recent articles you have read in the paper that include quotes from commentators or companies on certain situations. In particular, research commissioned by companies into activities linked to their firm.

Have a think about when you search online for products or services, and the way that you find information out. How many times have you clicked on a link to find somebody expressing an opinion on something and then you click that link to find that it goes to a product. How many times have you clicked on a link on Google’s pages one and two and gone through to a website that links you to another website and it is there that you find the information that you want.

All of this marketing is done at a very low cost basis. It is not simply a question of putting an advert in your newspaper, hoping for a response, or placing advertising in trade journals and expecting customers to pour in. It is steady and consistent building of a brand. Although it takes time, it also takes expertise and it is possible to get this expertise by contacting Chester Web Marketing who will be delighted to assist.

For details, please contact Chester Web Marketing at www.chesterwebmarketing.co.uk or by emailing info@chesterwebmarketing.com