Smart Marketer - Part 1

I say marketing is moving people.  Confused? Let me explain.  Let’s assume that you prefer to get news from ABC and I need to get you to try CBS.  In order to do that, I have to mentally move you from your preferred choice to my product/brand.  In the past marketing was promoting a product through advertisements and campaigns.  Today an advertisement is no longer sufficient to get a customer to try a new product.  Even if a consumer does try a new product…what can a company do to make the transition stick?

In order to make a consumer transition stick, a company/brand has to know its consumer’s present needs, pain points and address them in a timely fashion.  In this context a search engine is a marketer’s best friend. Websites like http://www.google.com/trends/ help marketers get a finger on the pulse and create content on their website that addresses the needs of the global market place.

Savvy consumers are more inclined to click on a page that has come up based on an organic search than a paid search.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a long term strategy that should be on every marketer’s radar.   The best way to ensure SEO works for your company is by knowing how the search engine indexes your pages. 

Here is a snippet from Google on designing the content on your web page (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769)

Design and content guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.