The seminar for industrial and manufacturing enterprises hosted by Thomas Register this week reinforced my belief that most business owners don't know that there are two phases to having a successful website:

1. Developing the technical vehicle (design and programming)
2. Making it into an effective external facing marketing tool that reaches and services your public.

The room was packed and everyone there was bemoaning the fact that their web developer had not told them they needed to do all this 'other stuff' to get a result and ROI from their site.

The presenter emphasized that you need 3 things to have a successful website -

1. Use meta tags and title tags. Make sure you do good keyword research and actually find a viable market that is already searching for your product or service. Construct the content of your site to catch that traffic.

2. Put in place a well thought out strategy to get relevant links pointing to your site. Relevant links.

3. And the most important of all - good, strong, interesting and useful content. The number one reason visitors come to your site is information and content. (Forrester Research)

You need a professional web editor who understands all this and can write good content.

77% of search engine users click only on 'organic' or 'natural' search results as opposed to the paid and sponsored results.

Content is what will get you the best results.

There was an excellent post from Jason Hitt of iunctura.com on Marketing Vox this morning -

For effective IT marketing, sit down the 3 groups in your company and ask these questions:

1) Sales - What kind of prospects do you want to reach? What do buyers need to know before they reach you? What are your sales objectives?

2) Marketing - How would you like to receive leads? What kind of off-line programs are working? What are your marketing objectives?

3) Service - What kinds of things could customers help themselves to? Are there any frequently asked questions (or solutions provided) that may support a knowledge management system? What are your service objectives?

Your web content (and optimization efforts) become the glue between these customer facing parts of your organization. You'll be able to spend more time on tuning pages, landing pages, and managing media related references.

With these questions, you'll also provide more relevant content that will attract visitors (through organic search) and identify buyers (so you can extract them with PPC).

Your website will also become a tool of the company to reduce costs -- you'll receive better buy-in and support to get the tools you need.

The answer to these questions will help you focus your optimization efforts -- being listed in search engines is only one part of producing a profitable website.

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Well said Jason!

Getting a good ranking in a search engine on a keyword or term is one thing. But if no one is searching on that term you'll still get no traffic.

Getting searchers to click on your result is the mext thing.

And if they do land on your home page and the site confuses, frustrates or annoys them, they will be gone in seconds.

Get a free analysis of the effectiveness of your home page

Lookers vs Bookers

The Rush Report study by iPerceptions and Hospitality eBusiness Strategies showed that only one third of hotel site users actually make a booking.

The study blames the poor results on the sites themselves,
rife with confusing content and drawn out booking procedures.

The study points out that the big sites like Expedia and others do a much better job than the branded hotels - yet users have more faith in the known name and like to use their sites.

It's time for hotels to treat their websites as an integral part of their marketing and business strategy. Find out what their users want and prepare their sites to deliver that.

Analytics will show them where the visitors are clicking and where they are falling off the site. Watching your stats on the site will tell you where the funnel is leaking on the way to the booking step.

Content based on the right keywords and organized in an easy and logical flow will convert those lookers to bookers

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that online advertising is making a come back.

Here is a comment from Click Z

"Yes, online advertising has changed and evolved over the past few years. The primary reason companies failed then and succeed now isn't due to changes in advertising.

It's changes successful companies are making when approaching the Web. Defining desired behavior, identifying success metrics, setting goals; in short, a more evolved approach to analytics."

But another article shows that only 11% of businesses are using their analytics to measure keyword conversion while as few as 31% are using analytics at all.

our online presence is either building your brand or eroding it clicks by click. You can only know how you are doing when you measure, analyze and optimize.

The 69% who aren't using analytics need to get wise and start to watching their visitor behavior - tracking the click paths to learn what is right and wrong on their websites.