When building your online presence, you should make sure you set up analytics tools at the outset to see what works, find opportunities you’re missing, and fine-tune your website, SEO, and e-mails.

Setting up analytics on your website can be as easy as adding a free Google Analytics code to the pages of your website. And most e-mail service providers generate data and reports for each mailing that you send. The key is to get these analytics programs in place as early as you can so that you can use the data they generate to continually improve your online communications.

Fine-tune your website and SEO

Google Analytics is a free suite of analysis tools that’s widely used to capture and display information about how visitors are using your site. Using analytics, you can find out what’s appealing to your audience, pull them into your site, and get them to click.

From the Google Analytics dashboard, you can get a great overview of how your site is performing over time. Detailed reports let you drill down for more detailed information about every aspect of your site’s performance. And you can have Google Analytics e-mail you reports on a regular basis so you don’t forget.

Google Analytics will give you as much information as you want, or you can stick to the high-level analytics. To see more details on any report, just click the “view full report” link.

Reports that you should monitor regularly are the following:

• Dashboard – See whether the number of visits is going up or down, see a map of where your visitors come from, and see which pages are most popular.
• Visitors overview – See how many visitors you have and how much time they’re spending on your site, and see which browsers and connection speeds your visitors have to make sure your site is optimized for all your audiences.
• Traffic sources overview – See whether your visitors arrived at your site from searches, directly, or from links on other websites.
• Keywords – See which words visitors used on search engines to find your site, plus what they did once they landed on your site.
• Top content –  See which pages get the most traffic on your site.

Depending on your business, you may want to run additional Google Analytics reports. For example, you might want to know what country your visitors come from or what time they are visiting your site. Perhaps you’d want a visual representation of exactly where users are clicking on your web pages.

Improve your e-mail campaigns

After you send an e-mail blast, you should plan on analyzing the results using the analytics that most e-mail services provide to learn how your audience is responding to the communications you’ve sent.  You can see how many people opened your e-mail, and who they are.  You also can check which links generate the most interest, and which campaigns are most effective.

For each e-mail campaign, you should analyze the following:

• How many e-mails were sent, received, and bounced due to bad e-mail addresses
• How many people opened the e-mail, clicked on a link, forwarded your e-mail, and opted out or signed up
• Which links and graphics received clicks
• A comparison of this campaign and past campaigns to identify differences and the reasons for them

Taking a close look at e-mail analytics lets you spot trends that help you refine and improve your e-mail marketing plans. If you get too many unsubscribes, you might be sending your e-mails too often. If none of your graphics are getting clicked, many of your subscribers might have their images turned off and you should design your e-mails to rely less on images and more on text links. If your response rate for a particular e-mail was particularly good, you should see how it differs from less successful campaigns.

Test and refine

One of the great things about having a robust analytics solution in place is that you can test the results you get by updating your content or making multiple versions of your content. For example, you could take a look at which words are leading visitors to your site and create more content that concerns those keywords, and see whether that improves site traffic. You can create multiple versions of a single e-mail campaign and see which gets the most click-throughs. Or reorganize your site to remove pages that are rarely visited, or create stronger links to those pages.

The key is to take a look at analytics at least once a month, plus after every major website change or e-mail campaign.

Link to your site from social networks

Be sure to complete all the information in your social network profiles, including URLs of your site and/or landing pages. Be sure to include links to your relevant website content on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other appropriate networks.

Add yourself to online directories

I attended the Online Marketing Summit yesterday in San Francisco, and there were some outstanding presentations. There are a couple more stops on the tour, and I’d highly recommend attending the summit if you are interested in keeping up with the very latest information about online marketing, hearing some great speakers, and meeting some bright marketers.

The keynote by Aaron Kahlow was a great introduction to the building blocks of an online marketing strategy. He advises that a company begin by building a foundation of a robust website; add the three pillars of search marketing, e-mail marketing, and web analytics; and cap it off with a social media strategy.

Your website is the foundation of your online marketing strategy. More than 60% of people go to a company’s website before contacting the company. Your site should be the epicenter of your marketing, with valuable content, and it should be allocated the largest part of your marketing budget. You can think of the website as your company’s lobby and budget for developing the website like you would a capital expenditure.

The first pillar to build is a search strategy. More than 90% of all purchasing decisions today start with online searches. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) provides the greatest impact on where you appear in search results, so you should start with creating keyword-rich content for your site. Adding pay-per-click advertising multiplies the business you’ll get from search, so it should be the next part of your strategy that you implement.

E-mail marketing is the second pillar, and it should be part of every marketing campaign you launch. Users overwhelmingly prefer e-mail to other means of contact, and well-designed e-mail can be the best way to keep customers informed about new products and solutions, or industry news.

The third pillar of your marketing strategy is analysis of what is working and what is not working with your strategies. You should test and refine every part of your website, search strategy, and e-mail marketing to determine the best way to convert your target audiences into customers.

Social media is the final building block of your marketing strategy. Use social media to enhance all of your other efforts. Users who engage with your company online are more likely to buy, so you should provide them a means to do so through participation in social networks, blogs, and video.

A well-built marketing strategy with a balance of all these elements will stand the test of time.

You know that you have some real treasures to offer your customers: your superb services, your excellent products, your unequaled solutions. But how do you make sure that someone looking for your treasure actually finds it?

You must make sure the route is clearly marked and that those wandering the oceans of information on the Internet actually land on your website and find their way to your buried treasure.

Here are the best ways to make sure no one gets lost on their way to find you:

1. Create mountains of valuable, compelling content on your site. These mountains should be visible from faraway search engines, as long as you’ve done a good job of search engine optimization, keyword use, and link building.

2. Lead customers to you by sending out messages through your blog, keep the Twitter fires burning, and broadcast your webinars and podcasts.

3. Reach out to customers through e-mails, direct mail, advertising, telemarketing, and events.

4. Create multiple places to land through optimized landing pages, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook pages, a blog, and search-engine-optimized pages throughout your site.

5. Clearly mark the path to the treasure using clear navigation and clean design.

6. Give the keys to customers through an online form, giving them access to the riches you offer.

Other Resources:

• Animated Marketing Treasure Map:

• PDF of the Marketing Treasure Map. Just be sure to give us credit if you use it elsewhere.

P.S. Check out “Getting started with Twitter,” “Getting Started with Facebook,” and “Getting started with LinkedIn” if you need help opening and personalizing your accounts.

Marketing today involves the same principles of promoting your company and products to your potential customers. However, the number of ways you can promote your company has multiplied with the widespread adoption of Web 2.0 technologies.

The objectives of marketing include the following:
•    grow brand awareness
•    build a positive brand association
•    drive business development
•    broaden customer base
•    increase website visits and page views
•    convert leads into customers
•    create a connection between company and customers
•    manage crises
•    provide customer service
•    humanize your company
•    generate buzz

The particular marketing tactics you use to achieve these objectives can be put into two basic categories: outbound marketing and inbound marketing. (Some people refer to the two categories as Marketing 1.0 and Marketing 2.0.) Outbound marketing tactics include TV, radio, print, and yellow page ads; direct mail; telemarketing; e-mail blasts; and events and tradeshows. Inbound marketing tactics include online content creation (including blogs, videos, podcasts, presentations, eBooks, and news releases); social media marketing (such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, and StumbleUpon); and search engine optimization (including optimizing online content for search engines, getting quality links to your online content, and more).

So, why choose inbound marketing tactics over outbound marketing tactics?

Using the internet has become part of what people do every day. Unless you’re providing services to people with limited internet access, chances are you should start with inbound marketing tactics and supplement with outbound marketing tactics, if appropriate. Here are a few reasons why inbound marketing tactics might be a better choice today:

1. Buyers start the purchasing process by doing an online search. More and more people use the internet to locate your solutions, and then find out what other consumers, reviewers, and the media have to say about you before making any buying decisions. You need to make sure information about your company appears in search results when someone is looking for the services or solutions you provide. That means having plenty of online content, optimized for search engines, created by you and your customers.

2. Inbound marketing tactics can cost less per lead than outbound marketing tactics. With traditional marketing, there are cost outlays for design, placement, postage, telemarketing, e-mail blasts, and tradeshows. With inbound marketing, the only costs are time. If you have limited budgets, but you have someone with time to write blogs, participate in online media, or optimize your site, inbound marketing is for you. And, some of this investment of time can yield long-term results. Good site Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and interesting content can serve to lead visitors to your site for years to come.

3. Inbound marketing tactics are more respectful of your customer’s time. An ad during your favorite TV show, a phone call during dinner, a billboard on an otherwise lovely drive: all of these disruptive outbound marketing tactics intrude upon your customers’ lives. With inbound marketing, your customer decides whether or not to read your blog, watch your video, become a fan of your Facebook company page, follow you on Twitter, or click on your URL in a list of search results. If you’ve done your content creation, networking, and SEO work correctly, you will get found when someone’s looking for you.

4. Inbound Marketing tactics allow you to listen to your customers. Back in the day, if someone had a bad meal in your restaurant, they asked to speak to the manager. Now, they post a review online. The only chance you have to respond to someone’s criticism or comments is by participating. Make sure you set up a Google Alert on your company’s name and any important keywords in your industry and you can monitor what people are saying. When someone makes a comment, you should reply with an honest, open response. Don’t try to put a marketing “spin” on your answer, as that will tend to decrease your credibility. Customers today expect total transparency and direct, open communication with the companies they use.

5. Inbound marketing is more targeted. Because the audience for inbound marketing tactics is self-selecting, they tend to be more likely to be ready to purchase. Someone who searches for your solutions or services is more likely to want to buy them than someone you reach out to with outbound marketing. Similarly, someone who subscribes to your blog or belongs to the same online group probably has more use for your services than someone off the street.

The marketing tactics you decide to use depend on your audience, the service or products you provide, and your budget. But, be sure to plan on including inbound marketing tactics in your marketing strategy to take advantage of the benefits and the lower costs.

P.S. Check out “Getting started with Twitter,” “Getting Started with Facebook,” and “Getting started with LinkedIn” if you need help opening and personalizing your accounts.

So, you’ve followed Scott Design’s advice and built your site with SEO in mind, including keyword-rich, link-worthy, clear, well-named content using clean code and including web analytics. If so, the search engines should be ranking your site highly and bringing people to your site in droves. But, if you’re looking for some easy-to-implement tactics to improve your search results rankings and drive even more people to your site or blog, Kristopher Jones from Electronic Retailer Magazine offers these 5 ideas:

#1 Add reviews to your website. Letting your customers review your products and services provides you with user-generated content, which search engines rank highly. Additionally, reviews give your customers a way to be active on your site. Don’t worry about negative reviews: the value of having the fresh content and interaction with your customers outweighs any risk.

#2 Acquire quality links. See if you can get a link from one or two authoritative sources in your industry that have a high Google PageRank. Find a site’s PageRank by installing the Google Toolbar or visiting pagerank.net.

#3 Maximize exposure with StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon allows you and millions of users across the web to rate web pages, videos, photos, and news articles. You can also submit your own content to be rated by the users of StumbleUpon. If enough people rate your site highly, it appears on the list of recommended sites, bringing more traffic to your site.

#4 Micro-Blog with Twitter. Using a service such as Twitter, you can create short text messages of 140 characters or less that go out to both your friends and the public Twitter timeline. Share news, deals, and exciting offers with your clients daily. Include a link to your site or blog in your Tweets for more links, which search engines use to rank your site higher.

#5 Write search-engine-optimized blog posts. Use keyword research tools such as Yahoo search suggestion tool to find out what your customers search for. Select 5 to 10 keywords and include them throughout your post. And, when linking to your post from other posts or within your website, be sure to use keyword-rich anchor text.

For more information, you can read our post on SEO in the Hot Design blog.

For a quick read of the minimum SEO you should do, check out HubSpot’s Shortest Tutuorial Ever on SEO.

(PDF: 135K)

Your web design or development project can be successful only if the target audience finds the site. At Scott Design, we place great importance on search engine optimization (SEO), the process of generating worthwhile traffic via non-paid search results. SEO is a fully integrated part of our process for designing, building, and launching a website.

Here are a few important SEO recommendations we make to our clients. We won’t design and build a website without following them.

Don’t try to fool the search engines
It’s very hard to fool today’s sophisticated search engines, so don’t attempt tricks like hidden text, keyword stuffing, link spamming, etc. Search engines include complex ranking algorithms that can take into account hundreds of factors. Most of them are unknown outside of the major search engines’ developer teams. So the best way to benefit from non-paid search results is to identify key phrases visitors most likely will use when conducting searches. You should then incorporate those phrases into appealing, organized content.

Create compelling, link-worthy content
Write and present content that is compelling enough to make others link to your site. “link-worthy” copy will produce better short-term and long-term search results than any SEO tricks.

You can dramatically increase meaningful visits to your site by receiving traffic via links from other quality sites. Additionally, if those sites have a lot of other quality sites linking to them, you can enhance your results exponentially. Bottom line: Create content that key players in your industry find compelling, and they will link to your site.

Write clear, descriptive copy that includes key phrases
Don’t write primarily for Google or Yahoo. Write for your target audience, the people you hope will visit your site. Be descriptive and clear. Use an active voice and a passionate tone. Keep it readable, and include content that is unique.

Focus on key phrases — combinations of words that a search engine user might type and/or a site visitor seeks when scanning your web pages. Write headlines, sub-headlines, and opening paragraphs that include key phrases. Feel free to use a key, relevant phrase two or three times on a page, or use close variations on the phrase, so your copy won’t be redundant. Using the same phrase more than five times on a page will not improve the search results.

Talk with your established customers. Discover which words and phrases they used to find your site. You also can determine key phrases by checking your web analytics, looking at competitors’ sites, and reading influential blogs and forums on community sites.

Properly name title tags, URLs, headlines, and navigation links
Give logical, accurate names to URLs, page titles, headlines, and links. This will make your content easily accessible to the search engine “spiders” that crawl through websites collecting information. And be consistent on each web page: Include the same key words in the page title (which appears in the bar at the top of the browser), URL, meta description tag, headline, navigation link, and first paragraph or two of the copy.

The title is the single most important SEO factor on a page, so use a unique and relevant page title on each one. It’s rare to yield impressive search engine results for a term that is not part of the page title. Also, the meta description tag won’t enhance your results, but it often appears as the text snippet below your listing in the search results, so it should include the relevant keyword(s) and be written to encourage searchers to click on your listing.

The headline on your page (H1) should include key phrases that reflect the content of the page. Any sub-navigation title (for example, in the left-side navigation) should be nearly identical to the headline. This avoids potential confusion for both the search engine and the site visitor.

Make clean, organized coding a priority
By using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), content can exist separately from coding, making the content easier for search engines to read. Specific tags on each page define headings and content. Search engines look for those tags as indicators of what’s important on a page. You must have an H1 heading, and H2 tags also are valuable.

Use more than just Flash for navigation. Search engines cannot see what’s in a Flash file. Selective use of Flash to enhance visual appeal is fine, but be aware that the content in Flash components probably will not be indexed by the search engines.

Give it time, and track success with web analytics
Search engine optimization is an investment that requires patience and an ongoing commitment. For most sites, it takes 2-3 months for SEO initiatives to have an impact. It’s advisable to minimize changes for 3-4 months after the initial SEO initiative. You’ll get more accurate results by sticking with initial content.

You should have clearly defined goals for your SEO efforts. To determine whether you’re meeting those goals, you’ll need web analytics software — like Google Analytics — in place at launch so you can track what’s working and what’s not.

You could spend countless hours learning the intricacies of SEO, so we’ve provided a list of websites (see below) that might save you some time. But no matter how much you learn, keep it simple: Create appealing, properly named, well-organized content. If you do, you’ll get the visitors you seek.

For a quick read of the minimum SEO you should do, check out HubSpot’s Shortest Tutuorial Ever on SEO.

Learn more about optimizing your site for search engines

• Google Keyword Tool
• Wordtracker Keyword Tool
• Google AdWords
• Search Engine Keyword Tracker & Keyword Ranking Tool
• Google Tool Bar
• Aaron Wall’s SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Search Engine Watch
• Search Engine Land
• SEO Book Blog
• Cre8asite Forum
• Search Engine Roundtable
• MarketingPilgrim Internet Marketing and Online Advertising
• Website Rankings
• Google Analytics

(PDF: 135K)