Is Your Website Where It Needs To Be?

In my last last this week, I talked about increasing online conversions. Several people told me there were other things that need to be accomplished before trying to increase conversion, so this is a kind of part two web accessing your website or your competitors website presence. I use these steps every time I do any online marketing for a company. What typically happens is the company needs a lot of foundational issues corrected before we can begin any online marketing efforts. Below is the process I use to evaluate a company’s online presence. I go will through the first several steps in the process today.

Step 1: Define a Keyword Strategy
Step 2: Optimize Your Website
Step 3: How to Convert Website Visitors to Leads
Step 4: Blogging and Content Creation
Step 5: Promoting Content in Social Media
Step 6: Lead Nurturing
Step 7: Analyze and Refine
Additional Information and Resources

1. Industry Research

Purpose: Finding Benchmarks for competitive analysis
How:
a. find competitors- use Hoover’s or other market research databases
b. Get financial statements if company is publicly traded
i. create spreadsheets comparing key financial ratios and benchmark
c. If not publicly traded, use search engines and print media to find information on company and competitors

2. Analyze a company’s and their competitors websites

Purpose: To find out (a) what their site may or may not be lacking in terms of foundational issues that would impede other marketing efforts such as social media
How:
a. Analyze websites code (scripting language, XHTML, HTML, JavaScript, AJAX, php, asp.net, etc ) to find out how their site is set up.
Tools:

1. Web Developer toolbar (free download) for either Internet Explorer or Firefox.
2. Firebug plug-in for Firefox- will show HTML, CSS, Script, DOM, Net, and Page Speed
3. Adobe Dreamweaver plug-in from webassist.com called website import- this allows you to download and grab an entire website to look at the markup language and page layout (my preferred method)
Things to look at:
1. Page Titles
2. Page Descriptions
3. Page Keywords
4. Use of ALT tags on images
5. How site-map is set up –if they have one. Do they have an XML and HTML version. HTML site-maps are primarily used for humans to aid in site navigation. XML site-maps allows webmasters to inform search engines about URLs in your blog/website for easy indexing. XML site-map is created for search engines but not for humans
6. Proper use of H1, H2, H3, tags, etc..
7. Use of text instead of image files which can’t be crawled by search engine spiders
Ex. Using image files for site navigation instead of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc
8. Does the navigation make sense? Is it confusing?
9. What analytic if any are they using.
Ex. Google Analytic
10. Use of robot.txt file if any. Web site owners use the /robots.txt file to give instructions about their site to web robots or spiders; this is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol.
11. Are they adhering to Web Standards created by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Ex. Is the site handicap accessible?
12. Are they using old technology for site architecture like tables, or are they using HTML to create site with DIV tags (In HTML, div elements are used where parts of a document cannot be semantically described by other HTML elements), and an external CSS (Cascading style sheet)
Note: There are a myriad of reasons why using tables for designing a site is bad such as:

• mixes presentational data in with your content.

• This makes the file sizes of your pages unnecessarily large, as users must download this presentational data for each page they visit.

• Bandwidth isn’t free.

• This makes redesigns of existing sites and content extremely labor intensive (and expensive).

• It also makes it extremely hard (and expensive) to maintain visual consistency throughout a site.

• Table-based pages are also much less accessible to users with disabilities and viewers using cell phones and PDAs to access the Web.

• Browsers read through tables twice before displaying their contents, once to work out their structure and once to determine their content

• Tables appear on the screen all in one go – no part of the table will appear until the entire table is downloaded and rendered

• Tables encourage the use of spacer images to aid with positioning

• CSS generally requires less code than cumbersome tables

• All code to do with the layout can be placed in an external CSS document, which will be called up just once and then cached (stored) on the user’s computer; table layout, stored in each HTML document, must be loaded up each time a new page downloads

• With CSS you can control the order items download on to the screen – make the content appear before slow-loading images and your site users will definitely appreciate it

13. Are they treating each page as a separate landing page for better SEO, as opposed to using the same titles, keywords, and descriptions for each page.

(These next points are more of a marketing issue, than design issues)
14. Do they have a call to action above and below the fold? Is it prominent on many pages?
15. How are they capturing email addresses, such as free offers (white-paper downloads, webinars, podcasts, etc)
16. Do they have a mobile version site for pda’s and cellphones?
17. What social media channels are they using, and are they being updated frequently?
18. Do the channels make sense for their industry based on industry research?

Next: Analyze the company’s website against their competitors using hubspot.com website grader. This will give much information such as traffic, indexed pages, broken links, use of H1, H2, tags, too many image files, not using ALT tags, do they have a blog? Have blog articles been re-tweeted?A call to action? Readability level, proper metadata (page titles, descriptions), domain info, MOZRank is SEOmoz’s general, logarithmically scaled 10-point measure of global link authority or popularity. and is very similar in purpose to the measures of link importance used by the search engines (e.g., GOOGLE’s PageRank).
Linking Domains, where is the site promoted, A Tweet grader, RSS feed Grader, do they have a conversion form. The sites traffic rank and overall score of the company and against their competitors.

Answering these types of questions will tell you how prepared you are to start new online marketing efforts such as blogging, and social media.