Know your market: Create rich content
Employing a marketing strategy which creates a content-rich website, including keywords and terms that your customer base is searching on is the key to SEO - search engine optimisation. According to catalogue e-business, including 3 to 4 keyword phrases in your content produces higher click-through and conversion rates. The fourth word in the phrase is fundamental - the more specific you are, the more search engines will tap into what your customers are looking for and bridge the gap.
What is also important is an holistic approach to website marketing - which will raise your brand's profile and publicise your product range. For example, linking target email campaigns to specific product pages on your site will give you greater search visibility.
As the author, Murray Kenneth writes: “If your brand is your passion, creating lots of keyword-rich content can be not only fun, but perhaps the best long-term investment you can make in your website.”
The structure of your website will also improve search engine returns:
- Title Tags - search engine spiders (or algorithms) use title tags to rank websites. Title tags can be found at the top of the browser window. Keep them simple, but focussed and specific - with important keywords included.
- H1 Tags - search engines rank H1 tags higher than the actual body text contained in web pages. Incorporate one H1 tag per page and ensure they are keyword rich.
- Meta Descriptions - These can be a useful way of incorporating a mini-advert into search engine results. So rather than displaying the phrase searched upon, you can build more readable text around the phrase to make the result more eye-catching and interesting to the reader.
- Mouse-overs, drop downs and other features…Mouse-overs enable you to deploy more options and links when a user clicks over an item of text. Drop downs allow you to display more key text by adding extra options to the page. Avoid over use of images, buttons and graphical tabs and avoid including “Click here” or “Read more” - since you are missing out on an opportunity to include more key search terms. Avoid confusing or over-technical jargon in your text. Choose the right vocabulary to access a wider market. Getting your customers to write copy via product reviews is one way of incorporating search language into the body of your pages.
And finally, test and re-test your SEO by regularly making changes to keywords, H1 tags, internal links etc. to assess traffic generation and click through rates to your site. For more information on SEO and how to get an SEO audit of your website, email info@mso.net.
Know your market: The demographics element
In the New Media Age publication it has been reported that women between 35 and 49 now make up the largest user sector on the web - accounting for 15% of the British population. And with this in mind, the experts claim that web design should include more women-focussed advertising - with social networking sites being the obvious source.
What is also worth a mention here, is that according to a recent study at Bucks New University (and reported in the Telegraph), men gravitate towards websites designed by men and women prefer websites designed by women.
Dark colours and hues, straight lines, 3-dimensional perspectives and regular layouts tend to be the preference of male web designers as well as the male audience. Women, on the other hand, prefer more detail, more abstract shapes, static imagery, greater use of colour and softer lines. Women prefer to see more images of women; men prefer to see more images of men.
Gloria Moss, lecturer and author of the study argues that the differences stem from our caveman ancestors - the hunter-gatherer dichotomy. Applying this data to modern day, she suggests her research has implications for web design and conversion rates:
“Organisations can either ‘turn on' or ‘turn off' their male and female customers. Studies show that if a customer perceives something as beautiful they are more likely to pay up to 66% more for the product.”
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