From a promotional point of view, there are several different tactics you can use when you build a website. We use a system when we're consulting with a client. Step one, we leverage off whatever we've got. We send any links off our own network to sites that we can do. Step two, we do some form of video marketing.
It's customized each time, but essentially the general steps are take a look at existing resources. If they've already got a website or if they're a franchise, for example, then there are other franchise sites. They have links off the mother ship so to speak. However, let's just take a small independent business. They've had a website up online. They probably have little to no search engine ranking.
One of the most beautiful things when you build a website is local search. It's so huge. If you're a barber shop, write barber and the city name. If you use this naming convention for your domain name then you're laughing. So do it however you want to do it, so that's an advantage.
We take a look at their existing site. We look at the mistakes they make on their website. Big mistakes on the website are generally, one, the banner is too big. Number two is the banner is not named, it's just 1-2-3. jpeg, it's not using the domain name or keywords. They don't have the keywords in the alt tags or whatever it is for that.
But their main thing, and this is important on YouTube and when you do internet radio, search engines are based on text. Write that down. So many people get excited about video and audio, make it and put it up but there's no text to go with it. They don't use their keywords well in their description of the video or the audio.
When we do an interview on radio let's say, we make sure we write an abstract that's a two to four sentence paragraph that has the keywords for the interview but also hopefully keywords related to what we do, which is get more customers. So, 'Today we talk to Joe Blog about how to get more customers using color graphics. Then next week we're going to talk about Joe Blow about how to get more customers using audio files.' Each time that you post it, you get the keywords in there and it's text.
So even though the audio is great and it's a twenty minute interview or even an hour long interview, search engines cannot read that. So many times I see people put content on their site that's just not findable, it's not searchable because it doesn't have a text that linked to it.
A big mistake people make when they build a website is that people put pictures on their site. Say you're at a conference, and you meet some famous person. You want to put a caption underneath the picture, 'X meets y and talks about how to get more customers' in the caption. Even when people do a Google search on images, they'll find you.
The first two steps are obviously leveraging off what resources you've already got. Then you want to look at your own site, do whatever on page optimization you can which would be both SEO and also from a conversion point of view when you're talking about the banners and things like that. Once they're leveraged off what they've got, they're cleaned up so that when the user hits that site they really do start driving some traffic. You're getting some benefit which takes advantage of what is the focus of what we're trying to do here? Why have you got this page up? We're not just building a site for building a site's sake. We want it to generate leads or we want to go straight to the sale, whatever the case may be.