“Up in the morning and off to school,” is one of Dad’s annoying jingles. He used to stir us with it at the end of every school holiday. Once, my brothers even went as far as lying on the nature strip wrapped in doonas shouting it out as we drove off to school.
Twenty-eight years later, I set off to Nett School to take part in a one day course: Getting Your Business Online and Understanding Online Marketing.
On average we spend 20.2 hours online per month and Australians have spent 23 billion on online goods and services since 2008. Twitter grew 1067 per cent in Australia in the first half of 2009*. With that amount of online activity it’s essential that our website is fresh, linked and well researched.
I appreciate that I didn’t learn everything in one day but seven and a half hours gave me a good grounding in this area. We discussed domain names, web hosting and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) access. Our lecturer explained that it’s a great idea to tell people what you do in your domain name with keywords. For example if I was to create a website for my blog, I could have a domain name publicistforselfpublished.com.au Attaching my email to my domain is also advisable in case our service provider goes down.
We had to think about our websites and what is the objective of having it? How much our business depends on it and its functionality. My other job is of course overseeing our business website http://www.clearcutpropertyservices.com.au
When we set up our business website we got a company called www.completeweb.com.au to provide the user-friendly software, tech support and upgrades. It was a good decision when we had babies and had limited time on the computer. It cost under $1000 for a static site and I even tried my skills at photography. I’ve just been a little lax in updating it and this course has spurred me to try some new ideas.
The course discussed generating online traffic in three different ways: Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Advertising and Social Media Marketing. We discussed getting your business details on a relevant directory, not using Flash because Google can’t read your data and putting key words in your URL, title, metatax etc is also very wise. It is also important to put key words on every web page (not just the first) because Google sorts your site page by page. Having a sitemap helps with your Google campaign and registering your business on Google Maps (and if possible attaching a review.) If you know someone with a popular site they can also create a link to your site that will aid in climbing the Google search remembering that not many people search beyond the first page of Google.
Google Analytics was another way to maximize your position and within that you can set up keywords and goals and see how many come to your site to read testimonials or certain pages. Google your competitors and see what key words they are using.
Finally, because I am sounding like a computer geek, indexing a website is advisable and this can be done for free on www.google.com/addurl
I’ll have to talk about social media and list some of the sites tomorrow night or we’ll all turn into gigabytes.
I am all Googled out!
*Check out Net School for courses. Statistics in this blog provided on this course
No comments:
Post a Comment