Internet Marketing

This involves examining the structure of a website and ensuring that it is user friendly and aesthetic, as well as containing relevant and interesting content. Optimising the site involves ensuring that it conforms to Googles best practices for website search engine optimisation. The site is also tested for cross-browser compatibility to ensure that it looks good and functions properly when viewed on the most popular web browsers.

Search engine optimisation is practically the only way to really ensure organic increases in website page ranking. In other words, aspiring to get your site to display on the top of a search engine’s first page. This is no easy feat, and requires continuous effort. To achieve any degree of success in this, a thorough understanding is needed of how the search engines rank web pages, and how to game the system without getting your site blacklisted. Search engine operators are also continuously adjusting their algorithms in order to keep their search engines convenient to use and more importantly, producing relevant results.

Another aspect of this involves mobile device compatibility and ease of use. Many modern websites are designed to be responsive to mobile device screen resolutions, meaning that the content will scale according to the screen size, whilst maintaining readability. However, in graphics rich environments and with certain site layout methods and containers, this does not always work as desired. In either case, a well designed mobile version of a website will go a long way in ensuring that you captivate and retain mobile traffic.

This is an effective way of getting your website seen on the search engines and on other popular websites where advertising is displayed. There are two key types of online advertising:

1) Pay Per Click

This is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked. It is defined simply as “the amount spent to get an advertisement clicked.”

With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system. PPC “display” advertisements, also known as “banner” ads, are shown on web sites or search engine results with related content that have agreed to show ads.

In contrast to the generalized portal, which seeks to drive a high volume of traffic to one site, PPC implements the so-called affiliate model, which provides purchase opportunities wherever people may be surfing. It does this by offering financial incentives (in the form of a percentage of revenue) to affiliated partner sites. The affiliates provide purchase-point click-through to the merchant. It is a pay-for-performance model: If an affiliate does not generate sales, it represents no cost to the merchant. Variations include banner exchange, pay-per-click, and revenue sharing programs.

Websites that utilize PPC ads will display an advertisement when a keyword query matches an advertiser’s keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to, above, or beneath organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a web developer chooses on a content site.

2) Cost per impression

Along with cost per click and cost per order, is used to assess the cost effectiveness and profitability of online advertising. CPI is the closest online advertising strategy to those offered in other media such as television or print, which sell advertising based on estimated viewership or readership. CPI provides a comparable measure to contrast internet advertising with other media.

An impression is the display of an ad to a user while viewing a web page. A single web page may contain multiple ads. In such cases, a single pageview would result in one impression for each ad displayed. In order to count the impressions served as accurately as possible and prevent fraud, an ad server may exclude certain non-qualifying activities such as page-refreshes or other user actions from counting as impressions. When advertising rates are described as CPM or CPI, this is the amount paid for every thousand qualifying impressions served at cost.

Much care is needed when planning an online advertising campaign, as the wrong type of advertising, or choosing the wrong mediums can be costly and futile. For example, advertising web design services on a website that teaches people how to build their own websites, is definitely not reaching out to it’s target market, which is essentially servicing those who want a professionally built and stable platform for their business or project.

In our opinion, Google’s Adwords is the best place to start when it comes to internet advertising. Although Google offers many tools and resources for setting this up yourself, it is always better, and more cost-effective in the long term, to outsource these tasks to specialists. We understand how to get the absolute most out of a Google Adwords budget, and can design appealing and relevant display ads for use on Google’s advertising network. We can also help you discover the best and most suitable advertising opportunities on the web, and help you plan your budget effectively.

Social media has become an important facet for creating awareness about your website, and can be an extremely effective medium for driving traffic to a website when correctly set up and used. Many companies pay for exposure on social media platforms, although this is usually extremely costly, and in most case, short lived in terms of interaction and engagement with the communities within the social sphere.

Setting up your website with social media integration is probably the most effective tool for allowing your website traffic to create awareness regarding your website, products and services, and interesting content. This achieved by placing social media links that visitors can click on to send Tweets, likes, +1 votes, and other such mentions to their profiles, where friends can see them and respond. In our view, the social sphere is the probably the best medium for consistently creating awareness about your website and related content. In this regard, we encourage site owners to ensure their website is optimised for convenient and effective usage of social sharing tools by site visitors. In designing and setting up our websites, we always pay careful attention to this aspect.

We can also assist clients in setting up their own pages on social media platforms, whereby we design brand matching graphics and user icons etc. to enhance the user profile. We can then assist by either instructing clients to effectively use the platform, or if required, we can manage it on their behalf. Social media campaigns can also be used from time to time to create a buzz regarding product launches, sales, events, or other important and interesting happenings in the life of a company or organisation. Speak to us about your ideas, or ask us for our suggestions. We can help.

Blogging is a great way of informing your visitors of the things that are happening in your company, and of offering your views on a wide variety of relevant topics. By creating interesting and informative articles, you can keep visitors returning to your website. Therein lies the opportunity to create fans and followers.

There are many popular blogs on the internet that people turn to for neutral opinions and reviews. Depending on the type of website that you have, there are many opportunities to be had in gaining exposure on the popular blogs. This can be done by encouraging the site owners or contributors to review your products or services, or by approaching them to do a feature on your event or promotion. Many companies even send their latest products to be reviewed by popular blogs with the premise that they can keep the items. This is even done sometimes prior to an official launch when companies want to get a heads up regarding reception and interest. Such moves can allow for companies to readjust marketing strategies according to market perceptions.

Google Analytics is without doubt the most comprehensive set of tools anywhere around, to measure traffic flows, visitor behaviour patterns and engagement levels, and literally everything to do with the way the internet community interacts with your website. The toolset now even includes a live view feature where you can actually see the activity and demographics of your site visitors. Google analytics is essentially the site owners and administrators wet dream. It is really quite simple to use, although it can take some time to learn how to effectively use and interpret the data. All of our websites are integrated with Google Analytics scripts that allow Google to record your website’s activity.

Effectively interpreting Google Analytics data can also allow for site adjustment and improvement upon noticing certain behavioural patterns of visitors. For example, a high bounce rate (where visitors don’t go past the first page of your website) from mobile visitors might suggest that your content is inconvenient or ugly to view on smaller screen sizes. This could allow the site owner to recognise a need for developing a mobile version of the website.

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A good basic strategy would involve looking at the purpose and primary target audience of the website, and then determining the best way in which to reach out to that particular traffic. This would typically involve quite a bit of research, and competitor comparisons and benchmarking. Online surveys can also be conducted in order to gauge current or potential interest in what the website is offering, and how successful it is in communicating with it’s visitors. Once all this is ascertained, a strategy can be planned and implemented in order to increase website traffic, and in the case of eCommerce and business websites, increase conversions (sales).