Promote your own Website

Once we have build and optimised your website and launched it in the search engines we encourage you to do a lot of the work to keep your site relevant and current and to keep it fresh making it rank higher in the search engines.  Its important to remember that you can do a lot of the website promotional work yourself in terms of building valuable / relevant / unique content for your website and your social and professinal networks. One client took our advice and once we optimised the site actually employed someone to promote their site (via Social / SEO means). Another thing this exchange demonstrates is the attention to detail we give each client.
Here is a sample conversation that shows the benefits of promoting your own website, as you know your business better than anyone
[Internet Marketeer] Firstly, let me introduce myself,  I have recently been taken on to oversee the social media and SEO side of the business. On top of this I will also be advising on9 the development of the website etc. The business owner has given me your details as the man to speak to regards development of the website and any amendments that need to be made.
Initially i wanted to just ‘touch base’ and ensure that I was speaking to the right person and to let you know who I was and what I was all about. I am, however, very keen to get the ball rolling with regards to a couple of key amendments to the site. The business owner has informed me that there have been no updates to the site in nearly 3 months which is a nightmare in SEO terms and, no doubt, makes the website slightly out of date.
In the short term I wanted to see if there was an easy way to access the ‘back end’ of the site so that amendments can be made by myself or one of the business’ staff. I don’t know if the site is built on a platform such as Magento / Joomla or WordPress where administrators access can be granted to make amendments and update the products page?
Longer term I think we need to include a blog and/or a news section on the website that shows a feed on the homepage. This is primarily so we can ensure fresh content can be uploaded (ideally) daily for SEO and allows an easy way to add to the site without needing to contact yourselves every time. I understand that you may need to contact the business owner in order to verify my position and he has said it is fine to do this (if you need any contact details then let me know).
[Delicious Webdesign] Happy to help and glad you have been brought in to help promote the website. Have attached the administrator instructions / details for the website. Here are the admin details but it looks like someone in the office changed the password on the without telling us the new password so can you ask for the new admin password and pass it back to us also.
The idea about a blog / news page is one we have recommended previously and its a a good one for SEO as well as making the site fresh for potential customers and posts can be added any time in the future. Text changes to the static pages can be made if the page name and old / new text is supplied to us (this normally is done within the hour). Good luck and any questions please dont hesitate to get back to me.
[Internet Marketeer] Thanks for getting back to me. The business owner would you know what this password is likely to have been changed to or James, would it be possible to get this reset if not? James, with regards the ‘blog’ (which i personally think should be presented as a ‘latest news’ tab). I am keen to get this up and running as soon as possible. What sort of timescale would we be looking at for its implementation and what (if any) would be the costs involved? Thanks again for your quick response and I look forward to speaking to you soon.
[Delicious Webdesign]
Invoice – Have attached an invoice for the customised blog and both domains hosting (one is due and one is due in November but thought its more efficient to invoice for both in one go)
Blog – We will install the WordPress blog and give access details and instructions within a day and then will customise it and build it into your website within a week
We have  installed and configured your news page (blog) its now customised and you can add posts / photos and learn about it via the wordpress instructions (link below)
[Internet Marketeer] The website owner wants a new page added to the site, I can provide the content but is it possible for me to add a page using the admin login you have given me?
[Delicious Webdesign] You can add a new section / page for anything using the blog, or give us the text / photos and we can create a new ‘main website page’.  Regarding your blog posts they is an incorrect  link (facebook one) that is in mixed case (only use lower case for email / web addresses). You also have a tiny blog post with a link back to the home page of the site saying ‘visit the website’ seems strange as they are on the website obviously.
[Internet Marketeer] I will correct the blog issues (I must have been half-asleep, I think I was just keen to get something up there so I didn’t have a blank page). I am meeting with the website owner tonight so I’ll find out what his requirements are for the new page (I think he wanted something almost like a sub-site) but will confirm this.
[Delicious Webdesign] Look forward to your reply, I see the facebook / dead link is still in place in the blog, I fear that the ‘perfect’ status of the site will be affected as this link has been left all weekend.Just checked and Google has visited that page and cached it so the dead link is recorded, if you cant remove this link then please email and tell us and we can do it
[Internet Marketeer] Hope you are well and the week’s got off to a good start. I had a long meeting with the website owner yesterday and we have come up with a number of key goals for the coming months in terms of updating the site and making it more visible to potential customers.
Firstly, we are going to experiment with a simple PPC campaign on Google for just a couple of key search terms. Do you know if the site already has an Adwords account? If so, do you have the logins?. It seems that there is at least one sponsored link for the website on Google which suggests there is an account already (although the website owner has no recollection of setting it up).
I also intend to register for Google reviews as this seems to drastically increase visibility when searching for a business sector.
In the meantime, now we intend to keep our social media updated on a daily basis I was hoping that the sidebar to the right of the homepage could be changed from 3 fairly-innocuous links to “buttons” for FB, Twitter and YouTube. How easy would this be and what would you need from me? Another small design change would be to experient with a different colour font (and maybe even a different font) for the website as the ‘black on dark green’ doesn’t jump out and can be tricky to read. I presume this is only a line of HTML for each page and was hoping you could modify one page to a slightly bolder font in white as a test?
(maybe something like the Contact page just as a tester)
Finally (for now). It seems that on older versions of IE the sidebar ‘pushes’ the rest of the homepage down when you land on the site. This means that you are greeted with a blank page with just a small bar to the right and have to scroll down to see the rest of the front page. I have tried this with Firefox and Chrome and it’s fine (Safari seems ok but have only tested that on an iPad). Could this be a resolution issue on older versions of IE and is it possible to fix.
Thanks for your time James and I look forward to hearing back from you soon. If any alterations are going to involve significant costs then if you can let me know so I can chat to the website / company owner before giving the go-ahead.
[Delicious Webdesign]
PPC – Am not aware of any PPC campaign but if you start one I can give you a £50 voucher to start your campaign
Google Reviews – You already have a Google listing, you dont need to register for reviews but I would recommend you encourage your happy past clients to review you (they will need a Google account)
Text – We have changed the text (colour and size) and experimented with some layout changes this morning, please review and comment.
Social – It would make sense to have one box on the right for social links and to do this we would need your social links-
IE Rendering – We will check this out – Update: Rendering on older browsers now should be fixed for IE7 and IE8 This was a ‘pig’ of a fix
Website Update Costs – Most tweaks / changes / updates are charged at an hourly website support cost of £30 per hour
[Internet Marketeer] At present customers are reporting to us that our listings on the website are our of date. As a short term fix it would be beneficial if the search page can divert to our other page.
I understand this has been done before and it has its’ risk but it is a short-term solution. I did approach Rightmove to see if it was possible to integrate or embed Rightmove powered search on our page but apparently not (unless you can think of any suggestions). Thanks, in advance, for your help with this.
[Delicious Webdesign] Anything can be done but you really don’t want to do that you want to update your listings on your own website estate agency listings page which was build / planned  and configured to improve your website / SEO / visitor numbers / website usability.
Previously we done this admin work for you but you can do it yourself easily or if you give us a list of what is needed then we can do it (or perhaps you want to say simply make the listing the same as rightmove again)
[Internet Marketeer] Hope you are well, The website owner has bought to my attention that as well as the main site we have another website which obviously isn’t being updated as and when we make alterations. Would it make sense to just redirect traffic the this site to the main site as i’m sure this would be quite as easy thing to do.
[Delicious Webdesign] Glad you brought this up, I queried why they have that website previously but it seems its just used for email. The SEO value of that website will only be realised if / when it has unique / valuable content on it. I have redirected it to the main site as there was no value having the same content on that site.
[Internet Marketeer] We have recently implemented on both or facebook page and our microsite a “meet the team” page. I’d like to get something similar implemented on the main site. I can forward the information and photos if needed but all this information can be found on facebook.
[Delicious Webdesign] I like these types of pages but you ideally need unique text and photos to ensure the site gets benefit out of this change (duplicated content from other sites is generally bad) if you have it twice already do you really want it again ? happy to do it if you provide photos / text. I would have done it initially on the website personally.
[Internet Marketeer] I hope you are well and looking forward to the weekend. With regards the website we are looking to change the primary colour of the pages to a much brighter blue. I have attached a couple of recent promotional bits to give you an idea of the colour we have been using.
This will probably mean changing the text back to black but I will leave that in your capable hands to see what looks best. Hopefully the colour is in the HTML rather than an image format but let me know what you can do. Thanks, in advance, for your time on this and have a nice day
[Delicious Webdesign] This involved more work that first believed but now we have changed the website look and attach a screenshot for your approval, once approved we can put the redesigns live.
Additionally noticed that nothing has been added to the blog that was built to help you post your news to improve your website and your SEO. We really think you should utilise the news pages (blog) as it looks a bit empty. The Blog is really is a great tool to enhance your website and increase its ranking in Google if used regularly and relevantly
Why not give the access to the girls in the office to let them talk about a day in the life of them in their role or perhaps get one of them to talk about what to expect as a customer of yours?