Thinking About Starting An Internet Marketing Campaign or Developing a Website for the First Time?

Have you ever thought about expanding your business to the internet? Still feeling a bit overwhelmed at times at what you should or should not do? No problem. This article will touch on a few of the main topics to help you get started and more acquainted with things.

Expanding your business to the internet is a great way to attract new visitors and customers. Search is getting better, Google and Yahoo have local search implemented. Google has local search for Canada, we're still waiting on Yahoo. Having your products and/or services listed online is a great to increase exposure and to further gain more business that you normally might not of. As a result of Local search, and continued growth of the internet, expanding to the internet is the next best solution.

So, here we will assume that you are starting from scratch, and you do not even have a domain name. The section after Choosing a domain name on, covers important information that is good for all people.

Choosing a Domain Name

One of the first things that you will need to do is get a domain name. Not to put any pressure on you, but the domain name you choose can have a dramatic effect on your business. Will it be easy to remember and type out? Will it incorporate your company name? You will want something that people will remember easy.

For my company, as you should notice on the URL locator, the domain name that I chose is ManningMarketing.com. I wanted something that was easy to remember, type out, say and incorporated my business name Manning Search Marketing. I also registered ManningSearchMarketing.com, but this is not being used with marketing my site at all, I just have a 301 redirect on that going to my main url. I just wanted to register the name as it had my entire company name and incase anyone typing in the url will find my site as well.

Registering a .com domain name these days is extremely cheap. You should have no problem finding one for around $7 or $8 a year. GoDaddy is a cheap register that you might want to checkout.

If you're a Canadian Company and you are looking to target the Canadian audience there are a few things you will need to consider. You can choose to go with a .ca domain name, this will ensure that your site will get picked up with Google Canada (pages from Canada). The other option if you choose to use a .com name is choose a hosting company who's servers are from Canada, that is their IP address are located in Canada. This will also qualify you to show up in Google Canada (when selecting pages from Canada). If you are thinking on getting a .ca domain, one of the most affordable places to register Canada domain names is domainsatcost.ca, they end up being just under $15 CDN..

Tips for Designing (or Redesigning) a Search Engine Friendly Website

Designing your website is a very important factor with an internet marketing campaign. Not all web design companies take into consideration designing a search engine friendly site. Below are some things that you will want to avoid or take notice of when getting your new site designed. Having an internet marketing firm help you along the way is a great idea, to make sure that the site will be search engine friendly and no additional changes will have to be made in the future.

Splash Pages: While these are surely eye pleasing, the problem with a splash page is that it forces the user to make ad additional click to your site. Also, the main or index page on your site (the very first page that the user finds when typing in your address) is the most important and has the best chance of ranking high. Splash pages often have no or very little text, and will not help with ranking your website high in the search engines.

Flash Sites: Having a website done entirely in flash will be expensive, and the bad news is that not all search engines will index the content in flash sites. If you must have a site done in Flash, make sure you also get a complete HTML version done off as well. There have been a few cases of new/potential clients coming with a flash site, and we have to tell them that they are going to need a HTML version. We know the Flash site looks amazing and often are extremely impressed by the design and layout, but when it comes to the search engines. Having the best looking and most impressive website that virtually nobody will find, will do you and your company no good.
Now, it is prefect OK, to have flash elements in your site, graphics for example, but try to avoid having your site done entirely in flash

Drop Down Menus: These menus are ideal for large websites, but the problem encountered is search engines cannot follow the links in the drop down menus, so each menu title must contain an active link to a specific page. The good news is that there are workarounds for these types of sites that can be incorporated to help increase the overall indexing and spiderability for the search engines.

Externalize JavaScript & CSS Files: Whenever possible, it is highly advisable to externalize the JavaScript when possible, and the CSS files. This cuts down on the coding on the page, but it makes for easier updates in the future so you only have to make the change once instead of X amount of pages.

Frames: A website that contains framed pages, adds an extra layer of complication for the search engines. The problem here is that the actual content is located in a sub page, not the actual framed page. The actual frames page contains no content for the spider, it’s the sub page that contains the content, and generally, that sub page will often show in the rankings (without the full frames page without the header and navigation sections).

Finding a Hosting Company: The hosting company you choose should be determined by the coding of your site. If you have a site done in PHP, you will need to go with a unix hosting company, if you have your site done in ASP/ASPX, then you’ll need a windows hosting company. If your site is in plain HTML, then you can go with either or. Here is more on choosing a hosting company.

Just as I was writing this article, I happened to check the search engine forums, and saw that someone was looking for help with their site and wondering why it was not indexed in Google. With a little investigation, I found that the site was done in Flash (including the links), some text was getting indexed, but when running the site through a spider simulator, it was not finding all the pages. Basically, the only pages that were getting indexed were, the splash page, and the page that had the skip intro link pointed to it. This person basically waited 10 weeks until after the fact to find out there was a problem. If he had gotten some advice and help early on, he could of saved himself 10 weeks of waiting around for something to happen. Here's the actual forum thread.

Your Website is Completed, Is there more to it?

So, lets’ say your site is designed, all finished and online. This is where a lot of companies tend to stop for some reason. Just as you need to market your business in the real world, you need a similar approach with your online portal with the internet. This will consist of finding the best keyword phrases for your site, optimizing your entire site, setting up a marketing strategy and ongoing link building.

You may be thinking, I can find my site in the search engines for my company name. That’s good, but only for the people that know of your company. You need to consider people that are not aware of your business, and attracting new customers.

How Long Will This Take?

So how long will this take you may be wondering. Is it something that can be done in one or two months?

For a successful internet marketing campaign, for new sites it can take from 3-6 months before rankings even start, and sometimes it can take longer. Just as building a house, you need a strong foundation. The foundation can be the website and a good incoming links.

Also, can you say that you are making enough money at the moment and you do not want to expand your business and increase revenue? If you happen to have more than enough money, and do not want to more, well congratulations! Most people will want to continue to make more money, and it is highly advisable to continue with a good internet marketing campaign to make sure you are on the right track, and everything is being looked after.

Gerard Manning
Search Engine Placement Specialist
Search Engine Marketing Agency :: Manning Search Marketing