Social Media Survivalist Guide 1/5: The Homepage
April 6th, 2009Posted by: esmith Posted in Blogs
Whether you’re a new organization or an established one looking to benefit from social media traffic, I’ve written this guide to make sure you’ve got some basics covered, as well as optimization tips and resources for further reading. Over the coming weeks, this five-installment guide will allow people with only basic internet knowledge to create and manage a social media presence. The pace might frustrate more advanced users, so feel free to skim.
Home URL: You need a website. Period.
These days, the professional standard is a website hosted at a top level domain (such as yourcompanyname.com or .net). There are many ways to go about this, and your needs will dictate what direction I would recommend you pursue. For inexperienced users seeking the best results, paying for a professional web design firm is the way to go. Do research, and shop around. Some things to consider would be how long they’ve been in business, your impressions of their portfolio, pricing, etc. This can be a costly route, but often times you get what you pay for.
Ideally, you’ll opt for a website powered by a content management system (CMS) – this is a system that will make your life a whole lot easier, allowing you to quickly post things to your website, change its settings, etc. without having much coding knowledge. Some examples of content management systems would include Drupal, Wordpress, Xoomla, and Typo. There are lots. I’d recommend going with a popular CMS with a historical following – Drupal and Wordpress are my favorites.
If you’re on a very limited budget, some web hosting companies offer automatic installs of content management systems; but there are several disadvantages to this. Many times, the installed CMS will not be the current version, and is vulnerable to security holes or other exploits fixed in a more recent release. This approach is also not beginner-friendly; fleshing out a bare content management system into a budding web portal takes time, skill, and knowledge. If you’re completely unfamiliar with these skill sets, I urge you to support your local web design firm.
Use your website to provide your contact information, mission statements, etc. Release company news and announcements on your web portal, and make sure it is up-to-date. Nobody likes getting to websites that haven’t been touched since 2004, and in 2013 they won’t like yours last updated in 2009. If appropriate, blog on your website, but do so cautiously and strategically. Take time to draft and revise posts, and familiarize yourself with good blog authorship practices by reading through tips from seasoned veterans. A Google search is a good place to start.
The quality of your posts will largely determine the return on investment your website shows you. In my experience, the most direct way to increase revenue is to optimize for specific keyword searches, and then post quality, original content that relates to those keywords. Nothing increases consistent, high-quality traffic more than ranking high on search engines and giving people what they are searching for. Depending on your market, this may be relatively easy or extremely expensive. A web firm that offers search optimization services should be able to determine the competition for your strategic keywords.
Next week we’ll take a look at our first round of social media, and begin working with these websites as well as integrating them back into a CMS-based web portal.
Image courtesy of Guoquan.
Tags: effective websites, home page, search engine optimization
April 13th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
[...] Last week, we took a look at creating a home URL and covered good starting practices for a bit of internet marketing. This would have been adequate as recently as 2006, but the internet has become more modular and intricate since then. Social media portals have become mini networks themselves — this guide was written to help readers use these mini networks to drive traffic to their home URL, thereby increasing revenue and message spread. Let’s get started. [...]