Tony Antoniades and I recently gave a presentation at an ATDC “Brown Bag” entitled 10 Quick, Cheap, & Easy Ways to Increase Your Web Presence.
It was a well-attended event with nearly a third of the companies in the incubator present. A lot of the entrepreneurs told me that they got great value out of the discussion.
In the future we are going to start Webcasting some of these events, but for now I thought I would share the 10 tips.
1. Get One
Yes believe it or not, not all tech companies have a Web site. It is your face to the world and your first point of interaction with analysts, customers, employees, and investors. For most start-ups it is the only outlet to portray their brand.
2. Set Goals
You really need to determine the purpose of the site. Are you trying to build some awareness, generate leads or actually create revenue? The goals need to be specific. Quantifiable. That way you can track results and measure success.
3. Study Your Stats
Most hosting providers have a free stats package and if they do not there are free third party packages such as Google Analytics. Learn where you visitors are coming from, the time they come to your site, the search terms used to find you. Knowing this info helps immensely on SEO keyword phrases.
4. Keep It Current
The most not so obvious tip is not to put dates on things that don’t need them. Don’t call it a weekly update if you really are not committed to updating it every week. When leaders join get them on the site pronto. Set a schedule for updating news and stick to it.
5. Clean Up Content
Less is more. People prefer clicking to scrolling. Page depth also helps with SEO for specific terms on specific pages. Seems like to me around less then 150 words a page is about right. Clearly identify downloads as such and put your deeper content such as tech specs, white papers, and case studies in those. Make sure that your site architecture is flexible and easy to change by someone less technical.
6. Be Found
SEO is designing your site so that it is friendly to search engine robots. While this is a subject in and of itself, at its core SEO is ensuring that robots can access and read all the content from your site. Robots can’t read scripts and they can’t read images.
7. Be Relevant
Relevence is key and the proper keyword phrases must be used. Both Google and Yahoo have nice keyword generator tools. Use keywords strategically on your site in content, inbound links, meta tags and titles. Don’t use them in images. And as in all marketing, density matters.
8. Be Popular
Think of inbound links as votes. You have to campaign. Do so by blogging, commenting on blogs, and getting links from customers/partners. Put your site in your LinkedIn profile. Make the votes count with links to your site that are hyperlinked keywords.
9. Buy Some Friends
I little efficient PPC campaign never hurt anyone. Be cheap with by focusing on $.05/.10 keyword phrases. Implement the ability to track conversion.
10. Stop Procrastinating
Just do it! Andy Monin from Vendormate started implementing these suggestions right away and for that he gets a little vendor credentialing and compliance love.