Why They Came to Us: Eric, from PCHS, came to mywebWOW! because he had a decision to make – he either needed to make a change or he needed to close his doors. PCHS was averaging 6 students per class and that was not making enough money to support his staff and business. Eric tried flyers, radio ads, stickers, job fairs, you name it and he was not getting success from these campaigns.

What mywebWOW!com did for PCHS: After we met with Eric we came to the decision to build a new website on a CMS (Joomla!) platform, so Eric could have access to update his website. We included an interactive calendar to manage classes and events and a registration module, so new students can register and pay online for classes – directly through his website. Once the website was finished we started a comprehensive marketing campaign for PCHS which included an ongoing SEO strategy, a monthly eNewsletter and 3 blogs per month, which helped position Eric as an expert in his industry.

“mywebWOW!com took us from obscurity to the #1 STNA program in the state of Ohio!” - Eric Ahiekpor, President of PCHS

How PCHS has Benefited: After just a few months of launching the new site and beginning an SEO campaign, PCHS went from averaging 6 students to 14 students per class. Within the 1^st year of an ongoing marketing strategy, PCHS saw a 400% growth in business! After two years, PCHS was seeing an even larger increase in revenue and has grown significantly. Due to a strong organic SEO Campaign, PCHS is now monopolizing the online marketing for STNA training in Columbus. They rank #1 on Google for the keyword phrase “STNA Classes in Columbus OH” and their newsletter and blog is gaining in popularity. Overall, PCHS has benefited greatly from partnering with mywebWOW!com and they have the numbers to prove it!

“mywebWOW!com is more than a marketing company to me. They are my business partners and my family.” - Eric Ahiekpor, President of PCHS

Search engine optimization can be overwhelming for most Do-It-Yourself marketers. But, the basics are not difficult to understand. At its core, search engine optimization can be broken into three pillars: Keywords, Content Volume, and In-bound Links.

It’s these three pillars that make it difficult to position a company website in a number one spot on search result pages. This is because your website pages are finite and fixed. A well-written blog, however, provides endless opportunities for you to publish thought-leadership content, earn links from other trusted blogs on the web, and be discovered by potential customers. If ranking in search engines is key to the growth of your company, then blogging is the most effective way for you to win on the web.

Keywords:

A search engine’s only job is to return the most relevant results to its users based on the words they type into the search bar–these words and phrases are called keywords. To do this, the search engine crawls through stacks of content on the web looking for keyword matches.

If someone is searching for the name of your company, or your name, search engines will give them links to pages of your website. These are the people who already know you and people who have received personal referrals to your brand. However, if someone searches for a product or service related keyword the most efficient way to get in front of them is with blog content that focuses on their searched keywords.

Identify your optimal keywords by putting yourself in the searcher’s shoes. Consider what they might be typing into Google when searching for information related to your company’s products or service. Use these “non-branded” keywords in the headlines of your blog articles and in the links within each article to improve your chances of showing up in search engine results.

Content:

Search engines put a premium on web properties with large cannons of content. The engines will recognize your blog or website domain name when crawling its pages and the more content associated with your domain name the higher your links will rank on the search result pages.

Unlike a website, blogs provide a platform that supports larger volumes of content optimized for a variety of keyword terms. Commit to posting on a frequent basis and your blog will help you rank for several keyword searches.

In-Bound Links:

Once the search engine has identified pages that contain keyword matches it ranks the pages based on a formula that helps determine the quality of the content. In part, the engine assigns this quality score by counting the number of links pointing to a page from other sites–these are called in-bound links. This is the democracy of the web. A link to a page is, in a sense, a vote for a page. The more votes by others on the web the higher the search engine ranks the page.

Bloggers act as a community referral network. As part of that community they frequently send readers to other blogger’s content by linking to it in their articles. It is highly unlikely that a blogger will link to a page of your website, but it is very likely that they will link to a quality blog article you publish. The more you publish, the more other bloggers link to, the more visibility you capture on the web.

There is no easy way to gain higher rankings in search engines. Blogging takes time, but it is the most effective way to increase your visibility online. Consider your website a place for people who already know you to come and verify information, get your contact information, or make a purchase. Think of a blog as your opportunity to be discovered on the web, by the thousands of people who are searching for general product or service information. Publishing volumes of blog content, optimized with keywords and linked to by others, will earn you a higher rank in search engines and in the minds of potential customers.

How to Start:

Pinterest is invitation only. So request an invite, or have a fellow “Pinner” invite you to join. After you are invited to join Pinterest, you create Pinterest’s version of a profile page. Next you would put a “Pin it” button (on the Pinterest Goodies page) on your navigation bar at the top of your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.) so you can easily “Pin” items that you like from different web pages.

You can search for people or companies that are already on Pinterest and start following them to see what they are pinning. On your Pinterest home page you have the option to see what people you are following are pinning or what everyone is pinning.

You also have the option to look at gifts being pinned which means there is a price that is associated with the Pin. If there photo you really like and you “Pin” it to your board and you know it is $50 then a banner will be attached when you associate the price and it will show up under the gifts feed of Pinterest.

What to Pin:

Let’s say you were browsing on shoes.com and you see a pair of sandals you love. You can “Pin” the picture of these shoes.  Put a brief description about them like “I have to have these sandals for the summer!” and then this Pin will have a URL provided that will link back to shoes.com so people can buy that pair of sandals from seeing them on Pinterest.

Another way to “Pin” something is by taking your own pictures. If you are on vacation and you see a unique building you can either instantly upload to your Pinterest or wait until you get home and do it on your computer. You would still write a brief description but there would be no URL provided since it came from you. Instead it would say “Uploaded by User”.

Extra: You can also Pin videos!

How to Repin:

Once you “Pin” something it will come up on Pinterest’s feed of new Pins. If someone sees this Pin they can Repin your original Pin to their Pinterest or one of their boards (explanation coming next). A good comparison of this is retweeting something. You found something you like and you want to showcase it on your part of the site.

Repinning works the same for you. If you are looking on the Pinterest feed and you find a piece of furniture you like, you can Repin this original pin to show that you liked the recipe.

Challenge: For every 3 Repins, try and Pin an original idea!

Creating Boards:

Either when you sign up or when you start to collect a lot of Pins you can create boards to organize your Pins – kind of like a cork board you would hang on your wall that you may pin pictures from a trip on. Instead of pinning actual pictures to this board you would create Pinterest boards that you would categorize by what you like. You can make as many boards as you would like. For this example you could have boards for recipes, shoes, furniture, photography, etc.

Pinterest is a great community that has a large following. The best way to master it is to learn by experience. Get on Pinterest and play around and see how it works on your own. Have fun & Pin on!

Check out the mywebWOW! Pinterest page for some inspiration and follow us for tips & tricks, an inside look at mywebWOW!, and more!

Next to come: How Pinterest works for Business

Building your internet presence (reputation) takes time. It also takes creating the right strategy that combines excellent key word knowledge and experience, as well as content writing skills. What good is a top-notch ranking for a key word or phrase on your web page if visitors and customers do not choose to stay on the page because it isn’t engaging enough or the page doesn’t provide the information they are searching for?

In order to maintain a successful online business, you will want to attract people to your web page and give them something to interact with. Create fresh, new content on your site in a routine fashion. You will find visitors and established customers will engage with your online business site consistently and often. Quality content is the key to superb online reputation.

Too often, SEOs view optimization as the primary quest to conquer. The majority of their time and effort is spent in key word placement, number of key words, and strategy on a web page yet totally overlook producing high quality of content for visitors to the site. At WOW!brands, Inc., our SEOs produce web sites/pages that contain the right balance of high ranking optimization and high ranking content quality. We produce sites that people want to visit and content that people want to read—pages that are optimized and written well, informative and interesting.

As you can see, with the right direction, strategy and patience, there are many ways to overcome the challenges involving search engine optimization when starting your online business. Like anything else in life, practice makes perfect. Building your internet presence (reputation) takes time and commitment. The best case scenario is to team up with a competent and skilled web development company, such as WOW!brands, Inc.

For quite a while, marketers targeted specific audiences that had expressed interest in their product or
service by clicking the “Like” button. Now that the Facebook has placed emphasis the real-time ticker/timeline, marketers need to become more sagaciously creative to compel Facebook users to add a particular business to their Timeline/Ticker.  With the new changes to Facebook, users do not have to “like” a page in order to comment product or service, thus
devaluing the “like.”  This is similar to how engagement changed in the blog world as readers didn’t have to be registered to leave a comment:  It lowers
the bar of entry for participation.

Instead of operating in the promotional mode on Facebook, marketers need to shift gears from promoting a product to retaining the attention of their fans.  Regardless of how you look at it, most pages on Facebook adamantly focus on promoting a product or service.  With the new changes to Facebook, the pages that do well and retain the attention of users and fans, are brands are marketers that produce posts and content that actually retain the user and/or fan’s attention.  Producing content that isn’t pushy or postures, but instead entertains the user or fan even if there is “nothing going on” in the campaign department.

This makes for a better environment for on-line publishers and WOW!brands knows the recipe for success using the new Facebook Timeline and applications.  It is a recipe consisting of creativity, substance and relevancy.  The know-how to integrate a particular brand or product permanently into a user or fan’s shared
history.  This recipe simply “humanizes”a particular brand, product or service.  Marketers that follow this recipe reap the rewards of having their product or service be absorbed
in the lives of targeted Facebook users and fans in a broad way.

• * Create a site with valuable content, products or services.
• * Place primary and secondary keywords within the first 25 words in your page content and spread them evenly throughout the document.
• * Research and use the right keywords/phrases to attract your target customers.
• * Use your keywords in the right fields and references within your web page. Like Title, META tags, Headers, etc.
• * Keep your site design simple so that your customers can navigate easily between web pages, find what they want and buy products and services.
• * Submit your web pages i.e. every web page and not just the home page, to the most popular search engines and directory services. Hire someone to do so, if required. Be sure this is a manual submission. Do not engage an automated submission service.
• * Keep track of changes in search engine algorithms and processes and accordingly modify your web pages so your search engine ranking remains high. Use online tools and utilities to keep track of how your website is doing.
• * Monitor your competitors and the top ranked websites to see what they are doing right in the way of design, navigation, content, keywords, etc.
• * Use reports and logs from your web hosting company to see where your traffic is coming from. Analyze your visitor location and their incoming sources whether search engines or links from other sites and the keywords they used to find you.
• * Make your customer visit easy and give them plenty of ways to remember you in the form of newsletters, free reports, reduction coupons etc.
• * Demonstrate your industry and product or service expertise by writing and submitting articles for your website or for article banks so you are perceived as an expert in your field.
• * When selling products online, use simple payment and shipment methods to make your customer’s experience fast and easy.
• * When not sure, hire professionals. Though it may seem costly, but it is a lot less expensive than spending your money on a website which no one visits.
• * Don’t look at your website as a static brochure. Treat it as a dynamic, ever-changing sales tool and location, just like your real store to which your customers with the same seriousness.

As the name implies, it is all about converting website visitors to customers.  It’s not enough just to drive traffic to a website and hope.   When developing a marketing strategy, we can’t forget the human factor.  The internet has changed our behavior drastically.   We want results and we want it now!  How many times have you clicked out of a website when you couldn’t find the information you were looking for in the first 5 seconds?  Conversion optimization involves firstly directing the traffic to the most relevant pages.

For anything to work well, care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to execute it and the same goes for website designs. With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you.  Conversion SEO relies on a well planned website architecture.

The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site. Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks. For example, you might have a “food” section, an “accommodation” section and an “entertainment” section for a tourism site. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information.

Think of your interior pages as landing pages.   Do you have a strong call to action?  Is it clear what you want users to do when they get there?  Often we put our best call to action statements & specials on the home page not thinking there is only one door into your website.  Any effective SEO campaign will land user to the content they are looking for within the site.   The less clicks it takes to a conversion point is always better!

mywebWOW!com’s five (5) newly released social media packages offer customers a variety of social media services like foundational account page setup, comprehensive monthly content management, friend and group building, press releases, and blog writing and formatting. But what’s special about mywebWOW!com’s approach to social media isn’t what they do, it’s how they do it.

mywebWOW!com understands that one of the biggest frustrations that entrepreneurs and small business owners experience in social media isn’t setting up a social media account or even getting excited about it. The challenge is how to execute an effective, ongoing social media strategy that attracts and converts customers. The challenge is making social media work for them!

“We believe that our thoughtful packages correct an common problem with social media. While Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. are attractive and fun; before now there seemed to be no clear path for startups and small businesses to use them effectively,” says WOW!brands CEO, Andrew Catapano.

Read the Full Press Release Here: http://www.onlineprnews.com/news/161295-1313186001-finally-social-media-marketing-strategies-that-work.html

All usability standards are designed with one premise in mind:  meet the needs of the user.  The company and the web designer who really spend time trying to understand the website visitor, their reasons for visiting, and what they are expecting to get out of the visit will design a better website.  The guidelines just help focus the efforts.

When it comes to the issue of branding, the first thing most potential customers want to know when they come to your site is “Who are you?”  That question is then very quickly followed by “How do you help me?” and “Why should I trust you?”

To answer the “who are you” question, the website usability standards say you should prominently display your logo in the upper left-hand corner of the page.  Americans are taught to read from left to right, top to bottom, so the most important image and words should be in the upper left.  If you are designing for an Asian market, your image and text positioning would be different.

Studies have shown that the eye gravitates to images before words, and photos draw attention the quickest.  Website design usability standards suggest the use of photos whenever possible.  Graphic elements should be spread out over the page, at the top, middle, and bottom, to draw the visitor’s eye into the text.

Your headline and tagline need to grab attention.  Put it in English.  Don’t be overly cute or clever.  You have at most 5 to 8 seconds to capture their attention.  If you can answer the question “How do you help me?” in a clear, captivating tagline, you will be miles ahead of your competition.

The path to the information the visitors seeks should be clear and obvious.  Don’t make the visitor guess where they are supposed to go next.  We’ll discuss this more in our post about navigation, but despite what you may have read that the longer you can keep a customer on your site, the better, if they are on your site getting frustrated because they can’t find what they need, they will leave and never come back.  That’s not the goal.

As for building trust, your site needs to meet the visitor’s expectations.  Misspellings, broken links or slow downloads, all of these issues feed into the website visitor’s first impressions.  It may seem cliché, but most visitors expect to see a tab that says About Us and Contact Us.  These convey a sense that you are legitimate and trustworthy.

After an initial design is done, you need to step back, put yourself in the customer’s shoes, and approach the website’s home page as the potential customer might.  Did you show the customer who you are?  Did you tell them how you could help them?  And are you demonstrating that they can trust you?

We try hard to design usable, visitor-friendly websites. Our Columbus Ohio website design team is here, ready to help build your brand.  We don’t just build your website, we build your business.

It’s important that any new business establish a business goal for their site. The goal for the site will, in many ways, dictate the budget, content, design, programming, and ongoing maintenance requirements. All of these considerations play into what is “affordable.”

Though there are many variations on the theme, there are typically four types of websites: 1) the electronic business card or brochure, which is designed simply to reinforce the brand (example: http://drnorm.net); 2) the self-service consumer education or customer service portal (example: http://newdirectionscolumbus.com); 3) the direct sales Ecommerce or lead generation model (example: http://makeafrienduniversity.com); and 4) a content site which derives revenue through advertising other’s products or services (example: http://asianuniquetravel.com).

Each model comes with its own challenges, opportunities and costs. For instance, websites designed for Ecommerce or customer service support purposes will typically cost more than a website that is designed as a brand extension because they will require a more robust, more sophisticated backoffice. In an ideal world, there is a simple interface that allows the company to easily add products, promote special offers, changes prices, etc., without the use of an IT programmer. Building that interface will cost money initially. However, a professional Ecommerce sales website, properly designed and promoted, will often cover its development, maintenance, and marketing costs very quickly. The return on investment can be very high and very fast. The brand extension sites, like traditional space advertising, are harder to justify with hard and fast numbers.

While cost has to be a consideration, price alone should not be the determining factor in building a website. Before choosing a website design company, make sure they take the time to get to know you and your business goals. Make sure they are experienced in the type of site you need. Find out what reports they provide and what training they offer. Do they offer services beyond just building the website, like logo and branding design or social media marketing and online promotion services?

Only after you determine your business objectives can you truly evaluate which affordable small business website design team offers you the experience and support you need. At mywebWOW!com, we understand you have choices in selecting a website design company to work with and we encourage you to compare our rates and services with any of our competition. We believe we meet and exceed our customer’s expectations on every level. Click here to get a FREE QUOTE and get started today.