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Your website
Every company should be able to easily update their website! If you cannot
easily do this by yourself or don’t want to pay your web designer every
time I suggest using one of the simple and FREE web site content management
systems that exists. You might still need to pay a consultant to help you
set it up, but he/she will then teach anyone how to add and edit pages.
I am an avid user of Joomla. Joomla is a free open source content management system developed
by hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world. Just about any function
that a website could possibly need is available for Joomla and it is very easy to manage – once it is set up.
Even though I have been building websites for 13 years I hired a consultant
(www.TaiwanChallenges.com) to help
me set up my new site (www.telemarketing.com.tw).
Now once it is set up I can teach anyone to add a new page. If they can write
a document in Word they can use Joomla. This lowers
our costs and increases our marketing efforts since we can make sure to make
a lot of updates.
Internet Marketing
Most companies have a website, but few know how to use it to reach new customers.
There are mainly 4 ways to use the Internet for marketing:
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising on Yahoo and Google
- Website shows up when people search for your company or products/services
on Yahoo and Google
- Social Media (Facebook, Myspace,
Digg, Petizens etc)
- Advertise on portals such as Taiwan Trade, Global Sources, Asian
Products etc that already attracts your type of customers.
I would suggest that a company immediately starts testing PPC advertising.
You only pay when people actually click on your ad and visits your website.
It is cheap and you can spend as much or as little as you want by setting
a maximum budget.
I think the most important of the four is number 2. If people can’t find
your website by searching for your company name and some keywords related
to your offering, then something is wrong. Just as important is that it doesn’t
take rocket scientists to fix that as well.
Let’s concentrate on number 2.
The great majority of you have a website already. As with all marketing,
Internet marketing demands that you know your customer. One of the great things
with Internet is that you can much easier collect data. If you advertise in
a newspaper you have no idea how many really reads the paper and if anyone
decides to visit your website afterwards you can’t easily track them. On the
web everything becomes statistics.
The best way to start improving your marketing results is to go and check
your web statistics. Hopefully you already have some kind of statistics but
if otherwise I suggest using Google Analytics (www.google.com.tw/analytics) since
it is free and very good.
Here are a number of questions you should look up right now:
- How many people visited your website last week?
-
Where do they come from? Yahoo? Google? Direct link?
-
Where are they from? Which countries?
-
What browsers do they use? Internet Explorer? Firefox?
-
Which keywords are they using to find you?
If you don’t know how to find out this info, find out! It is absolutely necessary!
Browsers
Then we are looking at the browsers. Taiwanese people are overwhelmingly
using Internet Explorer but a growing number of people are switching to Firefox
(www.firefox.com). This is important because
you need to know how people are watching your website.
A website that looks good in Internet Explorer might not look good in Firefox.
Internet Explorer Firefox
 
I know that 6% of the Taiwanese people who visit Enspyre.com use Firefox
but world wide the number is about 18%. If you have customers in Australia
26% of them probably use Firefox and you need to
make sure they see a fully functioning website.
Some web designers will tell you that it is hard to build a website that
looks good in both. That’s no true. There is no reason why the site should
not work the same in both browsers!
Language
Any company will put a lot of effort into their main website. But many companies
loose their quality focus when translating the website (and other materials)
into other languages. But if the text on the website looks bad it is a waste
of time to do marketing to bring people to it.
Just like no one would hire a Swede to write their Chinese website, it doesn’t
make sense to have Taiwanese people writing English websites. At the very
least every company should hire a native speaker to proof read their website.
Most Taiwanese companies of course don’t need a fulltime foreigner on staff.
But there are ways around this dilemma. One way is to outsource all translations
with a worldwide translation company which maintains all phrases and terminology
in the Translation Memory Software tool to ensure consistency. This way they
make sure to maintain your brand image over all languages.
I of course recommend www.star-taiwan.com.
STAR is one of the world’s largest translation companies with 47 offices in
31 countries including Taiwan.
Working with a worldwide organization like STAR you know that each language
will be translated by a native speaker.
[By the way, STAR Taiwan’s website is also using Joomla. A couple of years ago the site was first built by
a web design company who then wanted 1800 per hour for any changes or updates.
The site also did not have any meta-tags and did not have any search engine
ranking. In May we hired TaiwanChallenges (www.taiwanchallenges.com) to help
us re-do the site using Joomla. It took a couple
of weeks to get it right but now it is so much simpler to manage and we do
not need to pay anything, we can do it ourselves.]
There are other benefits to working with a professional translation company
that I would like to point out.
-
STAR uses software that they have developed themselves called
Transit. Transit can open any type of file (Html, Word, InDesign, Illustrator etc) and the translator can translate
the word inside. Upon exporting the file, the file retains all the design
elements so for example, some word that was red
and bold in the original will be red and bold in the translation.
This saves you lots of money for design
-
Transit also recognizes paragraphs and phrases that have already
been translated. This means that if you give STAR a website or manual to translate
and then later make some changes you don’t need to pay the full translation
price again, just for the changed bits.
-
Since STAR is a world-wide company, if there are specific phrases
or terms that are tricky, the translator can call your distributor or customer
in the respective countries and discuss in person. This close line of communication
ensures quality and consistency.
Another option for your language needs is to find a freelancer, either in
Taiwan
or outside. If you want to find a foreigner in Taiwan traditional sites like 104 or 1111 are
quite useless. I suggest looking here:
•
www.forumosa.com
•
www.tealit.com
•
www.taiwanho.com
•
sme-centre.ecct.com.tw
There are about 30,000 foreign professionals in Taiwan and many of
them are ready and willing to work part-time. If you need some help here let
me know, maybe I can refer you to someone.
Another option is worldwide websites which helps you find freelancers of
all kinds. Check out:
•
www.elance.com
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Now on to the issue of how to make people find you via
Search Engines (SE). Please remember now that I separate the paid advertising
from the regular search results.
Search results
Paid Advertising
Many people still think that it is very expensive to get their website listed
high up in the search results. This is not really true. I will explain more.
Search Engines use software to visit every website in the world and try to
figure out what they are about and for what topics they might be important.
As marketers we need to make sure that we have a basic understanding about
how Search Engines work so that we can build our website so that the Search
Engines understands and likes them. Your website structure needs to be able
to assist the Search Engines understand which keywords and search terms they
should associate with your website.
One can write whole books about Search Engine Optimization as this type of
marketing is called. I will give you the very basics, the most important things.
In order for you to understand SEO you also need to understand the basics
of how a website works. You don’t need to be an engineer; the basics are easy
to understand.
Keywords
What are the keywords that you think your customers will use to find your
website? If the customers already know your product, maybe it is the name
of your product, or it could be something that expresses the problem that
your product solves.
For example, Enspyre.com gets a lot of visits from people who search on “設立公司”.
This is not a product name of ours but people who
are in the process of starting a business search for this keyword, find our
website and learn how we can help them save money.
What are your keywords? What are the generic names of your products? What
keywords do your competitors use? You could ASK your customers what they used
to find you.
You should make a list of your 10-15 most important keywords that you will
target. Of course maybe there are many more important words, but you have
to start somewhere.
What is a website?
Most websites are built using HTML code. If you want to see the code that
make up your website, in IE click on View -> Source. In Firefox click on View -> Page Source.
The HTML code will give instructions for the browser to go and download text,
pictures, videos etc and how to put it together to make the pretty design
that you as a person will look at.
But the search engine doesn’t care about the pretty pictures etc. It is software
so it only cares about the code.
You see:
The
search engine sees:
 
There are a few things you need to know about this HTML code. At the top
of the code, you should see something called meta-tags; title, keywords and
description. Please note that both your title and your description should
contain your most important keywords!
By putting your meta-tags on your site you are basically telling the search
engines, “if someone search for these keywords, they
are interested in our site.”
This is the most important code needed in order for the search engines to
understand your site. If your site doesn’t have the meta-tags, figure out
how to get them on there! Ask your engineer or web designer to do this. Do
not take no for an answer!
Eventually every page on your website should target specific keywords, but
you can start out with every page having the same information.
This is the bare minimum of what you need but there are lots of other things
that you can tweak on your website as well. For more details you can read
this file.
So once you start making changes to your website hoping to get better search
engine rankings you of course want to measure your progress. You could go
to each search engine and search for one keyword after another and write down
the results but what a waste of time. It’s much better to use software called
WebPosition (www.webposition.com). It doesn’t work very
well for Chinese keywords and Taiwanese search engines but for those of you
who target the US, Europe and other large markets it will be perfect. You simply tell it
which search engines to check for which keywords and then wait for the report
to pop up. By checking the rankings every time you make changes you start
to develop a feeling for what works and what doesn’t.
WebPosition also have other really good functions. It can for example tell
you how well optimized a particular page is for a particular keyword and search
engine. Once again this function is of limited use for Chinese but works very
well in any single byte language (English, French etc).
The world that surrounds us
The World Wide Web is so called because every website is connected to every
other, somehow. The software that the search engines use are called spiders
and we often say they crawl over the web from one link to another until it
has run through every site on the Internet.
The purpose of the search engines is to figure out which sites they should
serve up to the searcher for every conceivable keyword.
So whatever we do to improve your rankings in the search engines is basically
about making them think/understand that your website is the most important
and useful site for a particular keyword.
Except for the changes and optimization you can do of your website (meta-tags
etc) that you can do the most important issue is links TO your website FROM
other websites.
If the search engines find that many other websites link to your website
then think you are important.
For example, if Google finds that TianXia Magazine
have linked to Enspyre.com using the phrase “電話秘書” this increases our ranking for that
keyword.
There are of course lots of ways to get links. Here are a few:
- Contact your friends, customers and partners and ask them to
link to you. It is customary to offer to link back to their website.
-
Send out press releases and hope media will write about you
on their websites.
-
Go on Yahoo Knowledge and similar advice sites and either answer
real questions or provide both the question and the answer.
-
Participate on online discussions on Forums related to your
industry.
-
Establish one or more blogs on popular sites like Wretch, blogger
etc
-
Set up pages on social sites like Myspace, Facebook etc.
If any of you think that this is all starting to sound very complicated and
perhaps out of reach for your organization, let me ensure you that anyone
can do this. I’ll give you an example: Twinsen is
a Taiwanese man who teaches Chinese to foreigners. I have never met this man
but he seems to use the Internet very intelligently to find students/customers.
If anyone searches for “best Chinese teacher Taipei” his blog comes up as number one. One of the main ways he has
achieved this is by making lots of links on different sites using the keyword
“the best Chinese teacher in Taipei.”
If a single person can achieve this, surely you can.
Alexa
So how to decide where to put links? The
bigger and more famous the website the better. You don’t want to waste
your time putting links on sites that no one ever visits. Links on Yahoo is
a no-brainer; they are huge and will carry a lot of weight. But when it comes
to customers and partners, how to know if it is worth the effort to put links
there?
One great tool is Alexa (www.alexa.com). Millions of people around the
world have downloaded this toolbar and Alexa keeps
tracks of every site they visit and rank the sites accordingly. A site with
a million visitors per month will have a lower rank than a site that only
has a thousands visitors.
Since not every person in the world use Alexa the
ranking is an statistical approximate only and should
not be considered exactly correct. But it is good enough for an approximate.
Enspyre.com has a ranking of about 830,000. If I compare myself with a competitor
who has a ranking of 1,700,000 then I can be quite sure my website has more
visitors.
Use this tool as a rough guide to where it might be worth the effort to put
links.
Google Alerts
Dell now employs 41 people who keeps track of any
website that discusses computers in general and Dell in particular and then
they add their comments.
You don’t have that many people but fortunately there are tools. Google Alerts
(http://www.google.com.tw/alerts)
is a function where Google will send you links with
websites that mention specific words. For example, I can set up an alert for
電話行銷. If next month someone writes an article
about this topic Google will find it and send me an email so I can then go
there and see if I can add a comment and a link.
Branded email addresses
Before finishing up I want to mention a final little pet peeve of mine. In
Taiwan
it is very common for companies to use Hinet email
addresses as their corporate email. I think this is a big waste. If you use
an email address with your company website address in it (like I use
這個email住址已經被防垃圾郵件程式保護，您需要啟動Javascript才能觀看
) then every email you send
is a branding opportunity. Why help Hinet do advertising?
If your website designer or web host tell you there is any problems with
you using your own email addresses, tell them you don’t accept this. They
can do it and if not, look for a new solution! This is simple and standard,
do not accept anything else.
Conclusion
Getting to the top of search engines is not easy, especially if you are in
a competitive industry where other companies are also promoting their websites
very much. But if you have not even done the most basic optimization, you
stand no chance and that is a waste.
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Figure out your keywords
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Make it a rule to add some kind of news item to your website
every month.
-
Make sure your website looks good in both Internet Explorer
and Firefox.
-
Make sure your language is good. Native speakers translate
or edit your texts for every language!
-
Make sure all your pages have meta-tags.
-
Spend some time every month making links to your website from
other sites. Cooperate with your friends, customers and partners to exchange
links. You will all gain.
-
Monitor your performance using statistics like Google Analytics.
I hope this guide will be useful to you. If it is, please send the link to
your friends who might also need to learn about Internet Marketing.
Sincerely,
Elias
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