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:

1. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising on Yahoo and Google
2. Website shows up when people search for your company or products/services on Yahoo and Google
3. Social Media (Facebook, Myspace, Digg, Petizens etc)
4. 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.

• Figure out your keywords
• 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