Getting the Website Architecture Design Right

One of the first considerations when building a website is the site’s structure. A well-planned structure is fundamental to the success of the website and can prevent issues in later stages of the site development. Website architecture design involves planning the layout and design of the website, identifying the pages to be included, determining how consumers will navigate the site, and planning how these pages will link together. Based on the learning from marketing research and competitor website analysis, the digital marketing team—along with subject matter experts, such as website developers—is responsible for ensuring an optimal website architecture design.

A key factor that the must be considered when planning the website architecture is click-depth. Click-depth or crawl-depth refers to the minimum number of clicks required of a website visitor in order to get from the “root” web page to a desired web page. The root web page is the page that displays when only the domain is in the URL (i.e., no path information is included). The objective is to enable visitors to find what they are looking for with ease. Companies must ensure that the click-depth is kept as low as possible, so that users and search engines can reach any point on the site within a minimum number of clicks.

The digital marketing team analyses how each page will be linked internally and externally, creating categories and subcategories within the site. While creating the website, search-friendly URLs should be used to increase the relevance of the links and help the organic ranking for the website. Additionally, duplicate meta tags, meta descriptions, and titles should be avoided to prevent confusing web crawlers.

In short, the website architecture design should assure visitors they are on the right page; ensure visitors can easily find what they are looking for by providing a clear navigation path and search feature; properly link together the various pages; and ensure that the website is easy to navigate not only for users, but also for web crawlers so that the site content can be detected by search engines.

A critical component of website architecture is scalability. Website designers must ensure that websites are designed in a way that navigation is not compromised when new functionality, product lines, or business units are added. Consumers have a low tolerance for long wait-times or high click depth pages and will quickly leave a site that does not provide optimal usability. For example, a business may start with a simple website to build awareness of the brand, and provide details of the product offerings; however, if the company chooses to add an e-commerce component at a later date, the e-commerce capability should be aligned with the existing product catalog so that customers can continue to navigate the site with ease and purchase products quickly and securely. A well-thought-out architecture at the planning stage will enable this new functionality without overhauling the existing site.

 

The article has originally been posted at https://www.smstudy.com/freeresources/articles
SMstudy is the global accreditation body for Sales and Marketing certifications. For more details visit https://www.smstudy.com
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Advantages of Blogs and Discussion Forums

There may be a number of blogs and discussion forums related to a company’s product category. Participating in such blogs and forums meaningfully, with the objective of helping others and sharing information, can help in improving a company’s online presence and SEO. A company should aim to engage blog authors and people commenting on blogs by clarifying areas of doubt, by providing valuable resources, and by positioning themselves as subject matter experts. For this, the person or team involved in these activities should be subject matter experts themselves. If the target audience that visits these blogs recognizes the company as being experts, then they will want to interact with the company on their own. This interaction may be in the form of a website visit, a personal message on a discussion forum, an email, or a phone call. They may also provide links to a company’s website pages in other forums if they find the information useful after visiting them. This will help in gaining natural backlinks to a company’s website—the kind most favored by search engines.

The company must ensure that its contact details and website link are visible or accessible to other readers. This is generally achieved by adding these details to the signature of a post or mentioning them in the user profile. Such links in the signature also contribute to a website’s SEO. However, many of the reputed and popular discussion forums allow such backlinks only to those forum users who have gained a specific level of respect and trust in the forum. Those users who have been on a forum for a long period of time, who have posted several times, and who have gained noted support and appreciation from others in the forum, are often permitted to post links in their forum entries or signatures. Therefore, it is important that the company post to the forum regularly.

A company may also write high-quality guest blog posts and submit them to reputed blogs for publishing. Such guest blog posts, once accepted, can be valuable for attracting readers of the reputed blogs to the company’s website, and can also improve the search rank of the website if links to the website are present in the guest blog posts. However, it is generally not easy to get reputed blogs to accept a company’s guest blog because they have high standards for accepting guest posts, or may only accept very few guest posts in a particular time period. Thus, the company should be persistent in its efforts and ensure that all guest blog posts that are submitted are well written and targeted to the audience of the reputed blogs.

Care should be taken not to hard-sell one’s product, and the company should avoid inserting links to its website for the sake of earning backlinks—most of the good blogs and discussion forums are moderated, and such links would most likely be deleted. In addition, irrelevant link sharing or hard-selling may damage a company’s reputation without earning any benefits. Sharing links on blogs and discussion forums that are not related to one’s product category or website may result in penalties from search engines in terms of a company’s search rank. Search engines are becoming increasingly more sophisticated at identifying links that do not add value as well as those that are present for the sole purpose of earning backlinks.

 

The article has originally been posted at https://www.smstudy.com/freeresources/articles
SMstudy is the global accreditation body for Sales and Marketing certifications. For more details visit https://www.smstudy.com
Important links:
Visit https://www.smstudy.com/dmbokguide/download-dmbok-guide to download the Digital Marketing Body of Knowledge for free
Visit https://www.smstudy.com/certification/digital-marketing-associate for free Digital Marketing Associate certification and course

What is Online Press Release?

Online Press Release is broadly defined as using new technology to effectively communicate with stakeholders over the Internet. When a business is attempting to increase online reach through PR, a number of tools can be used. One of these is the company’s own website. It is the ideal place to host value-added content that supports broader off-site PR campaigns where people are encouraged to click back to a company’s site, and where user engagement can be tracked and measured.

Online Press Release typically encompasses the following:

• Raising the profile of a company or brand using online channels
• Developing online word-of-mouth buzz
• Fostering online advocates and minimizing the impact of critics
• Identifying online trends and issues

The objective of Online Press Release is to raise awareness of a company or its brand among the broader online community and to generate interest that takes advantage of the viral potential of online social media. It is a way of exhibiting prominent, newsworthy stories about a product, brand, or company to as many viewers as possible. It is similar to standard press releases submitted to offline print media channels, but has the added flexibility of enabling content creators to include multi-media content, such as videos, as well as links and supporting digital files.

To maximize the penetration and exposure from PR, it is essential to submit releases to one or more Online PR or news distribution services such as PR Web, Business Wire, PR.com, or Click Press. Many other similar services can be easily found online. Some of these services offer free basic distribution with paid upgrades, while others require an upfront payment or contract on either a yearly subscription or per-item basis. These services also tend to distribute releases via news feeds to online and offline journalists, media websites, and news aggregation services, such as Google News and Yahoo News, which can result in a great deal of exposure for a newsworthy story.

The article has originally been posted at https://www.smstudy.com/freeresources/articles
SMstudy is the global accreditation body for Sales and Marketing certifications. For more details visit https://www.smstudy.com
Important links:
Visit https://www.smstudy.com/dmbokguide/download-dmbok-guide to download the Digital Marketing Body of Knowledge for free
Visit https://www.smstudy.com/certification/digital-marketing-associate for free Digital Marketing Associate certification and course

Why is Formulating Social Media Strategy Important for Business?

“Social media” is an umbrella term that includes web-based software and services that bring users together online and allow them to exchange ideas, discuss issues, communicate with one another, and participate in many other forms of social interaction. With the proliferation of different forms of social media, such as blogs, forums, audio-visual sharing sites, personal networking sites, and professional networking sites, consumers are constantly bombarded with many marketing messages.

Social media refers to all channels where people and customers are able to interact with each other via digital media that are public or accessible to multiple users. There are a number of social media websites, each of which has created its own model for enabling people to communicate with each other. Social media sites use content in various forms to build digital communities in which ideas and content are shared and discussion and comments are encouraged.

It is important to keep in mind, when planning a Social Media Marketing Strategy, that consumers will not always react positively to a company’s updates and content on social platforms. Negative comments about a brand and its products are inevitable even on the company’s own social media platforms.

Some companies will choose to exert control over comments on their own platforms and delete those that they feel reflect poorly on the brand. Other companies may choose to allow the negative comments to remain and respond in an empathetic way by offering an apology and/or a solution to issues. Leaving negative comments online, along with the company’s responses shows that the company is open, honest, and transparent. This also provides an opportunity to turn disgruntled customers into a brand evangelist.

It is also important to understand the distinction between “earned” and “paid” opportunities for “sharing.” For example, building “followers” or “shares” through the development and posting of valuable content is “earned.” Alternatively, several social platforms provide “paid” opportunities for advertising and promoted posts in order to share information. Earned and paid strategies on social media are not mutually exclusive and often the most effective social media strategies employ a combination of both.

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[Original article can be found at https://www.smstudy.com/article/why-is-social-media-important-for-business]

What is Affiliate Marketing and How Does It Work?

Companies may wish to partner with entities—such as publishers that are individuals or other companies—that can be beneficial to the brand. This can be a productive way for a company to expand its reach and marketing efforts.

There are two ways affiliate marketing is approached: companies offer affiliate programs directly to other companies/individuals, or they can sign up to be an affiliate through another organization. The company that is offering or controlling the affiliate program will pay a commission for every lead or sale the affiliate delivers to the company’s website.

Affiliate marketing is performance-based marketing where customers or partners are rewarded for designated actions that help market the brand. For example, a customer might mention in a Facebook post that he or she purchased a product and gain a certain number of reward points for their post.

The affiliate marketing program may be structured so that when more than ten friends like or comment on that post, the individual earns more points. The affiliate can then redeem these points against the company’s products or some partner brands.

Affiliate marketing helps widen a company’s reach exponentially using the most credible medium—existing customers. Websites offering price comparison services, coupons, shopping directories, and virtual currency platforms are the most popular affiliate marketing websites.

To look at affiliate marketing in a simple way, it is a cycle consisting of three key entities. These entities are the “merchant,” which is the brand whose product is being marketed, the “publisher” who is the affiliate, and finally the “customer.” In simple words, the advertiser pays a certain commission to the publisher for bringing new customers to the business.

Through affiliate marketing, merchants or companies gain a wider reach to sell their products or services, which is usually a key element to any marketing strategy. This approach can also allow the company to build a strong image or brand name.

One of the main advantages of affiliate marketing is that companies can gain more customers with limited dollars, since the approach is commission based or points based. However, there is the possibility that some merchants may incur high commission, maintenance, and initial setup costs, depending on the nature of the business.

Affiliate marketing is different from referral marketing in the way that it uses online marketing platforms—social media, search engine marketing, and more—to market the product while referral marketing is primarily based on word-of-mouth and relies heavily on trust and personal relationships between existing customers and prospects.

Affiliate marketing can be a powerful tool for a product brand because, in addition to helping grow the customer base, it can also aid brand presence in the market and create a buzz around the brand and its respective brand identities.

Attracting the right affiliates is very important for the affiliate program to be a success and in determining the volume that can be expected from the program. Updating content regularly and staying up-to-date with recent trends is equally important to help ensure that customers respond to the company’s offers.

A product or service does not have to cater to a niche market. Common-place brands, even fast moving consumer goods brands, can benefit greatly from affiliate marketing with the help of the right offers and efficient partners.

Getting products onto as many sites as possible is not necessarily the most important goal. Marketers must also consider the relevance, value, and traffic of the sites and platforms that one is able to reach.

There are some common mistakes affiliates tend to make, and businesses need to be aware of them. The job of the affiliate is to “market” the product, not “sell” the product. Selling is the job of the advertiser itself. Trying too hard to push customers to buy the product may only push prospective customers away.

Partnering with too many affiliates can be another mistake that brands need to carefully consider. Being everywhere can serve to dilute the customer perception about the brand and undermine its credibility. A crucial component to help ensure success with affiliate programs is to have robust analytics capabilities in place and to use them regularly. This will enable the company to understand which affiliates bring in more business, the value of that business, and where they should increase or decrease their efforts and investments in affiliate marketing.

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[Original article can be found at https://www.smstudy.com/article/what-is-affiliate-marketing-and-how-does-it-work]

Get found – optimize your website content for search engines

A key element of improving the performance of a website is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of affecting the position of a website in a search engine’s organic (unpaid) search results. A website that is search engine optimized will appear higher in search results resulting in a greater number of customer visits to the site. A high organic rank also helps build trust in the minds of the consumers as they generally associate a higher ranked website with being a strong, more established brand with greater reliability. This perception in turn leads to greater conversions on the website and supports the fulfillment of the corporate objectives for the brand.

Search Engine Optimization is an Internet marketing tactic that takes into consideration how search engines operate and ‘rank’ websites, how people search for keywords, the keywords that are most frequently searched, and the kind of searches (text search, image search, video search) that consumers are likely to use to learn more about the products, services, and business as a whole.

Typically when a business adds a page to its site, the various search engines send a spider (or web crawler) that stores the page on the search engine’s server and then indexes the page (i.e., gathers relevant information on the contents of the web page and the links that it contains) for fast and accurate information retrieval when an online consumer registers a search query on the engine.

Optimizing a website for online searches involves editing the content of the site, tagging or coding the pages to increase the website’s relevance to specific keywords, and removing barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.

Mobile SEO

Mobile devices and tablets are being used increasingly by consumers to access the Internet, therefore, it is important for organizations to ensure that their websites are optimized for mobile devices. Also, since many consumers use voice search features, websites and keywords must also be optimized to account for this changing trend among mobile users. When businesses optimize for mobile devices, they should ensure that the website is responsive to mobile devices and tablets; maintain a separate mobile site since mobile users prefer websites in which content can be consumed on a smaller screen and on the go, and provide only relevant content and maintain a light mobile site to ensure faster loading of the mobile site.

An Example of SEO Skills:

A website that sells kitchenware had issues with site structure and on-page targeting. Their category level pages were at subdomains (e.g. category.sitename.com) while each sub-category was back on the main subdomain (e.g. sitename.com/product2=url?xyz). Category and sub-category pages had a distinct lack of semantic HTML or term targeting. Steps such as getting H1 tags onto each page, improving title tag structure, clean & friendly URLs and adding internal links with appropriate anchor text were taken. The site saw ranking improvements across the board, which brought new traffic through head, mid and long tail terms.

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[Original article can be found at https://www.smstudy.com/article/get-found-optimize-your-website-content-for-search-engines]

Learn How to Structure Your Site for Optimal User Experiences

When building a website, one of the first things to be considered is its structure. This is fundamental to the success of a site and, if planned properly, can avoid many issues further down the line. Website architecture design involves planning the layout and design of the website, identifying the pages to be included, determining how consumers will navigate the site, and planning how these pages will link together. Based on the learning from market research and competitor website performance, the marketing team—along with subject matter experts, such as website developers—is responsible for ensuring the optimal website architecture design.

One of the factors that the marketing team must consider when planning the website architecture is click-depth. Click-depth or crawl-depth refers to the minimum number of links a website visitor must click in order to get from the “root” web page to a particular desired web page. The root web page is the page that displays when only the domain is in the URL (no path information). Businesses must ensure that the click-depth is kept as low as possible, so that users and search engines can reach any point on the site within a minimum number of clicks.

The marketing team analyzes how each page will be linked internally and externally, creating categories and subcategories within the site. While creating the website, search-friendly URLs should be used to increase the relevance of the links and help the organic ranking for the website. As well, duplicate meta tags, meta descriptions, and titles should be avoided to prevent confusing web crawlers.

In short, the website design architecture should assure visitors they are on the right page; ensure visitors can easily find what they are looking for by providing a clear navigation path and search feature; properly link together and by ensuring the various pages; and ensure that the website is easy to navigate not only for customers, but also for web crawlers, so that they can be detected by search engines.

Download the Digital Marketing Body of Knowledge for free at https://smstudy.com/dmbokguide/download-dmbok-guide

 

[Original article can be found at https://www.smstudy.com/article/learn-how-to-structure-your-site-for-optimal-user-experiences]

What are the technical skills required for developing a mobile app?

Generally, a company assigns a dedicated team to develop mobile applications for the organization. This team might be in-house, or the company may choose to assign the development work to an external firm. In either case, it is essential that the team has the necessary skills to develop mobile applications with the features that the company has determined are required.

A company may have fewer features in its first few apps, but it should ensure that the application development team has the requisite skills to create apps that have more advanced features as well, in case the company decides to add features at a later time. Given increasing mobile usage among customers across all industries, companies will, in all probability, need to constantly adapt to consumer needs and create more advanced mobile apps to keep up with mobile app trends and changing demands.

Also, several mobile application development platforms exist, and the team should ideally be able to develop applications across those platforms. However, if the team is able to identify and create apps for the most popular platform used by its target audience, then the company can test customer acceptance of its apps on the most frequently used platform before developing similar apps for other platforms.

The performance of mobile apps even on the same platform may differ based on the device type (tablet or phone) or the device model. Thus, the application development team must create apps that can perform equally well across device types and device models.

Some of the specific skill sets that a mobile app development team must have are as follows:

• User Interface (UI) design—This skill refers to the ability to design an app that has an attractive, easy-to-navigate, and responsive design. It requires both creative skill and knowledge of best practices in UI design for mobile apps.
• Database and hardware computing—This knowledge refers to the ability to create databases with an optimal data structure, specify interaction of the app with the device hardware, minimize power requirements, ensure security of the app against external threats like viruses and hacking, and allocate memory efficiently.
• Programming—Programming languages translate business logic into a machine-readable language. It is important to write programming code efficiently and in modules so changes to the code can be implemented easily. The team should have knowledge of using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for various mobile application platforms. These APIs allow programmers to create apps without requiring access to the proprietary underlying code developed by the mobile application platform companies. Preferably, the team should also know how to use interfaces that allow one to create mobile apps that can be deployed across different mobile application platforms.
• Business understanding—The app development team should have a basic understanding of the business’s overall Marketing Strategy and how the app fits into this strategy. This understanding will give the team a sense of the target customers, which may further enable them to create an optimal UI and ensure the final product supports the intended positioning of the app in the mobile app store.

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[Original article can be found at https://www.smstudy.com/article/what-are-the-technical-skills-required-for-developing-a-mobile-app]

Learn How an Effective Website Can Boost Your Business

An effective website is a critical component of a company’s overall online success. Company’s website serves as the central hub and foundation for its online activity. With a plethora of available website designs, the digital marketing team must determine the appropriate and optimal design and message.

Besides having a basic understanding of the technology on the website, the digital marketing team must also consider the following facets of creating a website.

Consumer Perspective

• Relevancy—Age, cultural nuances, geography, and other demographic factors of the target audience will influence the type of content on the website.

• Usability Design—The digital marketing team must take into consideration how technically savvy its target customer is. If the target customer does not generally have the appropriate comfort level with technology, the team should design a simple, text-based layout with easy navigation and basic features. If the target customer is comfortable and familiar with the Internet and computer use, a more intricate, interactive, and information-rich website can be implemented. The design of the site should depend on the expectations of both the users and the company. In some cases, the development might focus on consumer engagement, while in other cases, the design might be oriented toward supporting task-oriented behavior such as the ability to make changes to one’s account, purchase a product or service, and so on.

Site Development Perspective

• Purpose—Companies maintain a web presence for a variety of reasons. While some companies use websites as their main method of selling their products, other companies have an online presence just to support their business, message, and brand position. There are companies that use websites as a public relations (PR) tool, to enhance brand value in the minds of their customers, or to evaluate product feedback from customers that may help in understanding customer needs, general communications, product updates, and sales. The digital marketing team is responsible for ensuring that the website is designed to meet the overall strategic objectives outlined in the Marketing Strategy.

• Planning—The digital marketing team must work with the website development team to plan the execution of the website, beginning with creating a storyboard for the website; listing functional requirements; building the database structure; developing wireframes; and determining hypermedia linkages, search engine key words, graphical design components, user interface designs, audio/video sources, animation, and text requirements and formats.

• Performance— The digital marketing team also must consider the logical design of a good website, compare the performance of competitor websites to identify best practices, check for effective performance across browsers and operating systems, and perform usability testing of the website to ensure that it is easy to use.

• Maintenance—Websites create an online presence for a brand, so the marketing team must ensure that the website is maintained and tested regularly. Downtime on a website may adversely impact the direct online sales of products and may also taint brand reputation in the minds of consumers.

The brand messaging on the website has to be in-line with the overall brand message and must stay relevant to the target audience.

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[Original article can be found at https://www.smstudy.com/article/learn-how-an-effective-website-can-boost-your-business]