Internet marketing: optimising search results

In the first part of this series we discussed several tips on what every C-level executive or business owner needs to consider regarding web marketing and how to divvy responsibilities for the success of  internet marketing. Continuing the discussion, here are some more.

• I speak to many small and medium sized business owners who think that Google stacks the deck to ensure that paid advertisers win out in organic search too.  Even the European Union recently made such allegations and is reportedly researching this.

I consider this far-fetched because what is being overlooked as an explanation of this divide is how the more successful companies are using AdWords to set the slower moving (but typically the long term higher return on investment) website optimisation  efforts on track.

Your company can use very simple ''A/B testing'' to constantly find better ways to convey your messages in the details of web and design to your site visitors so that they convert to leads - experimenting with new keywords, for example.  However these two aspects of internet marketing are handled - outsourced, in-house or something in between - there needs to be someone who is keeping an eye on how to marry AdWords to feed search engine optimisation.

• Many companies are significantly overpaying for websites developed by outside web developers. Usually it is because these web designers are developing idiosyncratic content management systems and cobbling together multilanguage coding for the site in ways that both limit a site's ongoing expansion and keep your company going back to them for upgrades, oftentimes paying high fees with the simplest of tweaks.

Worse yet, many web designers use design methods that are not search engine friendly and only consider search engine optimisation as an afterthought, if at all. 

What every business owner needs to know is that there are now several open source platforms for websites such as Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal, and a plethora of web design templates in these languages that may very well be a better design and navigation for your company's website and at a fraction of the cost.

Any IT person worth his or her salt can master these open source platforms for web development in short order. Even if you decide to outsource web design - usually the wisest course unless you happen to have a lot of in-house talent - the lifetime costs of web development will be dramatically decreased by using open source frameworks.