Life Delights

If you do not have a properly-built website driving customers to your salon or health spa, you are actually missing out on the single biggest resource of new clients in the world today, costing you thousands every year! Don’t toss money away on a inadequately designed, unproductive website, as an alternative make your web site an crucial component of your business.

The 6 most frequent and expensive mistakes that salon owners make with their web sites.
Expensive mistake No 1: Not owning a website!

A website is definitely an incredibly profitable instrument in your salon organization — you completely need to possess one also it ought to be nicely developed and taken care of, promoted correctly and very profitable. It’s great to open the salon each morning and have online reservations to begin the day — actually you can make money via your website when you sleep!

Expensive mistake No 2: Failing to efficiently market your web site
When your site is up and working, you will still have to promote it to generate traffic. The procedure of promoting and refining your website to maximise the response rate is on-going — you will continually experiment. Consult your web site developer to provide you with a truly lucrative marketing plan.

Pricey mistake No 3: Selecting the wrong Web site Developer

The vast majority of spa website design developers are not marketing professionals. Unless your website developer really is aware of direct response marketing and how clients make purchasing decisions, don’t count on them to compose your message or develop your web site. Mistakes can turn out to be very expensive. But.if you can produce a web site that markets your salon, then the cost is worthwhile.

Pricey error No 4: The incorrect content.

Get the maximum quantity of suitable customers to identify themselves when they visit your web site. This can be done by simply providing free info and/or a excellent offer. Compare this with the ’salon library’ type of sites. In an attempt to supply a site ‘rich in content’, the actual entire text of the brochure may be discovered online. Why would a potential customer make contact with the salon when they can simply read the brochure, leave the site and move on?

Pricey error No 5: Image Style Websites

Image style sites don’t help to make the telephone ring. People don’t want to be sold, but they do want to be helped. Successful marketers realize that they must concentrate on a prospect’s wants — this is called ‘direct response’. By its very name is self-explanatory. It is created to get an instant response, action, visit, call or purchasing decision from the reader. It directs people to action, it compels them to contact you. You must give them a reason to contact you, with a direct response website, people will leave their contact information.

Expensive error No 6: Failing to constantly test and measure.

Many web sites are by no means tested. The genuine advantage of a direct response website is that it permits you to test whether modifications have enhanced the effectiveness of your website or not — given that you have built in the statistical tools required to track any adjustments. Once you have a prospect’s name and contact info, you are able to follow-up with them to deal with their specific needs. When you do not get their name before they leave your website, chances are they’re rarely going to get in touch with your salon. Any increase in this response rate will certainly go right to your bottom line!

If you’re not on the internet, you’re undoubtedly behind’

Local search and small business local search is something that should be taken seriously by all businesses at this point in time. With the proliferation of mobile devices and the release of new operating systems by Google, we are on the verge of a dawn of domination of business by local search. Local business listings and local search will drive all business, both online and off. Smart businesses will see this, and take proactive positions now to position themselves to be winners in this new time. Much like the changes brought about by the phone book and phone system, radio, and television, the internet and specifically, local search now, are about to drive the way things are done. Coming soon will be the “Local Search Revolution.” revealing the secrets you need know for your business to not only survive and thrive through the current economic climate and beyond, but to catapult your business beyond your wildest dreams.

Internet marketing and local search play together hand in hand for intelligent business to work their way out our current recession also. By intelligent positioning in local search, and smart internet marketing, as the internet is the delivery mechanism for local search, business will come out ahead and win. Others will be left in the dust and fall victim as most businesses will.

To facilitate your local search research, learning and work, as well as your internet marketing pursuits, you will need to read, research, and discover quite a few things in order to make intelligent decisions for yourself. To do it much quicker with the mastery of a few skills. Most internet marketers get side tracked with the latest tactic, the most recent method, and the newest course. If you fall into this category, you may want to consider the mastery of speed reading and increase your reading comprehension. You can do this by going to http://speedreading.informationlanding.com and discovering how Howard Berg, the world’s fastest reader, unlocked the secrets he found to become the worlds fastest reader and increase his reading comprehension in the meantime also. He is dedicated to helping you unlock your full potential.

All the great efforts made for making your own site, goes in vain when your site doesn’t bring you business. The reasons can be anything right from less traffic, to less page-per-views, or lesser PageRank. Upon serendipity of elaborating all of the above said problems, I would land up in search engine marketing basics.

- Less Traffic means fewer hits to your site.

- Fewer pages per views mean users checking your site but not getting interested in clicking on other pages. They don’t find it interesting to surf through.

- Lesser PageRank. PageRank is Google’s way of measuring the quality of a site. They will give your site a rank marking out of 10 as maximum. So your site may stand 0/10 initially. Then it may acquire higher PR (PageRank) according to the above said factor enhancements. It is to be noted that a PageRank of 4 is thousands time better than a PageRank of 3.

- If your site doesn’t appear on any search engine result pages (SERPs), upon searching for any keyword, then it may take a backseat.

So here is some advice to what can be done to improve it.

For outrageous results on your business-through site, make your site lucrative in terms of design. Such imponderable designing factors as aesthetic sensibility and human-user friendly site-making can be an obstacle. But you have to go through each and every aspect of your site to make a mark through your site. So design terminology would go as follows:

The architecture-savvy site should or I would say must have Home, About us, Contact us, sitemap, products, articles. All these links and others should be present on each and every page of the site, so that these are accessible from every corner of the site.

Interlinking of the site pages would make an impact, so I will add-up here that sitemap plays a vital role in connecting your site in a star-shaped connectivity. Whereas, product information to users can be conveyed via articles. So articles need to be well placed and comprehensive in language.

I would like to share my experiences on how your keywords can be found out by a human user, who doesn’t know about your site. A normal person goes to internet and opens up any search engine to look for the information on the product he/she wants to purchase. Now he is landing up on the pages where a site of your competition tops and the user clicks and buys the necessary things; you stand to be the loser. Here comes the role play of keywords on your site.

Your site should be full of keywords, which are, or related to the products on your site. The articles would be enriched with these keywords. Title, description and images of the pages should be named with the keywords.

If your site is selling an ebook on meditation, then the keywords will be the same as the product and they will read as “ebook on meditation”, “find peace online”, or “online meditation book” on your site. More these kind of keywords are accommodated on your site, the more your site could be searched out by a user via using any search engine.

Is there any special way by which search engines work and pick up the site for the keywords?
Yes, they do. They have automated crawler or human auditor system. The crawler acts as a scanner, a human user uses the search engine to find out ebook on meditation, he types in the same keywords, and the search engine crawlers at the backend does the scanning on the server database to find out the same keywords. If they find the keyword on a genuine site and appearing explicitly and not spammed, then they will show that site on top. The keyword search via automated crawler will be broken down into a few steps as follows:

- Crawlers will check out for the content of the site, expert pages (expert pages are the product related pages, or articles), title and descriptions of the site.
- They will also read the headings on the page which is mainly H1 sized headings, and yes if they read as “ebook on meditation” then an added advantage for those keywords to your site.
- Crawlers will also look for the Meta tags, Meta descriptions and Alt tags used.
- Crawlers are more prominent and effectuously look for the anchor text pointing towards your site. Anchor text has been explained below:

Anchor text (link text) is the text that points towards the page or resource for which the link has been placed. It is the normal text attached to the URL of any site. Clicking on that text it will take you to that URL/site. A link can lead to either a page on the same site (internal link) or to a page on a different site (external link). Thus, a user who clicks on one of your site’s internal links would be directed to another page on your site.

Linking further is bifurcated into two parts, namely Incoming and outgoing. An incoming link is an external link that appears on a different site and points toward your site, while an outgoing link is an external link that appears on your site but points toward a different site.

The link text is also known as Title and it’s followed by a nice description. Description again can contain keywords of your site; it’s a little advantage to your site but surely is a benefit. Links are usually placed on the Links page or Resources page of the site; some sites name these pages as “Other sites” or “Other cool links.”

A title should not exceed 65 characters but we recommend a title of not more than 55 characters and a description of not more than 250 characters in length as per latest strategies of search engines.

The more the number of links pointing towards your site, with the right anchor text, the more meritorious results of your online presence for that keyword.

If you want to know more on types of linking, and what kind of links benefit and what are the hazards of linking for your site, please feel free to contact author. He shall serve you for no charges.

About the author: Sandeep Juneja is Manager-Internet Marketing, in a leading Company and is an avid researcher in the SEM segment.

© Copyright 2005 Sandeep Juneja

This Article is Copyright protected. If you have any comments or would like to have this article republished free on your site, please contact the author here: sandboy@rediffmail.com We just require all due credits carried; and text, hyperlinks and headers unaltered. This article must not be used in unsolicited mail.

Sandeep Juneja is a search engine marketing specialist and an avid researcher. He specializes in Links exchange strategies and internet techniques. He loves to learn from others and wants to explore search engine marketing.