It’s time to design your web site. I want everyone to be my customer, you say. I want to be all things to all people, you say. Sound familiar? Hopefully not, because to be all things to all people means to be an indistinguishable pile of mush that will find its way to the bottom of the search engine results, and be confusing and uninspiring to users.
Okay, so to counteract the mush and make magic, you’ve got to put a stake in the ground. Period. You’ve got to figure out for whom you’re designing your web site. This is called “Defining Your Target Audience,” and it is an essential part of good search engine optimization. Why? Because good SEO is all about putting the focus on your site visitors. In order to do so, you need to give them good, quality content, which in turn will attract good, quality, relevant sites to link to yours, therefore ushering in a new group of potential customers. And provide good content and attract quality links, you need to know who your customers are and what they want.
Any English teacher worth her salt will tell you that when writing anything, there are two key concerns. First is purpose: what do I want my audience to think, do or believe. Second is audience: who, exactly, is it that I want to think, do, and believe these things.
It comes down to this: let’s say you have a website where you sell upscale items such as Godiva Chocolates and fancy fountain pens. To market such products to teeny-boppers and teenagers is probably not going to be real effective, so therefore, a “hip” approach for your web strategy is not what you need. A little research shows you that your typical customer has an annual income of over $100,000, has a graduate degree, owns 2 or more homes, and is over 45 years old. So there you go, now you have enough information to design a strategy and a website to target that market segment.
How do you go about defining your target audience?
You gather data. If you already have a web site, invite visitors to fill out a form in exchange for a free gift. The gift could be a downloadable, e-book, or a gift certificate for your products. If you have a database of email addresses, send out a survey, and again offer the free gift as an incentive for them to complete and send it back.
What data should you gather? Get as much of the following information as you can:
- Age
- Male or female
- Geographic location
- Income
- Profession/type of work
- Marital status
- Education
- Attitude toward your product/service category
- Attitude your product/service
- Interests/hobbies
If you’ve been in business for a while, you may have a good feel for who your typical customer is, but still try to glean as much specific data as you can.
What do I do with this data? Now that you have this information, you are prepared to design and produce an effective, targeted website and accompanying marketing program, be it email, telephone, or direct mail. First, write down your goal: What do I want my audience to think, do or believe after or while visiting my website. Second, write down your objective: Why do I want them to think, do or believe it? Third, look at your demographic data and place it alongside your goal and objective. The ideas for your web site marketing plan should start flowing.
I had a harrowing experience last night. I was perusing the web for an article I’d written recently on search engine optimization to see how many pick-ups it had gotten. Unlike previous article checks, this time I used the article title, “The Rhetoric of SEO” instead of my name as author for the Google search. Well, guess what? As I happily examined the pickups, most of which gave me proper credit as author as well as links to our site, I came upon one forum entry that used the exact title of my article, and verbatim text of a portion of it. And, here’s the clincher: it was posted by a forum administrator who presented it as his or her own work.
This is theft. Plain and simple. And unfortunately, the Internet is rife with it. The cyber-thieves gamble on the numbers game: with the sheer massive volumes of material on the Internet, what are the chances that the author will find her plagiarized work? So now the question becomes, what can be done about it?
First, if you are a website owner or webmaster, populate your site with good, quality content that you either create yourself, pay someone to create for you, or use material from public access sites such as Ezine Articles.com (http://ezinearticles.com/). If you do use such material, make sure you follow the terms of service guidelines (http://ezinearticles.com/terms-of-service.html) or you can find yourself in a heap of trouble.
Or suppose you find other information or articles that you would like to publish, and it is not in a free access zone, so to speak. You must contact the author of the article and ask for permission to publish the article. And when you do publish it, you must give the author the proper credit. It’s just this simple: if you have any doubt about whether you need the author’s permission, just go ahead and request it. Always ask FIRST, and publish later!
If you include information on your web site such as statistics or someone else’s ideas, then cite the material. Always give credit to the source of those things that are not your own. In addition, instead of copying and pasting material in verbatim from another source, even if you are planning to give the author credit, paraphrase it instead. And, even though paraphrased, still include the proper citation. As for what citation format to use, your best bet is to select the one most frequently used for your discipline or business area, and then do a Google search on it. Some of the more commonly used ones are APA (American Psychological Association), MLA (Modern Language Association), and the Chicago Manual of Style. Most colleges and universities have ample material to guide you through the creation of proper citations.
Second, if you are a contributor to forums, listservs, newsgroups, etc., never, never, never present anyone else’s words as your own. It is downright unethical, and just remember: what goes around comes around.
Third, if you are an author, make it a habit to peruse the web at least once a week to see where your work has been picked up. Perform three searches: one on your name; one on the title of the article; and one on a unique string of words from the article that you put in quotes in the search box. If you find that your work has been used without permission or proper credit, take immediate action by first contacting the plagiarizer, and then the administrators of the site. But a caveat here, as angry as you may be, and believe me, I know what that anger feels like, try to be courteous and professional in your dealings, but at the same time, firm about your request to either have your material removed or the proper credit noted.
When I discovered my plagiarized work, I immediately wrote to the person who posted it, and made a post on the forum announcing the plagiarism. The forum was attached to a website, but it had no contact information, and was not US-based. In addition, the “thief” was from India. Though I wanted to raise Cain with the web site owners/administrators, I had to be satisfied with having my work removed from the site within an hour of my email and posting. Hopefully, at least, this thief won’t strike again, but something tells me not to be so optimistic.