Like many of you I’ve been told to do more with less. Whether you’re a marketer or business owner we have smaller budgets and need to gain more traction. The landscape of how to communicate your business to the public has changed and shifted so much in the last five years. I find myself reading, tweeting, and learning. I love it. There is an amazing opportunity now to ramp up your companies’ presence online for very little spend. So, I thought I would share my results and what has been working for me lately.

• Get your website up to snuff. Whether you use Drupal or WordPress, do something. The platform doesn’t really matter. Get a good designer to help you make a splash but develop your site on a platform in which YOU can make edits, upload new images, change copy when you need to. You’ll look like a superstar—it will take minutes out of your day to upload that latest press release, news coverage, or new image. Plus you’re saving your company money by executing these small changes yourself. For me WordPress is what I use for my art website and Drupal is my company’s platform. If implemented correctly both platforms are easy to maintain and update.
• Advertising – If you want to skip print media for now try Google AdWords. It’s inexpensive but you will need to check and fine tune your key words. It will take some time to find the right ad content for your business so start out slow with a small spend per day.
  • SEO – I am no SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert but I’ve done the following to help my companies’ ranking and also employed the same techniques for other businesses:
    • Google Map Profile – It’s free—just go to Google and create a Gmail account for your business and a map profile. This helps index your site and elevate organic searches for your business.
    • Google Analytics – Also free—set it up on Google by copying the code they give you onto your website. You really be able to see who is visiting your site, where they are coming from, what pages they are visiting—the reporting is very detailed and you can cut and paste this onto any report for presentations.
    • Web copy – Writing the actual copy for your website does take a lot of time. Key words and repetition within the site is what Google and other search engines look for. Spend time thinking about what key words are revelent to your business and then see how you can weave these into your overall copy.
    • Website updates – It’s important that you update your website as often as possible. Whether you’re posting a news coverage, sending out a new update on Twitter, LinkedIn or posting to your blog this tells Google that your website is relevant and an active business.
    • Social Media. We’ve all been hearing about it. It’s free—yes it takes up your time but get your feet wet and start trying them slowly. For me I’m a one person show so I symphathize with many of you who are operating with limited staff. I started by creating our Linkedin profile initially and just recently started Twitter. Think about social media as platforms that work together. Twitter is your platform to send links to the world and short reminders. Blogs are where you should be posting longer content.

• Create your company’s Linkedin profile. It does matter—whether you’re an individual business owner or a large company—this is the online hub to “record” yourself to the world. If you’re an individual business owner—this is your online resume and fact sheet. It’s really the same for any size company. If you work for a larger organization rally employees to create profiles on Linkedin. Get HR to post that next job opening. This one is easy for you to maintain—once your profile is created you’re just editing and maintaining. Linkedin is a very standard profile all companies should have.

• Create a Twitter profile. Keep it simple. Don’t overwhelm yourself. For me it’s literally just me supporting Twitter so I sent out a tweet once a week. I also “build” content in the background and try to send out more content when I can. Take advantage of these platforms—they’re free and just require your time. This is another platform that you can get your subject matter experts within the company involved. Collaborate with your business experts and sales to create short, content subjects that your clients care about. It’s not about how great your company is. Put yourself in the seat of the customer—what do they want to know? What criteria or search is involved in reaching your company, your product, or your service? What’s your view on the your industry? This type of content will create traction and get those followers!

• Blogs. Do you need to post to your blog daily? If you can but try starting by posting once a week. Remember this is your platform to post longer content—at least 300 words. Test out different types of content you’ll find what will work for your industry. Keep it fun—post something that isn’t too time intensive on your part every now and then.

• Video. Many of us don’t have the budget to hire a professional video expert. Buy a video camera and tripod and start recording—for my company’s website it’s about our business process and value proposition so maybe we’ll record projects, brown bag seminars, public speaking events and even a quarterly “tv” spot to our customers–you get the idea. Post to YouTube and get it on your website.

Here are some great companies and sites to visit for services:

• 415 Systems – http://www.415systems.com – WordPress web design, SEO and SEM services
• Hubspot – http://hubspot.com – Online Marketing tools helping you to find customers
• Af83inc. – http://af83inc.com/ – Drupal web design, SEO and SEM services
• Google Tools – http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/services/var_1.html

See Wendy’s Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/wenbryant.

The good news is that today’s web design tools are leagues ahead, easier to use, and often don’t require any programming whatsoever, though all sites benefit from the occasional code tweaking if you have the resources.

Today’s web site platform of choice is the Content Management System – or CMS – and the most popular ones are open source and therefore free. The choice between Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress is complicated, but in almost every case, WordPress is the platform you should use. Here’s why:

1. It’s not just a blogging platform.

Although WordPress.com gained fame for blogging, the WordPress platform as a whole manages content – some of which may be a blog. You can manage any type of data in WordPress, which means you can set up everything from product catalogs to social networks all within one space. Having a blog on your site is a great idea, but it’s not even required to use standalone WordPress.

2. All the complicated stuff is already done.

You know when you were planning to hire somebody through your creative agency to write the user login system? Or the voting section? Or user polls? Or image handling? Or the Facebook integration in a shopping cart? Or the thing that talk to the search engines when your site changes? Almost anything you can imagine has already been written in the form of plugins, most of which are free, open-source, and install in two clicks.

3. It has better support than most paid software.

Many IT departments drcry open source as having no corporate ‘paid’ support – but I’d take the 100,000-strong community of pro WordPress developers anyday over calling Microsoft’s tech support line. Outside of Linux and Mozilla, WordPress arguably has the best support and development community of any active software project on the planet. If you have a problem, it’s very easy to get high quality responsive help.

4. It’s easy to completely change the look of your site.

If you’ve been through site refreshes that seem more like intricate software upgrades, you won’t believe the simplicity of WordPress, where the appearance is all packaged up into ‘themes’.

You can have multiple themes – regular corporate, holiday season, Patrick’s Day – and switch them at will with two clicks without bringing the site down or needing an army of support staff. There are also thousands of free templates on the web, and many good designers.

If you want to design templates yourself, take a look at the award-winning Artisteer product, which is used by many WordPress designers. Artisteer builds templates with no knowledge of code needed.

5. It’s scalable.

You probably have ambitions of your site one day being mentioned by Oprah, or showing on the first page of Digg, but are wondering if your web server can handle the traffic. WordPress is one of the few CMS platforms that serves trillions of pages daily, and if sites such as CNN, Wall Street Journal and ZDNet are surviving perfectly well with their WordPress engines humming, your site will be fine too. Admittedly, they will be some tweaking, but the core platform is built for your first viral posting.

6. It’s SEO friendly.

Aside from the truly excellent All-in-One SEO pack, WordPress sites are well understand by Googlebot and are one of the easiest types of site to optimize. One of the most arduous parts of SEO is the mechanical, step-by-step routine of getting pages ready, and almost all of this is handled automatically. If every site was built on WordPress, the missing Title and Description attributes that I find on 50% of the sites I analyze would actually be there.

7. You and your team can edit content.

Web designers and home builders have one thing in common: they make more money out of changes you make than the original design. I recently heard from a colleague who paid $1200 to have Twitter and Facebook icons added to their site footer, which is quite frankly just shameful (it’s two lines of code). With WordPress, you can hire a designer and SEO firm, set up the platform, and then make changes to pages, posts and layouts without having to cut checks. Editing WordPress pages is just like editing a Word document.

8. WordPress takes less than a minute to setup.

While this may seem hard to believe, it’s true. The one-click install package, available as a zipped installation for techies or Fantastico script for the rest, sets up the database and program files in seconds. Upgrades are also one-click.

9. You can leave anytime you want.

While it’s unlikely you ever will, I always find it comforting to find that my data is not tied into any one particular piece of software. WordPress offers a simple XML export function, so that you can move to another platform anytime you wish.

10. WordPress makes you focus on content.

The part of my job I most enjoy is providing content. While it’s great to talk to companies about the look and feel of their sites, I consider this more of the ‘setup’ phase, and ultimately successful SEO is always about content. Because WordPress handles so much of the technical side for you, it frees up resources to create news, articles and pages that will keep visitors coming back for more.

Does your company need a website facelift? Are you on the fence about which platform you need? No problem – we can provide a WordPress consulting session! Please contact us at wordpress@oneuproar.com.

That being said, here were his major observations:

• Don’t change old URLs if they don’t comply.
• Don’t over-do the mechanics of SEO: write about what you know and love, and ranking will follow.
• Build a reputation through original research, live blogging, finding a creative niche, making lists, creating code, being conversial (sometimes) and meeting people through social media.
• Reduce bounce rate by using ‘Show Related Posts’ feature.
• Security: keep WordPress updated and use .htaccess to limit IP access to your administration.
• Use Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics to check most popular referrers and manage 404 errors.
• 90% of WordPress installation are only in existence to created to create spam.
• The number one request from site owners is to improve their ranking in Google.
• GoogleBot considers over 200 factors in ranking pages. Pages, not sites, are ranked so the focus should be to improve the quality of every page on your site..
• “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of SEO” in the pure mechanics.
• Google rewards sites that are relevant and reputable, and inbound links from other pages with a high PageRank helps reputability. A description of the PageRank algorithm followed (see the presentation for details).
• Avoid the obsession with backlinks since low value inbound links don’t help your ranking. High quality and relevant links do.
• Translate your site into real English not technical speak or jargon – this helps both humans and search engines.
• Use the Google Keyword tool to find synonyms and commonly-used search terms around your topic.
• Don’t engage in keyword-stuffing techniques, since your pages will be penalized.
• In permalinks, use the custom structure ‘%post name%’ for maximum SEO usage of the URL (and put keywords in URL). Don’t update the old URLs if they don’t comply since this will result in broken links.
• Don’t over-do the mechanics of SEO: write about your area of expertise, and ranking will follow.
• Build a reputation through original research, live blogging, finding a creative niche, making lists, creating code, and meeting people through social media.
• Reduce bounce rate by using the ‘Show Related Posts’ feature.
• Security: keep WordPress updated and use .htaccess to limit IP access to your administration.
• Use Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics to check most popular referrers and manage 404 errors.

While these tips were geared towards bloggers, they’re relevant for every business website that wants to attract more traffic. The WordPress platform has simplified the mechanics of SEO, and now the challenge is to create high quality and relevant content that will increase your reputation – and consequently improve your PageRank.