A practical introduction to promoting your website through Inbound Marketing. This presentation explains the need, benefits and basic principles of Inbound Marketing online in plain English. Topics covered include SEO (Search Engine Optimization), copywriting for search engines and users, the role of Social Networking and blogs.

1. INBOUND
MARKETING
Magnetize your website
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

2. TRADITIONAL MARKETING becomes less effective
Outbound marketing techniques become less effective
as savvy consumers inundated with over 2000 marketing
interruptions per day, figure out creative ways to block
unwanted messages.
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

3. A NEW APPROACH INBOUND marketing
Inbound marketing is about creating and maintaining a network of connections to your
website. Setting up numerous signposts that drive interested customers to your company’s
website. Enabling these prospects to discover your proposition naturally through search
engines, directories, the blogasphere and related websites.
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

4. BENEFITS What can it do for my site?
Higher ranking on search engines
making your website more visible
Increased traffic to your site
A greater proportion of interested and
highly targeted visitors
Improve brand awareness online
Benefit from new business contacts and
inbound links (people linking to you)
Website gains in reputation and authority
Can be implemented within every organization
with minimal training and limited resources
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

5. Content
Search engine
Syndication
optization • Authority
• Content
• Awareness
• inbound links
• inbound links
TECHNIQUES
How to get results
YOUR
WEBSITE
Weblogs Social Media
• Fans • Friends
• Content • Content
• Inbound links • Inbound links
Apart from being able to
Article
write good copy non of these
Marketing
techniques requires any great skill
• Authority
and they can be mastered by any organizations.
• Awareness
• inbound links
Any and all of these techniques will have an
incremental effect on your website, but when
combined their cumulative effect is significant.
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

6. Finding the needle in a haystack!
...or why Search Engine Optimization is important
• The top 30 results on a search page get
over 90% of search traffic.
• The top 10 results receive nearly 80% more
traffic than those in positions 11-30 achieve.’
• According to a 2004 survey from Marketing
Sherpa, in the six months after search engine
optimization, clicks on organic search results
increased an average of 73%.
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

7. Search Engine Optimization
Essentials for improving your sites search ranking
Content is still king: How dynamic, relevant and
1 well constructed a websites content is influences its
reputation with search engines.
Link building: the number and quality of links to your
2
site is like a voting system. These inbound links are seen
by search engines as recommendations. As in most
things quality trumps quantity.
Meta data or information about information:
3 Webpages contain unseen information that search
engines use to identify your content. Namely Title tags
(describe what a specific webpage is about) and Meta
tags (keywords focused on your site).
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

8. WEB CONTENT Writing for two audiences
Internet copy has the twin objectives of satisfying the search
engine as well as the visitor. Writing copy for the internet
must combine both creativity and analytical insight.
• Lay the trail with keywords: The placement of keywords is
crucial as they create a trail for search engine spiders to follow.
• Add signposts with keyword phrases: Expand your base of keywords
by adding relevant keyword phrases e.g. executive coaching where coaching
would have sufficed. Using different forms of important words avoids
repetition and optimizes the page for keyword variants.
• Related keywords are important: Google’s ranking algorithm uses
'Latent Semantic Indexing' to gauge the relevance of a webpage to a
keyword. Which simply means that when analyzing your web page for
a keyword Google's ontological analysis expects to find words that are
related e.g. golf, sport, tee, clubs.
• Back to basics: Writing for the web is not just about keyword
enrichment. Eventually it boils down to drawing the visitor's
attention, holding his interest and persuading him to act.
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

9. LINK BUILDING sign posting your website
Search engines equate link quality and popularity as a part of their
ranking algorithms. A link back to your website from another site suggests to
search engines that they trust you and promote your site. The more back links you
have throughout the internet from respected websites the better.
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

10. HOW DOES IT WORK understanding linking
All major search engines equate link quality and
popularity as a part of their ranking algorithms,
but what does that mean?
LINK POPULARITY refers to the number of hyper-links pointing to
a page on the Web. A popular Web site tends to have large numbers of
these back links, and obscure Web pages have very few.
LINK ANALYSIS evaluates the relevance and value of a link in
reference to the web page where it appears. It takes into consideration
elements such as layout, relevance to content and most importantly
authority.
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

11. LINK BUILDING seeding your website
Outbound link
Inbound link
Recommended
website
Internal webpage
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

12. Inbound link
Inbound link
Inbound link
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

13. ARE YOU LISTED? Register your site with web directories
There are 2 main types of directory:
1. General website directory - a broad 2. Specific website directory - dedicated
listing of websites separated into broad categories to a particular business, topic or industry and broken
e.g. dmoz.org or yahoo directory. down into specific sub categories. e.g. Accounting web.
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

14. WHICH DIRECTORY?
General Web Directories Rated by Inbound Link Quality (ILQ)
This list of Web Directories contains the Top Directories rated by the quality of inbound
links each directory has (April 2009). The ILQ Score is taken from the number of inbound
links each directory has from dir.yahoo.com, DMOZ, EDU and GOV sites.
Courtesy of The SEO Company website
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

15. META DATA Information about information
Choosing the right keywords and phrases for your website is
an important part of the search engine optimization process,
making your site visible to search engines and searchers alike.
Points to consider:
Select keywords that describe your company, its services
and website from your target audiences perspective.
People search using plain language not jargon!
To get a clear idea of what keywords people are actually
searching on you can use online tools such as Word Tracker
or Googles keyword tool.
If you have not targeted specific and precise keywords
for your website, then you will not be easily found.
A good title tag is like a well crafted blog title namely descriptive,
provocative, concise and above all clear. As title tags are displayed in
search results they play a crucial role in deciding which link a user selects
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

16. CONTENT SYNDICATION
Promote your content
One of the best ways to attract visitors to your
website is by providing related sites and social
media sites with quality content (editorial, video,
presentations etc.) relating to your subject area.
Benefits:
• Creates awareness
• Positions your organization
as experts in a given field
• Indirectly aids search engine
ranking via link popularity
What to do:
• Distribute your content via RSS
feeds to other online resources
• Write and participate on blogs
• Write and distribute expert articles
• Share presentations
• Provide press releases to popular
blogs within your field
• Share videos on YouTube etc.
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

17. WHAT TO PROMOTE? and where to publish
VIDEOS PROFILES
PHOTOGRAPHS PODCASTS
BLOGS
PRESENTATIONS
IDEAS/OPINIONS
EXPERT ADVICE
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

18. SOCIAL MEDIA creating a buzz
One of the most effective methods to increase sales and gain new customers is to
get the right people talking about your organization - creating a buzz. To gain the
attention and trust of people who could start the conversation with prospective
new customers. Social networks are ideally suited to this task allowing you to market
your organization more intimately, communicate directly with your customers and
receive honest and frequent feedback.
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

19. BLOGGERS Rise of the super advocate
quot;super advocatequot; - the corporate organization's biggest ally or enemy. Highly influential
figures, outspoken and with a loyal following, super advocates will have the power in the
Web 2.0 world to make or break a brand's reputation at will.
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

20. WHY ARE BLOGS IMPORTANT?
Given that only a small percentage of Internet users regularly
read blogs why are they important for inbound marketing?
Simply put, the information doesn’t remain in the bloggers’
Exponential effects
domain; it is fed through search engines towards mainstream
users and 40% of Internet users say search engines are the
Increased traffic
first place they go when researching products and services.
Blogs consistently rank high in search engines due in part to More links
the their high concentration of keywords. Blogs fill search
engine databases with relevant keywords. Relevant, because More content
most of us search for words and phrases we use every day,
the same words and phrases used in a blog post.
Each posting has one subject and is invariably concise and to
the point, consequently their keyword density is extremely high.
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

21. THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT YOU!
but who should we be listening to?
Not all bloggers are equal, in the same way search engines rank your site, organisations
such as Technorati and Nielson’s Buzzmetrics rate and monitor blogs. Start by researching
which blogs and social sites are talking about your company and its products and then join
the conversation.
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

22. FOLLOWING THE CONVERSATION
Conversation Tracking
When a blogger publishes a post and other bloggers link to it, the original post (or quot;seedquot;)
becomes part of a conversation. From those seeds sprout other links, and so and and so on,
until it creates an entire conversation. Conversation Tracking provides a snapshot of weblog
quot;conversationsquot; by creating a threaded view of the conversation.
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

23. WHAT NEXT 10 ideas to get you started...
Publish your ideas. Distribute and market white papers,
1 presentations and articles etc. on relevant websites such
as Slideshare. Contribute to a blog.
Join the conversation. Use technorati to find and asses blogs talking
2 about your business and link to them, write comments, offer content
e.g. press releases or exchange articles.
Social Networks. Build your online network on sites such as Linked-in
3 by connecting with professionals you know or with whom you share
interests. Join discussions where you refer (link) to your website or
blog. Join or start an appropriate group in your area and/or industry.
Use Several Domains. Consider using more than one domain if you
4 have topics that warrant their own websites. Search engines typically
only list one page per domain in their results. Another reason is that
directories typically accept homepages. Having more than one domain
means that you can get additional directory listings.
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

24. WHAT NEXT 10 ideas to get you started...
Ride Coat tails. Contact representative websites that align with
5 your business and ask them to link to your site. Create a
directory page on your site with links to sites relevant to your
business offering.
Use Directories. Ensure that important directories and portal
6 sites within your field have descriptions and links to your site and
products.
7 Create RSS feeds from your site.
Link Deeply. Inbound links should point to as many pages
8 within your website as possible. This lets search engines know
that you have numerous pages of relevant content.
Don't overlook the basics. Ensure that your web pages have
9 concise, clear descriptions and make use of popular keywords in
their meta tags. Give titles to your links, this can result in search
engines giving higher rankings to your page.
Anchor text optimization. The inclusion of important keywords
10 in your anchor text can make a difference in the final ranking of
your site’s pages. All search engines that matter, give significant
weight to the anchor text on your web pages.
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT

25. THE END
Iain Davenport, March 2009 ©
Inbound Marketing
E-BUSINESS CONSULTANT