I try to make it a habit to go to the gym on Saturday mornings. It’s not quite as habitual as I’d like it to be, but I’m working on that. A few weeks ago, I headed for the treadmill with the goal of doing 30 minutes of intense cardio. In my gym there are 15-20 TV’s in the cardio area. I was looking for the best treadmill in front of something that would keep my mind far away from the pain. I jumped on in front of Law and Order. I knew that the interesting storyline and the twisting plot would keep me entertained. The only problem was I didn’t have any headphones and the TV’s don’t have closed captioning.

What I thought was the best location for my run soon proved to be rather disappointing. Without audio or closed caption I was lost. I couldn’t tell if that was the good guy or the bad guy in the interrogation room. I soon lost interest, but what did get my interest, you guessed it, the cartoons. I don’t know the name of the show, yet even still today I distinctly remember the story line, without audio or closed caption mind you. I watched as the hero daughter of the show worked to save her father from his own stupidity. But I can’t tell you a single detail from Law and Order.

The Point

It’s the simplest messages that often leave the strongest impression on us. We often get approached by businesses that have a super complex message that they want to cram into a 1”x2” newspaper ad or worse yet, there logo. But let this little observation show you that simplicity is the key to getting your target market to remember you. Short, Clear, Simple, Concise – the recipe to success.

Merging Old and New Without Wiping Out Branding Efforts

Warren Lamb & Associates has been providing secure electronic data interchange and electronic commerce technology strategies for healthcare, financial, and media industries since 1989. So, prior to their website redesign, they had established a strong presence in their industry.

Crashbox sought to give the Warren Lamb & Associates website a professional facelift without nullifying any of the company's branding efforts.

The existing Lamb logo and existing company colors were incorporated into the site to maintain company identity while still allowing a complete overhaul of the existing website. These elements help Warren Lamb & Associates' return visitors answer the first question a website needs to answer.

Where am I?

A complete website redesign without some of these transitional elements might leave return visitors confused as to whether they have come to the right website and might cost the company some critical business.

The Site Structure of the Website Redesign

Site structure of the new website redesign revolved around allowing site visitors to find services in two ways.

First of all, if a visitor knew what business area they data security for, they needed a quick way to find out if Warren Lamb & Associates provided services in that area. So a mouseover drop-down menu was implemented to give home page visitors a quick list of links to the variety of business areas in which Warren Lamb & Associates specialized.

Secondly, visitors in specific industries such as healthcare, media, and finance, who were seeking ways to secure their digital documents and securely transmit those files, needed a quick look at the industries in which Warren Lamb & Associates specialize. Drop-down menus from the home page along with introductory copy on the various industries the company specializes in, allow visitors to quickly identify their industry before learning about the various services Warren Lamb & Associates provide in those industries.

Going Wider Instead of Deeper

Finally, the website was redesigned in such a way that each page of the site can easily be reached from the home page. Visitors rarely go too many clicks deep on a website. If the site doesn't have quick and easy access to all content, the website loses visitors, and, consequently, customers.

So, the Warren Lamb & Associates website was structured in such a way that every single page can quickly be reached from the home page.

A good threshold for website structure is four clicks deep. Visitors really don't want to click more than four times to get the content they're looking for. The new Warren Lamb & Associates site takes navigation ease to the next level making it simple for visitors to find the information they're looking for and make a quick decision.

Website Redesign Facelift

Website redesign is in a completely different category from websites that are designed from scratch. Navigation speed must be improved, conversion rates increased, and a professional edge must be presented. However, if the company isn't re-branding, careful attention must be paid to maintaining consistency in the transition.

If you're thinking of redesigning your website, contact Crashbox Creative. We'll help you do it right.

Using Visuals to Convey Your Message

We've all heard the old saying "a picture is worth a thousand words." It's become such a well-known saying because it's so true.

Your sales message, whether online or print, needs to convey a great deal in a very confined space. There's often a lot you need to tell your prospective customers, but you just don't have room. Design can speak volumes literally in an instant.

At a glance, prospective customers get a sense of what your product or service can do for them. They get a feel for the type of company you are. They sense your company's quality standards, and more. And, they aren't even conscious of it because powerful design speaks volumes in a moment.

Good Design and Layout Captivates

Take the most incredible marketing copy ever and present it to your prospective customers with a shabby design. You'll absolutely ruin any marketing power the piece might have.

Ugly or mis-sized fonts, poor color choice, or clunky graphics can destroy the potential of a good marketing piece.

On the other hand, great design grabs attention. It stands out among the myriad of other marketing pieces flooding your prospective customers. Then, once its grabbed their attention, the design pulls them into the copy by catching their attention in micro-bursts.

Embedding in Long-Term Memory

Every Christmas one of the most popular commercials is Coca Cola's polar bear commercials. What stands out in our memory about those commercials is the polar bears. The message we get from that image is one of family spending time together during the holidays, enjoying each other's company, and having a lot of fun. And, Coke is a part of it all.

What words appear during the commercial? None. We get all those warm holiday feelings and associate them with Coca Cola, and the commercial doesn't actually use words to convey their message.

That's the power of great design. It can create, in a prospective customer, all kinds of feelings and desires. It can give your company the exact image you want, whether that's professional or family or fun. Invest in good design. It really pays off.

Wait! Where are My Title and Description

The title and meta description are both found in what web designers call the header of your page. It's just a little bit of code that a web developer puts into your website. The code looks like this...

<title>Title and Description for Marketing and SEO | Crashbox Creative, LLC</title>
<meta description>Title and description are for more than just SEO. They are the only thing that gets searchers to click to your site. Craft them carefully.</meta>

If you look way up at the top of this browser window, you'll see one of the things the title tag does for your website. See how the top of your browser window says "Title and Description for Marketing and SEO | Crashbox Creative, LLC?" That's one of the things the title tag does.

More importantly, the title tag shows up in search results. Take another look at the sample title and description above. When this page shows up in search engines, the title tag becomes the blue link you see at the beginning of each search result. The description is the text below that link.

Both title and description play a major role in how you rank in the search engines, but that's not all they do.

To Click, or Not to Click

Imagine for a moment that one of your important web pages has been well optimized for search engine ranking and comes up at #1 on Google. Does that mean everyone's going to click on it?

Not necessarily.

If the title and description for the second position on Google appear more likely to be what the searcher is looking for, they're going to pass up your page for the next one in line.

On the flip-side, if your page only ranks #3 or #4 but has a better title and description, people will pass up #1 and #2 to click on your page.

Your title and description need to be optimized for search engines, but they also need to have a lot of marketing pull. It's a balancing act, no doubt about that, but if you balance the two nicely, you'll get a lot more traffic to your website.

Search engine rank is a key concern for Discount Online Parts. High search engine rank means more traffic for the outdoor power equipment dealer and adding more pages means more opportunity to rank well in search engines.

Solution: Add a Blog to the DOP Website

One of the best ways to add more content to a website is by developing a blog.

When regularly maintained, a blog continually adds pages to a site. Adding pages makes a website fresh, and that's something that search engines like. Each page gives us the opportunity to optimize another page for ranking in the search engines.

In addition, a blog provides customers with information they are seeking. Buyers trust sellers more readily when the seller has proven that they have the buyer's well-being in mind.

We established a blog to accomplish both these things for Discount Online Parts.

Result: Increased Sales

One of the blog posts hit #1 on Google within a couple weeks. A prospective customer read the post, went to DOP's website, and made a purchase.

Discount Online Parts was thrilled about the impact of their blog.

The customer found some helpful information about the part and found the part at a great price. Discount Online Parts not only made a sale, but, most likely, a return customer when other parts are needed.

Biggest Marketing Increases

According to the 2009 Media Survey Results & Analysis released by Emarketer.com,

• Investment in email marketing (emails and e-newsletters) is up 40%
• Interactive (blogging, social media, etc.) is up 31.3%
• And search marketing is up 23.5%

as major companies are moving their thinning marketing budget to the lower cost electronic world.

Many regional business owners ignore marketing moves like this thinking that their businesses are far to regional to benefit much from electronic media. However, local search has been on the rise for years and yellow pages usage is on the decline.

It appears that, rather than reaching for the yellow pages, local shoppers are spending more time reaching out to Google for their regional shopping needs.

Biggest Marketing Cuts

Marketers are cutting back on several areas of marketing in order to invest more in electronic media. The biggest marketing cuts being made in 2009 include the big-ticket items like:

• Print down 37.5%
• TV down 21.4%
• Radio down 8.9%

These cuts don't necessarily indicate that these methods of marketing are no longer valid or that they are being cut permanently. The likelihood that marketers will re-invest in these methods of marketing once the economy bounces back is pretty high. However, cutting back on these types of more expensive is allowing many companies to weather the economic storm.

If you’re running radio or tv ads, you might want to sit down and consider whether you might be able to move to more electronic marketing and save yourself some money while still getting the sales you need to sustain and grow your business.

As business owners, we need to find ways to tighten up our spending. If we're able to do that now, while the economy is struggling, we stand to do very well when it bounces back. Our marketing budgets will grow allowing us to implement a wider variety of marketing options.

SEO basics boils down to two things: On-Page Optimization and Link Building.

On Page Optimization

On page optimization is about getting the right keywords on your site and getting them in the right positions on your page.

The Right Keywords

Great keywords have two qualities. 1) Lots of people are searching for the terms, and 2) the terms bring people to your site who are actually interested in what you have to offer. If either of these conditions is missing, you don’t have a great set of keywords.

For example, the keyword phrase “healthcare” gets millions of searches every month. If your golf pro shop ranked high for that keyword phrase would get millions of views. Unfortunately, most of those visitors would not be interested in your pro shop. Even those who enjoy golf wouldn’t be interested because they’re searching for healthcare at the moment.

On the flip side, if you target the phrase “callaway golf club clone” as your keyword phrase, you’re definitely targeting the right group of people, and you might even rank #1 for this phrase. The problem is that no one is searching for it. If no one is searching for the term. You get no traffic.

You need to find a nice balance between these two factors to have an effective set of keywords.

The Right Positions

If you search the internet looking for stuff about keyword positions, you’re likely to come across the term “keyword density.” There are many advocates that say 3 to 5% of the words on your webpage should be keywords. Others say density isn’t a factor, placement is the key.

The debate on whether keyword density is a factor in SEO continues, but one thing all SEOs agree on is that you need to have your keywords in the following places:

• Page domain or address
• Title
• Meta description
• Headers
• Image alternate text
• Bold face
• Body of the text
• Links that link to the page you’re optimizing

You need to be careful not to stuff any page with keywords though. If a page reads like it’s optimized, it’s over-optimized.

Link Building

Link building, or off-page optimization, is one of those SEO basics practices that many people don’t do. It’s definitely the more difficult of the two factors of SEO (on-page and off-page). However, it’s the more critical of the two.

Too many people think they can do some keyword optimization and their page will climb to the top of the search engines. That’s just not the case. 25% of SEO is on-page optimization. The other 75% is link building.

Link building is the process of getting other pages to link to your website. Why is it important? Because every link to your website is like a vote of confidence in your website, as far as the search engines are concerned. More votes equals higher search engine rank.

A word of warning about getting inbound links though. Don’t think you can buy a couple hundred links to your site. There are several reasons this won’t work.

• Search engines don’t like purchase links and they’ll either penalize your site or ban it altogether. They want to see it happen naturally.
• If 200 links to your site appear in a single week (and you site isn’t cnn.com), that’s a red flag for the search engines.
• Search engines are good at finding and shutting down link farms. Chances are your purchased links will only be active for a couple hours anyhow.

Where should you get links:

• General directories
• Niche directories
• Blog rolls
• Blog post contents
• Article distribution
• Blog and forum comments
• Websites in your industry

In a natural state, you put up a website with good content and naturally occurring keywords. Over the course of several years, people stumble across your website, like it, and link to it. That’s the natural course of events for a website.

All search engine optimization does is speed up this process. We take what happens naturally and make it happen much quicker. This gets you on the search engine map faster than would ever happen naturally.

There is a lot more to SEO than this, of course. But these SEO basics will help you understand the process of SEO. For more information on SEO basics, you can download our white paper on search engine optimization.

A recent survey from the AMA (see full survey here) picked the brains of marketers from around the country. The result boils down to 4 key concepts to get the most out of your marketing now and into the future.

1. Focus on your company’s message, not your price point

Sales are temporary. If you cut your prices now, you send the message that your product has always been overpriced. Instead, focus on what makes you different and valuable in your industry. Take a close look at your current message to see if there is a better way to connect with your target market.

2. Avoid unprofitable market segments

It’s one thing to make an effort to expand your marketing to new segments, if your key target market is sustaining your business. Now may not be the time to do that. On a tight budget, find out who is most likely to buy your product and go after them and them alone. One anonymous survey respondent said and I really agree with this, "Fish where [your] fish are." I can’t think of any better advice for either now during a downturn, or in the future when we’re out of this mess.

3. Be innovative

This is a time of change. Seems like every day a new gadget comes out that’s going to make my life easier. Some are fads, some change life as we know it. If your company’s not changing, you’re getting left behind. For some industries change may be as simple as getting an ecommerce web site, for other industries change will come as new initiatives to be green.

4. Sustain your brand

This quote from Nancy Costopulos, Chief Marketing Officer of the American Marketing Association says it all, "The key to success for marketers in this economy will be supporting the short term, and managing for the long term. It is more important than ever that marketers simultaneously run a sprint and a marathon."

Several studies have shown that investing in branding now helps companies emerge stronger when the economy comes around. Getting your name out there now will take discipline to see that customers will come to you when they need you. That might be tomorrow, but most likely it will be when they feel safe enough to afford you.

Conclusion

Cutting your marketing budget now might save you a few bucks. But what you have to gain by being different and visible now is the best investment you may ever make in your company.

When Does Google Index?

Typically, Google’s spiders are on about a 10-day rotation. Every 10 days they’ll come back to your site to see if anything has changed. If something has changed, they’ll plan to come back in another 10 days. If nothing has changed, the spider will figure he doesn’t need to come back as frequently.

That said, sometimes Google’s search spider has trouble finding your site in the first place. Generally, there’s no trouble getting indexed for the first time, but if a couple weeks go by and the spiders haven’t found you, you might need to help them out a bit.

Helping the Search Engine Find Your New Website

Start a Blog

There are a couple reasons I suggest starting a blog as a first attempt at getting Google to find your new site.

1. A blog forces you to continually add content, so the spiders will return on a regular basis.

2. It can be a great way to introduce the spiders to your new site.

If you have a blog on your site, you can subscribe yourself to the blog in a feed reader. You can publish a post and ping blog directories announcing the new post. You can ask other bloggers to link to your blog.

These tips will help the search engines find you in the first place, but there are other benefits you’ll get from having a blog. For instance, search engines like sites with lots and lots of pages of content, and a blog has a lot of content (if you keep it active).

Get Some Inbound Links

The search engines will also find you quicker if you get links from established websites to your site. So, visit several blogs or forums in your industry, make some comments or post some replies, and add your website to the comments. When the spiders index the blog or forum next, they’ll see the link to your site and visit it.

Again, this tactic has more than one benefit. If you want to rank higher in the search engines you need inbound links to accomplish that. So, getting inbound links will not only help your site get found in the first place, but it will help you in the long run as you try to rank higher in the search engines and get that free search engine traffic.

If you’re trying to get your site found by Google and are having a hard time, try some of these tips and you should be in Google’s index in short order.

More Services Than Ever Before

We’ve added a host of products and services to our quality web design, logo design and branding. Now you can get electronic newsletters, SEO, professional copy writing, print media, and lots more.

We wanted to offer the opportunity for clients to get all their marketing and advertising done in one location. Our vision is help small to mid-sized businesses get affordable marketing materials (both electronic and print). Offering more services allows our clients to get everything done right here at Crashbox Creative.

Offering a More Complete Marketing Package

Not only does offering more services allow our clients to get everything done in a single location. It also makes it easy for us to create a seamless marketing package. All the parts work together as a whole to give our clients the most powerful marketing presence they can have, rather than the disjointed marketing effort that comes from outsourcing these to numerous companies.

We’re also able to structure pricing to meet the needs of any budget. If you have a smaller budget we can accommodate that with the most powerful tools that will give you the biggest bang for your buck. However, with each increasingly larger package, we can add tools that, working together, will give your marketing more effectiveness and efficiency.

Ultimately, we’re thrilled to be better able to serve the clients we work with by adding more services and more choices. Which makes us better able to meet the marketing needs of our clients.

Saving Time

The internet makes communication fast and easy, but that doesn’t change the fact that collaboration across the country or around the world slows down the progress of projects. While other firms are chatting via Skype and sending files with email, we simply turn a computer monitor around and ask, “What do you think of this?”

We like saving our clients time because saving clients time also saves them money. The faster our designs can be implemented, the quicker our clients start improving conversions.

And that’s what we’re all about. Creating designs that help our clients make more money.

A Seamless Marketing Package

Your entire marketing package needs to send a single message. If your logo presents a warm, friendly image, but your web content is filled with sterile corporate language, your visitors are going to click away.

You want everything in your marketing campaign to mesh. Your print advertising will not only sell your product or service, it will drive traffic to your website where people will find out more about your company. Your website needs to pick up where your print ad left off.

On the other hand, people will be coming to your website from search engines. Your website also needs to take these people from where they’re at in the sales cycle and move them to the point where they become your customers.

It’s so important that all your marketing tools work together. If any of these tools doesn’t sync with the others, it can make your visitors freeze. And that usually means you don’t make a sale.

A full service design company saves you time, maintains consistency, and, quite frankly, a lot of headaches.