Sarah Rayner

Sarah Rayner: 2009-09-02: Sarah Rayner has a new website. It's not one of mine, it's been created by a friend (hopefully still).; It's built almost entirely using Flash. That's a bad thing. The devil makes shiny things to distract us from what we should be doing.; When the Google robot visits this site, it will see nothing barring the metatags: the page title: "Sarah Rayner - The Creative Pumpkin", the description and the keywords which it ignores.; Not only that, when you work out the navigation (unusual navigation is bad, imagine cars having different controls) and click to see a new page, what you're seeing is another part of the Flash presentation, not another webpage. So Google sees this website as simply one blank page.; Google needs content, mainly in the form of text. Flash has hidden the content from Google. That's a real pity since it seems Rayner is a copywriter.; It's sad too because, except for the page sliding effect which isn't worth the downside, there's nothing there that couldn't have been done by bog-standard website means.; So. How to market this site on the Internet given there's nothing we can do about the on-site content? I'm speculating, I don't know Rayner at all, so it all depends what she wants to do. For all but a social media strategy, this website will hold her back in terms of getting a position in the Google search results. So I would be tempted to use it as a brief and rebuild it properly, but she's probably already spent her money for the website and it might even cost more to rebuild it properly so that would be hard to swallow.; So we've basically got two strategies left: build inbound links (because they will contain text Google can use to classify the page), and social media .. build a fanbase on Twitter / Facebook et al. (update: I forgot: PPC too of course); With inbound links, basically the value that needs to be implemented is "how can I contribute to the Internet today?" We would need to work out in what way Rayner would be confident contributing .. would she have an hour a day to write a blog? A couple of hours a week to write an article? Would she be willing to get involved in forums? Are her paintings for sale, should we post them in online galleries (are they, actually, relevant at all or is it really a hobby)? We need to create a content machine, and I'd guess she's unlikely to want to outsource any of the creation of that because text is her business. But she might want to outsource the publishing and publicising of what she creates so she concentrates on creation, then gives it effectively to her online publisher who does all the crazy Internet stuff that turns it into traffic and kudos and interest and enquiries. That is the main hope of raising her position on the search results with this website.; With Web 2.0 and social media, it's about thinking through all the ways people can and might want to connect with her, from RSS feeds to YouTube channels, from Facebook to Twitter via LinkedIn, and from Podcasts to newsletters and creating material for her and her 'fans' or followers through the channels that work for her.; All of it is about giving and contributing in order to get back kudos, social standing and reverence. So when it comes to it, people will turn to her for help. Here the website isn't dragging us back, so at least we'd be battling on equal terms.; That should be implementable with a few hundred pounds a month ongoing to create and implement the strategy, assuming Rayner creates the core content.; But the truth is, that all sounds like hard work and if she's a freelance copywriter she doesn't need a huge amount of work to keep going. These strategies are forced upon us by the initial website because without the ability to test and evolve the website we can't do the central, core website thing which is to be there on the first page of Google when someone types in that they want what we sell.; So I'm back to the website. I'd rebuild it properly and go from there.

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