Multiplied Marketing on the Web

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
Web Marketing Today, Issue 40, January 1, 1998

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It's very easy to get lost on the Internet. With tens of millions of Web pages out there, how does a company get found? One answer is what I call "multiple marketing." (Note: this has nothing to do with multi-level marketing, an entirely different concept.) If searching for a company's offerings with Alta Vista is like looking for a needle in a haystack, one way to increase the chances is to multiply needles.

Multiple Articles

Let's say you're a human resources consultant who publishes a quarterly newsletter sent via snail mail to your clients and e-mail to your online contacts. When you put it on your site you can configure it as one long 30K file, or you can break it up into ten different brief articles all joined together by links on that issue's main page. The "one long file" method is much tidier and somewhat less work for the webmaster. But from a marketing standpoint, the chances of someone finding your site with a search engine goes up ten-fold when you use the multiple articles approach. Ideally, each article would have its own title, META tag description, and META tag keywords. When you publish this quarter's issue, make sure you advertise that issue's linking page to the six important Web search engines: Alta Vista, Lycos, Infoseek, HotBot, Excite, and WebCrawler. They are supposed to spider each link on that issue-linking page so that the content of each of the issue's articles is now indexed on each search engine.

Multiple Doors of Entry

Closely related to the multiple articles strategy is multiple doors of entry. Yahoo treats the Web as if each visitor looks up the business's address, 145 Main Street, and enters by the front door. But search engines have made the Web much more helter-skelter. Expect people to come in by the warehouse dock or the employees' door at the side. It's your job to make them feel welcome wherever they enter and help them find their way to other parts of your site, especially the parts of the site that promote your products and services. This requires an intuitive navigation system on every page of the site that can take visitors to every other main section of the site without getting lost. You don't want people to enter some obscure page and then fall back into the trackless wastes of the Web. Draw them in.

Multiple Links

Analyzing traffic also indicates the most-visited pages on our site. I make sure that each of these pages has clear and multiple links to the sales side of our site. One might be enough in theory, but people often don't read carefully. Have a link or two in the text. Then have an icon, which twinkles and entices the visitor to click on it, and of course, a full navigation system on every page.

Multiple URLs

This may sound a bit overdone, but go back to our quarterly HR newsletter for a moment. What if one of articles about overtime pay is not only one of ten articles in the December 1997 issue, but it also appears as part of a separate section of the website focusing on California employment laws. Now the same article does double duty and has two URLs:

http://www.californiahrpractices.com/newsletter/97dec/overtime.htm
http://www.californiahrpractices.com/california/laws/overtime.htm

On some Web search engines it has twice the chance of being found (though some will group the several URLs together).

These could be separate Web pages altogether or the same physical page of code, which appears in two places on your site using symbolic links. Unix has the wonderful capability of linking a kind of "shadow" page so that when it is accessed it will show the "real" page it is linked to. Consult a Unix manual for details on how to do this if you have telnet privileges to your website. If you are in the /laws subdirectory for example, this could be linked as follows:

ln -s ../newsletter/97dec/overtime.htm overtime.htm

This just clutters up Web search engines with phantom pages, you protest. True. But it enables potential customers to actually find you by multiplying the number of pages from which you can be reached.

Multiple Domains

Perhaps you were not aware that it is possible to point several different domains to same space on a Web server. Most Web space can be found, for example, by using your ISP's domain name. Our much-used overtime page could probably also be found at

http://www.isp-domain-name.net/~califhr/newsletter/97dec/overtime.htm

You don't want to use your ISP's domain name to index your site (even though it's possible), since if you move to another Web hosting service, those pages would end up as dead ends. For $100 each you can obtain new domains from InterNIC, each good for two years. So instead of just californiahrpractices.com, you could also set up calhrpractices.com, westernhr.com, and goldenstatehr.com.

Potentially, you could have each of these domains pointing to exactly the same Web pages, each with its own set of unique URLs. I'm not saying you should do this -- I don't do it -- but letting you know that you could.

Multiple Companies

When searching for all the information I could on merchant credit card accounts to put into our exhaustive Electronic Commerce Research Room (http://www.wilsonweb.com/research/), I began to find several articles which looked exactly the same as several others. Perhaps someone had shamelessly copied someone else's hard work. That's definitely illegal and prosecutable under Federal law. I dug further. Each appeared to be a different company, but when I got to the links at the bottom of the page, I found that these identical pages from different "companies" all funneled into the sales page of one company. Later I talked with the site owner. At that time his relatively small company "owned" merchant credit card accounts on the Net under half a dozen different company names. It was impossible at that time to search for "merchant credit card" and not find his message multiple times. Was it legal? So long as each of the companies is doing business legally in his state, I don't see any laws against it. Think of it as a sort of private franchise. While I don't endorse this approach either, I use it to illustrate the various ways that multiple marketing can be used on the Web to amplify your company's profile in the Web search engines.

Yes, businesses can use the unique structure of the Web to make themselves appear somewhat larger than life. And while it may needle other businesses lost in the Web's haystack, multiple marketing will definitely increase your chances of being found.