In a rush to make websites visually appealing and search engine friendly, most of the businesses forget a very important aspect of website designing – customer friendliness. The result is a narcissist website that dwells greatly on the business’s products, team, offerings, locations etc. but has no place to deal with customer issues.

Most customers do not have enough time to read every word on a website. They simply scan it for ‘relevant info’ and this is simply what narcissist websites miss!

In contrast, an intelligent website has the right information, at the right place and does not leave the customer stranded. Here’s what an intelligent website must do:

• Provide to-the point statements
• Proactively address common concerns and questions
• Offer active online self service support
• Encourage a dialogue with customers

While designing your website the focus should be the anticipated needs or concerns of your customers rather than self praise. Too much of “me me” stuff may simply irritate them away. Tell customers about yourself but do it in a way that is helpful for them as well.

Social media and SEO may not look like brothers in arms, but they cannot succeed without each other either. While social media stimulates off-site conversation and interaction with your customers, SEO aims to pull traffic to your website. However, these two marketing disciplines have more in common than you may think. A recent article in presented a nice summary of the intersections. Here’s a summary:

• Social media is all about generating interesting content to share with social audiences. As this content is shared, distributed, and discussed on forums, it creates linking opportunities. The quality and quantity of these links can have a big impact on your SEO
• Social media can help you draw traffic to your website for less competitive keywords.
• Social media users tend to search for terms that are lower in the sales funnel. You can use this knowledge to optimize your PPC spend.
• Social media can offer deep insights into search terms that are popular and useful to your audience right now. This kind of real-time optimization can be rich dividends on SEO.
  

At the end of the day, we have to stop thinking of search and social media as two separate marketing silos. Just as online advertising may affect the in-store customer experience, social media impacts brand awareness and SEO in online marketing. It is essential for marketers to integrate SEO and social media in the right way to leverage greater benefits.

Primary motives of any social media campaign are buzz creation and engagement. But social followers want something beyond the regular.

A recent Marketing Sherpa survey showed that discovering a great deal (sale, special offers or discounts etc.) remains the top motivation of those who befriended or followed a brand online. Looking for savings is followed closely by learning about new products, features or services.

The survey results support the findings of another study by Razorfish, that listed searching for exclusive deals and offers as the primary motivation of US Internet users for following brands on Twitter.

The tip for marketers here is that only by sharing interesting content that users care about, along with exciting deals and discounts, they can engage and motivate customers to spread marketing messages further.