Website Marketing Tips

In today's information age, it is imperative that your company or personal website be marketed online in an effective and strategic manner. Everyone with a website should consider search engine rankings, increased website traffic, and conversion of visitors into customers a vital aspect of their long-term success. It's not enough to put up a website and hope it magically gets found by customers and search engines. It won't be! Regrettably, too many businesses do just that and land up losing out on the opportunities the web offers. You wouldn't open up a brick-and-morter store and then sit by the window until someone walks in would you?

You must actively target your market and give them tangible reasons to come to your site. All businesses from small start-ups to large corporations benefit from some level of internet marketing. The only differences are the objectives, timeframe, and budgets set out by each. Even personal hobby, blogs, and MySpace websites need some thought about bringing people to the site otherwise what is the point of posting content to the Internet?

The following areas are important avenues for online marketing of your website. It's a good idea to consider them and implement some or all of them for a complete solution.

High Quality Professional Websites
Informative Content
Search Engine Optimization
Pay-per-click Campaigns
Affiliate Marketing
Opt-in Email Advertising

High Quality Professional Website

Customers are increasingly checking out companies websites for more information. Based on a recent study, they know within about three seconds if the site is 'worth' staying at. Yes, you heard it right, three seconds. Time is valuable online and your competition is always just a click away. And, unlike in a store or on the phone, a sales person can't quickly grasp what your customer is looking for and sell your services.

For these reasons, it is vitally important to market your business with a professional website - one that's aesthetically pleasing and functional at the same time. It's not economical to try and market a poorly constructed or amateurish site. A1 Website Templates offers over 6,500 high quality website templates developed by professional graphic and web designers making it easy to choose a stylish, good looking pre-made layout. After your website template purchase, you should consider the following:

How should I organize my content so that it's easy to understand? What pages should I create?
How can I make my navigation as clean and logical as possible so visitors can quickly find the information they seek?
How can I customize my template so that it matches my company brand and so customers recognize my site right away?

Informative Content

Customers are almost never going to initially come to your website for your phone number or email address. You need to give them a reason to visit so that you can sell your products or services. There's nothing worse than clicking on a link to 'read more' about a subject only to find that it's just as ambiguous and uninformative. We recommend writing as much explanation about the product or service as you can while still keeping it concise and interesting. Having well written informative content on your site has the following two advantages:

Gets indexed by search engines and helps bring people in
Answers questions your visitors may have in their minds that may be preventing them from taking the next step and contacting you

Also effective is to offer additional information that your customers may find valuable. Think about what would bring you to your website if you were a customer and what would keep you coming back for more?

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is much more complex than simply submitting a site to Google®. There is no quick fix. Increasing rankings takes diligence, experience, and determination. The first thing we recommend is determining what your main key words and key phrases are. The more specific the better. That is, 'internet' is a poor keyword choice because it encompasses everything online like email, web hosting, and DSL. Once you establish your key phrases, include those in your text and headers. Depending on your goals, current situation, and budget, we recommend implementing some or all of the following strategies:

Review accessibility and text-centric features such as strategic header placement, alternate text, and title attributes
Perform detailed keyword density and weight analyses to see if your key words and phrases are included in the page
Analyze your competition to see what they're doing and what key phrases they're targeting. Are they missing something that you can capitalize on?
Submit your site to global search engines
Reorganize navigation, structure, and/or web page content
Increase high quality inbound links from relevant sites
Develop a site map page to give search engines one convenient spot to find and index all your pages

For more information and help with search engine optimization and marketing your website, please see Traffic Travis.

Pay-per-click Campaigns

One of the most popular types of web marketing campaigns are those where another site displays your advertisement in their relevant content and you only pay when someone clicks the link and visits your page. Google Adwords is probably the most popular pay-per-click advertising but there are many more as well. All offer varying benefits. These strategies are a great way to increase traffic to your website because the ads are displayed on pages relevant to your business. That means a higher chance that your target market will see your ad and visit your site. Those types of visitors are highly sought after because they're interested in what you offer and easier to convert into customers.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a great way to drive traffic to your site and gain new customers. A partnership is developed with another site to send customers to you in return for a commission on each sale. Companies such as Wal-Mart and Amazon.ca use these strategies because they realize that they accomplish the following two very important tasks:

Act as part of sales team driving new customers to you
Create another inbound link to your site from a page with relevant content

Opt-in Email Advertising

You've probably seen the check box at the bottom of a form that asks you whether the company may send you promotional material or the like in the future. Or, you might have signed up for an e-Newsletter. If you 'opt-in' you'll receive periodic emails about the latest sales, news, or industry trends. This is not spam because you've allowed it to be sent to your inbox. If one of your customers has agreed to receive your information, they are already interested in your company and services and more likely to be receptive of what you have to say.

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