Tips for successful website marketing

Today’s tough economic times make it even more important to make the most out of your website. After all, it’s the only vehicle that can provide information, generate sales, and support customer service on a 24 x 7 basis. But getting traffic to your site still remains a bit of mystery to many companies. For this reason, we’ve put together some helpful tips to help you drive more customers to your site. We hope you find them useful!

1) How does your site stack up?

• There is no point in investing money in site marketing if you are driving customers to a bad website!
• Is your site designed for your target audience?
• Do you have appropriate, up-to-date content?
• Does the design support your overall branding message?
• Does it reflect your commitment to customer service?
• Compare your site to three of your major competitors
• Do they have features or content that yours doesn’t?
• Are they making it easier to do business with them instead of you?

2) Make sure your site isn’t search engine un-friendly

• Avoid putting too much content in graphics, flash and pdf’s – they are invisible to the search engines.
• Be sure that all pages are appropriately tagged with headers, meta tags, and meta descriptions.
• Focus on the home page – Google still considers the first page of your site as the most important in terms of content. Be sure to ‘seed’ the text with important key words and include text links to sub-pages.
• Make sure that content throughout uses plenty of important key words.
• Consider creating branded satellite sites under separate domains which act as landing pages.
• Try to establish in-bound links to your site from other sites. Search engines look at what sites are linking to you as a vote of confidence. The more inbound links you have from other sites, the better your search engine rankings will be.
• Avoid link-share agreements and other paid services to generate inbound links…Google will penalize you!
• Consider adding a blog or a forum to your site. They help generate content for important key words and provide helpful information for your clients as well.
• Install free tools like Google Sitemap.
• Review your site traffic patterns regularly – Google Analytics is a great tool.
• Never rely only on positioning in the organic section of Google and other search engines.

3) Consider pay-per-click advertising like Google AdWords

• Adwords is the only guaranteed way to get top placement in Google.
• Google now makes 85% of its revenue from paid listings and has become the most popular search engine in the world.
• The budget required to maintain top positioning depends on a number of factors: how many search terms you are bidding on, how popular those search terms are on the Internet, how many other companies are bidding on the terms, and how much you are willing to pay for a new customer.
• Review your competition to see what terms they are bidding on.
• Establish a daily budget to be sure that you are spending within your comfort zone.
• Be sure to establish tracking controls and regularly monitor accounts for ROI.

4) Utilize social networking sites

• Social networking and comment sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Yelp, and Examiner have become a unique opportunity to communicate marketing messages to potential customers.
• A strong presence on these sites can help broaden reach in a very cost–effective manner.
• Determining the best fitting sites, creating a presence and monitoring the message is an ongoing effort.
• Note that these sites are not appropriate for all businesses.
• Be sure to monitor comments and respond promptly – remember, markets are conversations.

5) Consider online advertising

• Consider listings or banner ads on industry sites.
• Locate user interest sites where your customers congregate.
• Be sure to verify valid statistics from all non-audited ad sites.
• Establish methods to track response.

Need help with your online marketing strategy? Desktop Solutions can help! Contact Lynn at (631) 493-3422 x101 or lynn@desktopsolutions.com to discuss which strategies would work best for you!