6 Easy Tips for Successful Website Marketing

These days, it’s not just enough to have a website for your business: you need to market, optimize, and enhance it. Just a few years ago, all you needed to do was create a user-friendly website that provided the basic information about your business and services to get traffic and see meaningful results in your customer base and bottom line. However, today the online market is positively bursting with millions of businesses, and making it to the top of the search engine ranks – and catching the interest of your consumer demographic – requires a lot more conscious and continuous effort.
The good news is you don’t have to settle for being another fish in the online ocean; you can stand out by following these six easy website marketing tips to get your site noticed:

• Focus on your Keywords – It’s an old refrain but an essential one; deciding on a group of industry-relevant keywords and being conscious about placing them throughout your site pages is a simple yet critical way to enhance your site’s traffic potential. With well-researched keywords, not only can you get more people to your site, but also more of the *right* people (ie people who are looking for your specific industry, services, or business). Need help getting ideas for the best keywords for your site? Google AdWords offers an excellent tool that will provide a list of keywords related to the ones you plug in that also tells you what the search volume for each keyword is on a monthly and yearly basis. Picking specific, high traffic keywords is a must for any website marketing efforts.

• Create a Site Map – A site map is a very basic overview of the pages of your site and their location for search engines to read quickly and accurately. Site maps are essential elements to ensure your site and all its pages are properly indexed. Site maps are very easy to make, and there are a variety of plug-ins and online tools that will generate a site map on your website server in less than five minutes. If you don’t have a site map, be sure to generate one ASAP.

• Add your Site to Directories – Getting your site listed in various online directories will help improve your search engine rankings by creating more links to your site while offering people one more way to find you. There are literally hundreds of online directories, so your best bet to get the most coverage is to utilize a service that will submit your site for you across all legitimate directories.

• Don’t Ignore Social Media – Whether you love it or hate it, social media – including Facebook, Twitter, and more – is here to stay and is a must for everyone serious about expanding their audience and enhancing their online visibility. Remember to create balance in your social media updates: mix promotional plugs and updates with conversational and observational updates. No one will pay attention to you if you don’t provide value, engage in dialogue, and have something interesting to say! Bonus Tip: when creating your accounts on social media sites, be sure to have a uniform handle across all of them. For example, don’t be “BobsBeers” on Twitter and “Bob McDonald” on Facebook – keeping it consistent will improve your following.

• Blog – While it might seem like an arduous task to many business owners, blogs are a sure way to provide interest and value as well as encourage visitors to come back regularly. Static content websites, meaning those that do not update content regularly, leave little reason for a visitor to return once a week to check in on what’s new. However, a website that has a blog attached that provides interesting, newsworthy, and unique content will entice people to come back again and again. The more times someone visits your site, the better chance you have they will pay attention to your service and think of you when they need it.

• Publicize Your URL – One sure way to get your website noticed is to make sure everyone – from your customers to your neighbors – knows you have one by publicizing it regularly in the off-line world. While this method of website marketing is more traditional than virtual, it can help get visitors in a very under-targeted audience. By placing your URL on your business card, your business brochures, your stationery, and even your car, you are reaching potential customers in a completely different way than the usually online techniques. Online, you tend to get tunnel vision as you try to tune out the advertisements, pop-ups, and other obnoxious information. However, in the off-line world, you don’t have the same type of mental filter running. Take advantage of this opportunity to promote your website as often as possible!