Web Marketing

Marketing Your Site

Once you have a web site it can be come a valuable marketing tool.

Here's a checklist of items that will get customers coming to your site:

• Include your web site address on all printed materials. Try to match the color scheme and overall design themes of your printed materials. Or, better yet, change your printed materials to match your new web site design! Strive for consistency.
• Determine your best key words - Google and other search engines catalog web pages based on keywords and how often they are used on a page. You can select target keywords and build those into your text to improve the ranking of your pages. (Be legitimate or you could get kicked off the search engines for cheating.)
  
  - Listen to your customers, sales staff and customer service people - pay attention to the vocabulary they use or words they recommend.
  - Use Google Analytics to determine what keywords people are using to find your site
  - Use a keyword research tool such as WebCEO (there's a free version) or Google's Keyword Tool (also free)
  - Use Google Trends - Enter your potential keyword into Google Trends and you'll see whether a keyword is rising or declining in popularity over time.
  

• Have other organizations include a link to your site on their pages.
  The more people link to your site the higher you will get on the search engine results.
  
• Start a blog focusing on your industry
  This is an excellent way to increase your SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
  You can visit my blog at http://webexplorations.com/blog
  And here is a presentation I give to young writer's on How to Blog

• Use Google AdWords
  -- You bid on specific keywords that people will use to search for your product/service
  -- You determine how much is spent each month. Once that money is gone your ads no longer appear for that month
  -- Google places small text links on people's pages based on the content for those pages. Each time a person clicks on one of those links Google pays the owner of the web site a percentage. If it is your ad, your dollar amount for the month goes down the amount you bid.
  -- Make certain you are ready to respond to any response your Google Ads generate.
  
  
  

Web Explorations