Web Marketing for Start-up Web Sites

Your web site can be a great asset and vehicle towards supporting your business goals. However, its success is dependent on the planning, design and methods of build.

Research should be undertaken, and strategies put in place, to make sure you not only gain good web visibility and targeted visitors, but also that the site is effective at retaining, channeling and converting those visitors.

Important elements of a search engine optimized, usable site are:

• organized, logical site structure
• clear, consistent, search engine friendly navigation
• attractive, focused, usable design
• clean, search engine friendly code
• concise, relevant, search term targeted content

These elements are the foundation of a successful web site.

Time and time again we have customers come to us, with a web site that has already been designed and built, requesting SEO thinking that this is a natural subsequent stage in their web marketing efforts.

It ought to be, but unfortunately, so much of the time, their new web site is a minefield of SEO no, nos. Rather than supporting the crawling and ranking of pages by the search engines, the way the web site has been designed & developed hinders its chances of gaining good web visibility.

We are able to help these customers, but time and money has to be spent on revising the site which could have been avoided if search engine opitimization had been considered during the design and development stages.

If you are in the early stages of planning a web site, or have recently had a web site designed and developed, the first thing you need to do is is to identify your optimal target search terms.

By researching what web users are typing in at the search engines, you can discover the search terms (keywords) that are most likely to drive your ideal visitors to your web site.

These search terms should be considered and implemented during the planning, design and development of your web site.

Before you launch your web site, it is vital that you have your web analytics in place, to measure web traffic, traffic sources and visitor behavior.

Once these foundation elements are in place, you need to get involved with members of your online community. Start networking with other web sites and individuals via forums, blog commentary, bookmarking and tagging sites, social media sites and so on.

Paid search (Pay-Per-Click) can be a good way for new sites to get some exposure and branding while they are still too new to get a substantial amount of organic traffic. By driving visitors to your web site you can then measure its effectiveness in other areas.