What is the Purpose of your Website?

There are millions and millions of business Websites on the Internet, and I'm continually surprised by how many were apparently put up without any thought about what was trying to be achieved.

I say this because many are obviously nothing more than online brochures for the business products or services. These treat the Internet the same way as hard-print advertising or collateral materials.

Other business sites are designed for the Internet but are not optimized for search engines. Many also lack a means of capturing sales leads and hard to navigate. Kinda makes me wonder what they were hoping to achieve...

The first and most important step in launching any Website is to define its purpose and goals. Is it to be a reference site? A customer support site? Or, do you want an online marketing machine? The answer determines the resultant site design and content. Conversely, failure to address this subject before building a site will inevitably lead to frustration and expensive site revamping.

So, what do you want your site to do? Is it accomplishing this? Need help?

Market your Website with Free Articles

One of the most inexpensive means of promoting your Website is to create and distribute free articles on the Internet. There are a half-dozen major sites that are dedicated to this purpose and the best part is that is FREE!

And the articles do not have to be long - three or four paragraphs will do. Write about something you know. Keep it narrowly focused and related to the service or product you offer on your Website. Include an author box with an embedded link back to your site. That way, interested readers can go directly to your site to learn more. Articles are a great sales lead generator!

Moreover, free articles get widespread distribution on the Internet. They are picked up by other blogs, Websites and newsletters for content. So, your free article (with its embedded link back to your site) results in an explosion of one-way links back to your site and considerable traffic boost.

There's nothing not to like about using free article distribution as a means to improve your Website traffic and search engine ranking. Contact us if you need help getting this going.

Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly?

The days when you could just put up a Website for your business and wait for sales leads to come rolling in are long gone. It's amazing how many small business Websites are actually "invisible" on the Internet.

Today, your Website must be optimized for those little critters known as "search engine spiders" that continuously crawl the Internet, indexing and updating a humongous database of Websites. If these spiders can't easily traverse your site, you are in trouble. If they can't readily identify your line of business through indicated keywords, you've got problems. If your site is in a heavily competitive marketplace and it's not optimized for a specific market niche, it could take a long, long time before you see it showing up in the first three pages of search results. And if you don't show up in the first three pages, chances are that the only way your marketplace will ever know you exist is if you point them to your Website address.

Of course, it takes more than just search engine optimization to turn your Website into a high-power lead generator. Most search engines also place a heavy factor on the number and quality of incoming links as a measure of your site's popularity. And that takes a lot of work to achieve.

An easy way to determine if your site is search engine friendly is to take advantage of our Online Marketing Appraisal. Our experts will examine your site and issue a custom report with specific recommendations about what you can do to turn your site into an Internet marketing machine.

Are You Invisible on the Internet?

Here's a good exercise. Create a matrix with five columns and five rows. Blank out the upper left cell, but label the other four top horizontal cells, "Google," "Yahoo," "MSN," and "Ask." Then place your Website's top four keyword phrases in the left column. Now, do a search under each search engine and list your position among the returns in the appropriate cell. For example, if one of my key phrases is "curved widgets," and my site came up on page 2 in the number five position when I enter that phrase into the Google search box, I would enter "page 2 - 5" under the Google column for that phrase.

If you do this for your top four keyword phrases, you will get a real good idea of how well your site is optimized for the four search engines that account for at least 98 percent of all Internet searches.

If your Website isn't showing up within the first three pages of search engine returns (for your strategic keywords or phrase), then you are invisible on the Internet! If your site shows up on page 1 for all search engines for all keyword phrases, you walk on water. If it's somewhere in between, you have some work to do.

For anything but the "walk on water" results, there are two things you can do to drive more traffic to your Website. First (obviously) is to improve your search engine optimization as necessary. This is a long-term solution that takes time to implement and show results. Secondarily, you can utilize targeted, local pay-per-click advertising to get economical leads while your organic search-engine ranking climbs a competitive ladder to success.

Go ahead - grab a pencil and perform this exercise. The results may surprise you. Need help?