You must ensure that, when someone types some words into a search engine to find possible suppliers or informants, your site comes high up on the list of results. If it does not, you have just lost a potential customer to a competitor.

So the first step is to analyse which key phrases are most likely to be used by your customers – and which give you the best chance of achieving a top ranking. For a new site, some subjective assessment is required, but later you will have actual results on which to base refinements.

You may have heard the term ’search engine optimisation’; this is the same as ‘website optimisation’ but less accurate. What you have to do is adapt your site to the requirements of the search engines. Not the other way round!

Most Used Sources
for Web Addresses

Search Engine
57%

E-mail Messages
38%

Web Sites
35%

Word of Mouth
28%

Magazine Ads
25%

TV Commercials
14%

Periodical Article
11%

Vendor Catalogs
11%

Newspaper Ads
9%

Banner Ads
7%

Radio Ads
2%

Mail Ads
2%

Source: Forrester Research

January 1999

As a result the use of language is crucial. You must ensure you use in your site those keywords and phrases that your customers will put into the search engines. Each page should be considered separately as they are indexed separately by the search engines. Each page should only be optimised for one or two phrases. Here are the main requirements:

Page Title: up to 10 words beginning with the main phrase

Meta Description: up to 24 words describing the page content in a way that will interest a visitor to click through

Meta Keywords: up to 12 pf the main keywords used on the page

Headers: use H1,H2 etc tags to show the importance of each phrase and break up the page accordingly

Content: use the phrase in the content, preferably near the beginning
Keyword density: use variations and repetitions of the phrase to reinforce its importance without making the text unreadable.

Images: ensure their is a relevant ‘ALT’ tag with text to show content

This process will ensure your pages are indexed for the right content. It is a necessary starting point for achieving good rankings but it must also be combined with an active promotion program as explained on the link popularity page. However there is no point in spending extra money on promoting until you have tested that the site itself does the job you need.

First, you must optimise your site for the search engines. Simply making your site easy to index by the search engines and focused on relevant keywords will bring you some traffic. However just being indexed is a long way from being near the top of the index for the majority of competitive keywords. But why pay to get traffic that you can otherwise obtain for free?

The next stage is to make sure your site is seen by as many as possible of your target market who are actively searching for your product or service on the web.

Pay per Click advertising
This is the tool you used for your test market. It can ensure you are always visible on the first page of results. Therefore it should continue to be used as long as there is proven short term profitability.

Link Popularity
Once the website optimisation is completed with all the on-page factors in place, the search engines have to be persuaded not just to index the page but to rank it higher than most of its peers. One of the key factors in achieving this is to create incoming links from other web sites which are taken as a vote of confidence in the receiving site.

Email
Email is the most used form of communication on the internet. Provided you use it properly and avoid spamming, it is a very valuable way of keeping in contact with customers and prospects who may not yet be ready to order but are important to your future.

Interaction with the visitor

Use of the right keywords in the right places

Measurable objectives

Include ongoing promotional and updating requirements

The Web Marketing is a 2-way process of communication. That distinguishes it from the traditional offline brochure. Effective websites are designed to stimulate interaction both online and offline. The internet takes the potential of traditional direct Web Marketing one stage further. Visitors, your future customers, have greater control over the messages they receive than with recipients of your offline promotion item.

In short, if you want a successful website, you must start from an understanding of the power and specific features of the web and then refine your business objectives accordingly.

The key measures for effective performance are:

Does the site attract the right visitors?

Does the site convert those visitors into customers?

Before you spend further on web development and promotion, you should know how much it will cost you to attract sufficient visitors to achieve a conversion and how much profit that customer will generate on average. You then have a basis for forecasting future profit. If you don’t like what the picture shows, you need to re-look at the strategy and alternatives.

The quickest – and cheapest – test is to use real visitors and measure their reactions. Pay per Click advertising from Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing provide the ideal vehicle. They will generate visitors more quickly than optimisation for natural listings and you can try more different key phrases more quickly. More detail on PPC advertising is available here.

Of course before you start any testing or promotion you need to ensure your measurement systems are in place. The more you understand about what your customers need and how they react the more effectively you can market to them. Both Google and Yahoo! provide good measurement of PPC campaigns. But, in addition, you should have a general web statistics package.

While setting up your website and determining your marketing strategies, don’t forget to save all the information you are collecting.