Internet Marketing (Site Promotion)

or getting more visitors to your site and turning them into customers.

Just having a website is not enough. You need to maximise the number of visitors to your pages and, if you use your site to attract business or make sales, then you need to convert as many of them into customers .

One of the principle ways of attracting visitors is to ensure that your site pages rank well (near the top of the first page of search results) on the major search engines e.g. Google, Yahoo and MSN. It is very important to ensure that your site is optimised for seaching, a process called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.

There are four distinct elements in the process;

Careful Site Design

Your site needs to be designed and structured to be search engine friendly...

• Strict coding standards including accessibility should be applied during design
• Use of cascading style sheets (CSS) for page formatting (separating content from design)
• Standards conformance should be checked using official on-line tools.
• Logical and simple page navigation structure
• Relevant content incorporating those key terms and phrases likely to be used in searches
• Descriptive page titles and other metadata e.g. content description
• Keeping content up to date

Letting the Search Engines know you are there

• Submitting your page URLs directly to e.g. Google
• Incorporating a robot accessible site map in your web directory e.g. Google SiteMap, remembering to keep this up to date as your site changes.
• Providing links to your site from other, established and popular web sites e.g. trade organisations, business directories

Targetted Advertising

• Pay per click advertising e.g. Google Adwords campaigns on-line
• URL publication in printed, journals, advertisments, newspaper articles and business stationery
• Email marketing

Site Peformance Analysis

• Detailed analysis of site activity is very useful in determining what works and what doesn't, how advertising campaigns affect visitors etc.
• Site visitor statistics can provide some information e.g. visitor numbers and locations, pages viewed, search terms used by visitors, main entry and exit pages.
• Advanced site analysis e.g. Google Analytics should be employed by those serious about achieving better results from their web presence.