Website Marketing opinions are like belly-buttons - everyone has one. When I am asked what type of business I am in, I respond 'real estate'. When further asked about the homes I sell, I respond that I don't sell homes because my real estate is entirely digital. I then further explain with real estate comparisons. Imagine building a house in the cheapest, most run down part of a town located in the middle of a desert. That may appealing to some, but the likelihood that you will make a lot of money on that home is slim compared to say a 10 acre seaside villa on Martha's Vineyard. Let us further imagine that after building your desert tenement, you can develop it into the waterfront resort home without moving the building an inch. Digital real estate can do just that. It doesn't matter where you are, but with a little work and very little cost, you can make your site into a valuable piece of your business property.

I have encountered business owners who wanted a website merely to have "an Internet presence". Being one of a million websites that sell the same product you do have a presence, but not a very useful one unless you take steps to set your web apart from competition both locally, and worldwide. I present here 10 points that you need to consider in promoting your website to make it work for you as a major part of your marketing strategy.

First things first...

1. Do you have a Website?

A website is your most permanent and dynamic form of advertising. If done properly, it can be the most cost efficient! Just having a website is irrelevant without considering it's use as a means of increasing your business traffic. Questions you should ask yourself (or better yet, others) are the following:

Is your web useable, understandable, and navigable?
Your website should be well laid out and clear about the product. It should contain well written content, and have clearly defined links. The menuing should be apparent and constructed to be obvious to the user how to find information on your site.

Does your web take advantage of the most useable tags? To read more about proper use of keywords and metatags, see the article on Search Engine Positioning. We will discuss the use of tags more in point 7.

2. Is your website more professional in appearance than your competitions website?

I was asked by a local lawyer to create a website to focus on his firm's particular legal services and to pull potential clients from a competitor.
The competitor's web did pretty well in the search engines, however it had the appearance of having been designed by his sister's friend's nephew for a 3rd grade school project. Once the customer's site was set up with all the keywords and phrases properly embedded on every page, it went to the top of Google and Yahoo for searches on regional+services search phrases. If you compare the sites, you would probably pick the lawyer with the better designed website because of the impression the web site provided to visitors. A professional website = professional lawyer. Even though the competition was the leader in his legal field, my customer's practice received a tremendous amount of new customers that responded based solely upon the website and it's information.

3. Does your website and web marketing compliment your other marketing efforts?

This gets into the area of branding. it is not really so much a website issue as it is a marketing issue. Your web, brochures, business cards, envelopes, etc, should all have the same color, theme, and logos.

4. Advertising your website

Do you have an appropriate domain name for your business or organization?

With more simple domain names being swallowed up, you need to be creative.

Chesapeake Bay Market is an online shopping and classifieds website. The domain name www.ChesapeakeBayMarket.com is pretty long, and not to hard to remember as long as you can remember how to spell 'Chesapeake'. One solution to a long domain is a simpler alias. You can get to this website also through the domain www.cbaymarket.com. A bit easier to remember, especially at 60 miles per hour (I'll explain in later).

Now that you have your domain, where do you want to display it? I am surprised by the amount of business owners that fail to add their domain name to other advertising. Put your domain name on everything you can:

Invoices, bills, business cards, answering machine message, on your product, print ads, envelopes, bumper stickers, and don't forget your vehicle. As previously mentioned, this is where a simple domain name or alias (another domain name that points to the actual site) comes into play. If someone can pass you on the highway, read the back of your rear window and remember your domain name, that may be worth the $75.00 to slap that ad on the family van.

For vehicle ads, forget the phone number, just state the company name, purpose or services, and the domain name.

5. Content

Your website becomes more valuable as you add to it. Press releases, product news, related articles all posted on your site will do wonders for your search result position. You are also considered by visitors to be somewhat of an expert in your field, especially if your content is clear and well written.

Now take this a bit further. Consider syndicating your online content through the use of RSS feeds. Once you generate RSS feeds, other organizations can pick up your information to display on their own websites.

The advantage of this is that the links go directly back to your site.
Anyone understanding web design can set up a feed quickly. For the rest of us, I recommend software that allows you to enter and edit your article through your website and will also automatically generate the feed for you.

One product I recommend is Article Manager from InteractiveTools.com. No web design knowledge needed, just your ability to write about your passion - your business, product, service, organization, etc.

If you have separate products or services, create specific sub-domains with a keyword as a sub-domain name.  An example of this is right in front of you.  This site's primary domain is www.PRWP.com.  When focusing on book sales, the domain to use is http://Bookstore.PRWP.com. Google also searches on domain names as part of the search results.

6. Reciprocal Linking

This is the process of exchanging links with other website owners. I would suggest avoiding link farms, but rather cross-link with sites that compliment your site or product. Don't link to poorly designed sites. If you are part of a business group or even a small chamber of commerce, links from these sites and between members can provide you with quality inbound links that helps you with your "popularity" rating with Google.

7. Put meta tags on every category page

I suggest you look at the content of your page and use your TITLE tag as well as your KEYWORD, DESCRIPTION and ABSTRACT tags with similar key phrases.  Don't try to put every word that may pertain to your business in the keywords section, you will only dilute the value of your most important key-phrases or keywords. In your title tag, use a descriptor first. Many businesses put their company name first. That is OK if people know your domain name (Google, Amazon, Microsoft), but better search results are achieved by putting your product or service first in any tag including the title tag. For more on this see the article on Search Engine Positioning.

Determine you market.  You will have probably have done this in your marketing plan, but this affects keywords as well. If you customer base is regionally located, use that region / city / state as part of your keyword phrase.

8. Ask Customers to Bookmark your site

Weather you do this my email or by having your web designer create a "bookmark this site / page" button in your site (recommended), you increase your chances of having your site stored in visitor's favorites folder on their browser.

9. Affiliate programs

Affiliate programs work two ways. You can make money with other affiliate programs like Amazon, Network Solutions, etc, especially if their products compliment your own. Or, you can start your own affiliate program and have others bring customers to your site to sell your product. The former is the easiest. Being an affiliate of a larger business provides you with a capability of selling products and receiving a commission for sales. You may want to focus on products that do not detract from yours. If you are a business that provides financial advice, you may want to sell recommended books from your site as an Amazon affiliate.

10. Market your worthy causes

Show that you give back! Every good business has a philanthropic side.
Proudly display your on your site to show that a portion of sales directly supports a worthy cause. Just make sure the cause you are promoting on your site does not alienate potential customers.

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In summary, a good marketing strategy includes supporting the most permanent and most cost effective advertising you can conduct for your business - your website.  Like Mr. Franklin used to say, "Hide not your talents, they for use were made. What's a sundial in the shade?"