What is web-marketing? Why does your business need it?

The best web site and the best web-marketing strategy will not reap the highest possible results, if they are not tightly integrated. Not only do you need a well-designed web site with relevant content and user-friendly navigation, but your site needs to be found by your target audience (prospect customers). A well-thought web marketing strategy drives traffic to your site through search engines, and other methods. Search engine strategy helps in getting the highest visibility in the search engine ranking, then helps pull the visitors to your web site if your listing is relevant to their initial query. After that, your web site or web page needs to communicate and be relevant in a targeted fashion to what your visitors had in mind when they clicked on your listing or search result.

How does a web site communicate relevancy and targeting? Here are 7 habits a well-thought web-marketing plan needs to include to increase its efficiency.

Habit #1: Keyword strategy

Keyword research must be done to find out what people are actually typing into the search engines. Of course, it will be important to analyze the competition and your current keywords on an ongoing-basis. The really important number is the amount of traffic each keyword generates. Since search engine algorithms and methods are bound to change and are diverse, it is important to revisit your keyword strategy on a regular basis.

Habit #2: Targeted pages to channels or main audience constituencies

The key is to know your audience and address what they are looking for, rather than presenting what your business can offer. Rather than sending all visitors to your home page and then letting them wander through your web pages, hoping that they will find what they were initially looking for, why not point them in the correct direction and offer them the content they were initially looking for by doing this search query?

Habit #3: Integrating keyword strategy and web content

Also, it is important to point out that keywords need to be re-used in the content itself of the page, and this is done by striking a careful balance between selling to prospect customers, optimizing for search engines, and making the text interesting and useful to your visitors. Because search engines want repeat customers, they try to return relevant results, so this content cannot be artificially crafted for the purpose of search engine ranking only ; but rather, one must take into consideration the importance of contextual relevancy and content usability.

Habit #4: A call to action

The web page needs to have a call to action, and you need to have some ROI measurement in place to establish the success of your search engine marketing strategy (whether it is paid or unpaid search engine keywords).

Habit #5: Content creation and freshness

Your site needs to grow its content to increase its search marketability, relevancy and ranking. Indeed, the more fresh content your site has, the more likely it will come up in search results, and the more your audience will come back to your web site.

Habit #6: Integrating your online and offline marketing campaigns

Think about ways of reinforcing the conversion of new prospective leads to consumers. This can be done through reminders via emails, brochures, coupons, seminars, newsletters, etc.

Habit #7: Link Campaign

You need to get relevant sites to link to your web site. Partner with sites that have good relevant content related to your business and that are the authority or are popular in your field.

These 7 habits will help in increasing the success of your online presence. It is important to ensure you have the right resources committed to your web site and allocate the appropriate budget to maintaining and promoting it. Don’t just build your web site and wait!