Online marketing goes hand in hand with search engine optimisation (SEO). However, they both have different goals and outcomes.
In my opinion SEO should be carried out before online marketing because the aim of SEO is to push your website up to the top of the search phrases for your particular service or product. Then it basically involves little input from you to continue bringing benefits apart from a bi-monthly analysis and tweaking.
First, let’s look at SEO
The first part of any SEO strategy must be to research the market to find out exactly which related phrases are being search for the most. Then optimise for them. How do you optimise for them?
Onsite optimisation is carried out in various areas of the actual site files as follow:
- File and folder naming convention
- Internal navigational linking structure
- URL naming and structure
- Meta tag usage on a page by page basis
- Content positioning
- Content copy and key phrase placement
- Page load speed and caching
- Reciprocal linking strategy
Once these basic parts of your SEO strategy have been optimised and tweaked you should then move onto offsite SEO.
Offsite optimisation has many aspects and here we’ll look at the main points:
- Reciprocal linking strategy. The main aim of which is to obtain relevant inbound links from valuable, reputable sites that are along the same theme as your own. This needs to be done correctly as there is such a thing as “bad neighbourhoods” and exchanging links with these will actually work against you with respect to climbing the search engine results pages (SERP’s)
- A fully optimised sitemap submitted to Google and refreshed at a regular interval closely related to when your site content is likely to be updated.
- Social Networking sites integration. With over 500 million Facebook users alone and 50 million messages being sent on Twitter daily, this is an area not to be overlooked.
- Local business searches, with today’s search engine becoming even more clever in the way that they produce search results, this is also a must.
- Main directory placement. There are thousands and thousands of online directories out there but only a few of them are important for the benefit our sites. You need to be listed in these.
With these SEO points implemented, you are well on your way to gaining more leads via your website.
The next step would be to make a start on your online marketing campaign.
There are many, many techniques used to market your site online. Here I will cover enough of them to give you a very good idea of what and why.
Online marketing can be carried out by the following steps:
- Pay per click (PPC) advertising. This is where you bid on search terms with a search engine like Google. Then when a web user searches for this term your site will be placed above the organic search results depending on whether or not you outbid your competitors. This is a great way to jump start a newly optimised site before you have had time to benefit from your SEO campaign.
- A subscriber bi-monthly newsletter to alert your members to new products, special deals, upcoming events, etc. Newsletter will always contain content that links back to your site. This way, when the person viewing the email clicks on a link, they are automatically transported to your site.
- Community sites, if possible, should always have a member forum. This will add valuable “stickiness” to the site and keep members coming back.
- Prizes and competitions
- Participation in other forums that are related to your product or service. This is a great way to get quality inbound links and targeted traffic.
Once both of these processes have been completed you should find you have a turbo charged site with increased leads and more more pleasing stats.
