Online Marketing Strategy

A simple and effective way to organize your marketing strategy for your website is the following five-step process. It would basically cover 85% of your traffic if you are a B2B business.

1. Search engine friendly website

Not just any website. A search engine friendly website is made in such a way that search engines can read it just as easily as humans can. For that your site should be made with Cascading Style Sheets or simply CSS. This is a new technology that is supported by the latest browsers which enables you to build a web page in a sequential form so search engines – which are essentially robots – can read the content instead of reading a lot of HTML code. The older more traditional form of coding a page relied on “HTML Tables” which made it confusing for search engines. Many developers still use this technique to code pages and the CSS based sites are way ahead of HTML Table based sites in rankings.

Of course, there is no point in having a search engine friendly website if it is not ultimately people friendly. So it goes without saying the site should also have pertinent content. But the assumption is that you have a real business and you have real content to fill the site with.

2. Keyword Optimization

The next step to an effective online marketing strategy of course is to ensure that your site is well optimized to reflect your business. This should be fairly simple but there are some things you still need to look at:

1. Metatags – these are groups of words that you add to each page within the code so that search engines appropriately index the pages of your site.
   
2. ALT Tags – these are word descriptions of images that you use on your site. Search engines do not see pictures. They instead read your word descriptions that are hidden in the code. So relevant descriptions will enable the engine to appropriately index the site.
   
3. Keyword Density - In addition to having to the point and brief text for your visitors, also add detailed text with relevant keywords. I am not talking of simply adding keywords in meaningless manner but of detailed meaningful copy with high keyword density.
   
4. Link building through Social and professional Networks
   
   
   1. Facebook, Linked in, etc.
      
   2. Forums and guestbooks
      
   3. Industry specific directories
      
   4. Other relevant websites
      

Active participation in online forums and directories ensures that you have effective “back links” or connections back to your site. Search engines believe that your site is worthy of listing on top by counting the number of times you have been referred to by other sites. Some people actively post every day or week simply to increase this measure of credibility.

4. Email Promotion

While the above 3 are ways for people to find your website from among the mass of other websites out there, email marketing is a highly effective way to build and sustain relationships with both customers and prospects. We are not talking of spamming here but opt-in mass mailing and targeted mailing. Some effective email marketing tools are opt-in newsletters, follow-up emails, announcements, etc. Used judiciously, they can garner effective relevant traffic.

5. Offline promotion

One of the most effective but often unused method of promotion is offline promotion. Offline promotion is something that needs to be done actively all the time. Talk about your website. Put the URL on your cards, letterheads, envelopes, mailers, brochures, posters, banners, etc. Any offline availability of your website address will be more readily and relevantly used than any type of online availability as it carries more authenticity and weightage.

If you can handle these 5 aspects of web marketing you should be covering 80% or more of your market. We’ll go over things like twitter and social media marketing in another article. But frankly if you do the above 5 you should be fine.