Online Marketing for Business Web Sites:
What should we be doing?

As soon as we establish a Web site, we register with the most important search engines and directories. Many companies then move on to the next project, considering the site's online marketing to be complete. But search engine registration is only the foundation of a good marketing plan. Successful companies build a good foundation and use that foundation to establish their online marketing program. The following six steps are crucial:

1. Page preparation. Prepare the Web site pages so that every viewer can understand the goal of the site. The non-visible Meta tags on each page are written to enhance the standing of the pages in search engines.
2. Site registration. Register the site with the critical top ten search engines and directories, being careful to choose the most appropriate categories for the site. Register with at least another 150 general search engines and directories to obtain wider coverage.
3. Strategic linking. Research specialized directories and complementary sites, then request the site owners to add a link to our site. The number of links inbound to a site has always been important. Now some of the most influential search engines are using the number of inbound links as a measure of the importance of a site. Strategic linking is a marketing activity which should be ongoing for the life of the site.
4. Traffic measurement. Monitor the site logs to determine whether the traffic is increasing, decreasing, or remaining stable. We want to keep the traffic increasing or stable at a reasonably high rate.
5. Site rank evaluation. Audit the site's standing in the most important search engines. The search engines change their selection algorithms frequently, and they are constantly receiving new registrations, so a site's standing can change from day to day. If we find that our ranking is not high enough, we research the difference between our site and any competing sites which rank above ours. We find a legitimate way to improve our key words or description, then we register our site again to increase its ranking.
6. Referrer logs. Review the list of referring sites in the logs for the site. If we find that we never receive visitors who searched on one particular search engine in the top ten, we register again to improve our ranking.

A few marketers have stated that we should re-register every week, and that sounds like a nice easy solution. However, most search engines consider repetitive registration of unchanged sites to be spamming, and weekly registration can get our sites banned from a search engine. There is no single automated solution to attaining and keeping a good ranking in the search engines. The sensible solution takes time and attention: attention to site design, Meta tags, traffic, referrer logs, and search engine standings.

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