Your website is representative of your business, its reputation and even credibility. When getting ready to build a website, consider the following factors:

• Your website needs to have a modern look and feel, appropriate for your type of business (e.g. social networking website versus financial planning firm; alternative energy provider versus HR software developer)
• Your website needs to offer a good amount of free and interesting information to its visitors (links to quality websites in your industry, free PDFs, demos, etc.)
• Your website's content needs to be written in a simple language and presented in an easy-to-read format (suitable for visual scanning)
• Your website needs to have clear and visible calls to action (buy, order, download, register - links, banners, and buttons)
• You webiste needs to collect emails of your visitors or other contact information (newsletter signup, registration form, free download, free demo)
• You need to conduct a thorough keyword research as well as competitive analysis
• You need to SEO your site's design, content, and formatting by incorporating your main keywords in all structural elements
• You need to build as many incoming (back) links as you can from sites and blogs in your industry
• Your need to learn about online PR and Social Media Marketing (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and Pinterest)
• Your need to participate in your industry's reputable forums and blogs and offer your professional advice

You need to enrol in Google AdWords; you need to create custom landing pages for each ad group (one per each ad group, keep them orphan)

You need to collect your website statistics and analyze it on a regular basis (Google Analytics is a must; remember to set goals)

In summary, you need to be constantly creating content: on your website's blog and on the leading social sites, as well as posting comments on forums and blogs with links back to your site where possible. The key is to create meanignful and useful content for your visitors and for the general public; re-writing your press releases and posting them on all social sites will be counter productive.

Above all, you need to entice your users to clicking on Social Media buttons: "like" and "plus" and "share" your pages as well as posting comments on your site. Those comments should ideally contain your most important keywords. Comments are key. Simply clicking the buttons is not enough, or you need hundreds of those clicks. But comments, if you can get 40 social media "likes" with keyword-relevant comments, you site will move up in ranking on Google very significantly. Being on the first page on Google will drive traffic to your site. Your next objective is to retain this traffic by earning its interest.

If you'd like to talk about your website marketing objectives call Joomla Bliss at 613.231.6308

A website has a little value if your clients or customers can't find it. Before embarking on a website design project, it is good to familiarize yourself with the basic web marketing principles.

Website Marketing in a Nutshell

Overall, website marketing can be summed up as three things:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Social Media Marketing (including Affiliate Marketing)
3. Paid advertising on search engines (Google AdWords) and social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc)

Whether you are focusing on all of them or only one, the bulk of your activities will be creating content on your website. Quality content is key for any kind of website marketing activity.