Marketing on the Internet is an on-going process. If you create a website and leave it alone, it will stagnate and cease to bring leads or customers. All search engines want to provide fresh, relevant results to their customers (the "searchers"). Therefore, you will want to occasionally update and add new information to your website. Some popular items many websites add throughout the year include news articles, white papers, educational information, answers to newer frequently asked questions, or videos.
Internet Marketing is Not Just SEO
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is just one
tactic within the larger scope of Internet Marketing. SEO may seem like "voodoo" to many people, but it's simply a methodology applied to your website files that will help search engines locate and index all the pages on your website. Over time or in other countries, different search engines may be more popular than others. The key is to ensure that you are applying your SEO strategies that work well with the top search engines that YOUR customers, prospects, and other stakeholders are using.
Beyond SEO
A strong SEO program will implement tactics that lift your site's ranking position high on search engine results pages. This includes developing and updating your annual search marketing strategy. Your marketing plan needs to incorporate a variety of important factors, like current business goals, offline and online marketing initiatives (for past 12 months and the upcoming year), any web traffic history you may have collected, significant changes to your products or services, changes in targeted markets, the competitiveness of your industry, and your primary competitors (both online and offline).
After reviewing your overall SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) and online ranking position, begin to develop your search engine tactics. The core foundation of your SEO will consist of some solid marketing standards:
- Build a website that contains relevant and valuable information for your targeted markets
- Define strategic keywords and phrases that best define your product and service offerings
- Include content and features that your prospects and customers will expect to find, as well as any information that you know they will need.
- Plan a strategy for updating your content on a regular basis. If you do not "plan resources" for updating your website, it will probably not happen.
- Develop a navigation architecture that is intuitive for new visitors on your site (this means that it's easy to figure out how to find MOST information within 2 or 3 clicks).
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