Increase Website Visibility By Understanding Your Target Audience Online

It's All About Quality- Not Quantity

In today's competitive global market, a well designed business website is perhaps the most powerful marketing tool available, so long as it is visible to potential customers. And this last part- being visible to potential customers is the greatest challenge any business faces, regardless of size or distinction. In many ways, the Internet is a level playing field allowing savvy businesses to step in front of their offline competitors.

Part of what improves site visibility is optimising each page of your site to be crawled and archived properly. The other part is using the right keywords to appeal to your target audience. And the other side is to advertise and extend your online marketing onto other online properties.

The basics include:

• An easy thing to do is to ask other relevant sites to link to yours. One measure search engines now use to measure your site's importance is the quality, and, to a lesser extent, volume of outside sites that refer to your own.
• Many directories, such as the Yahoo! directory and the Open Directory project, offer paid submission options - they can significantly increase your websites visibility because they are recognized by every leading search engine- including Google and Bing.
• Use descriptive and informative text on each page of your website, choosing keywords that are specific to your product, service or industry.
• Highlight and feature your most important content first, in a clear, uncluttered fashion.
• Be sure to create distinct titles for each of the pages on your website, and use your keywords in the titles.
• Write descriptions that are clear, factual and free of excessive superlatives (best, cheapest, biggest). People prefer sites that are more factual and less "sales talk."
• If your geographic location is relevant, use it in your site and make it part of your list of keywords.

Social media is an ever increasing component of your online marketing strategy, and is often referred to as 'integrated marketing' - this is when you spread your online marketing activities across multiple websites and platforms. Integration comes from creating a circle of activity.

Forrester research has called this creating 'groundswell' and it means that brands create a community of brand advocates that engage with the brand online and become word of mouth advertisers for the brand.

The best way to generate more genuine and profitable leads is to create a brand community through sites, such as: Facebook or Twitter. By inviting consumers to opt in to permission marketing activities you are able to slowly feed curriculum-based communications to your target audience. By educating consumers about your daily activities and innovations they are more likely to promote your brand because they know more about your brand.

67% of all consumer decisions are primarily influenced by word of mouth (McKinsey)

Here are just some examples of traffic-driving strategies:

• Create a tool/application and promote your profile alongside it.
• Buy a banner ad to target tech-savvy audiences, link it to your profile.
• Use Twitter as a tool for tech/customer support.
• Organize a contest through your Twitter profile
• Include links to your profile in email/forum signatures.
• Evangelize Twitter on your blog/other blogs and include a link to your profile.
• Connect your blog and other social media profiles to your Twitter page.
• Learn to pitch Twitter influencers with articles relevant to their interest
• Explicitly ask another user to recommend your profile or exchange recommendations.

The online world is still wide open for new business models. Once you understand online marketing there are few limits to what is possible. If you already have an idea, please talk to us to make sure you get the strategy right.