By George Carson

The six simple steps to a web-marketing program.

Step 1

Start with Google Analytics. It is a free service to help track website traffic and provides some statistics. You will need to sign up for a Google account.

Go to www.google.com/analytics

Although I am not a big supporter of using statistics and metrics and formulas to make a strong web-marketing campaign, it is essential to have some of these basics in place.

Step 2

Keywords will help you get high rankings with SEO’s. Knowing what words to use is important. You can make a list of the keywords you think would be used by potential customers, but I recommend using this keyword tool:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

There are several others to choose from, but this is one of the easier tools to use. After you find the keywords, it is important to NOT overload the Meta keywords (in the html), or use them in every sentence in your text. SEO’s read for grammar as well as content, and “stuffing” too many keywords will actually hurt your rankings. Have the keywords in your title pages, text body and in the html structure of the site.

Step 3

Create links—Internal and Inbound

When you make reference to another product/service that you offer, create a link pointing to that page in your website. SEO’s like websites that have internal links.

Inbound links are not as difficult to create as they were several years ago. With the active usage in social media, this is where you can build a solid inbound link program. First you need to make sure you are active with social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and have a blog site. Although these need to be on going, it will require someone in your company (or hire an outside service) to write frequently using these social media. At least three times a week for about 6 months will help establish your social network. When you write about your product or service, be sure to put a link to your website. These inbound links are powerful and can build targeted traffic to your website as well as get your site highly ranked on Google and other search engines.

Step 4

Directory Listings and submitting your website to SEO’s

It is important to be proactive. Do not wait for search engines to find you, make it part of your web-marketing program to do the submission. If you provide products or services on a local basis, then be sure to put your business on Google local search. Go to: www.google.com/places

Here are a couple other places to list your site. Do a Google search and you will find dozens of others:

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

http://www.submitexpress.com/free-submission.html

Another important place is with the Open Directory, which is the web directory of Internet resources. Follow the directions to make sure you are listed. SEO’s will use this directory when looking for websites.

http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

Step 5

If you ignored Step 3, then go back and re-read it. Social media is not going away. It is not a fad, or trend. It is a way of doing business today. Implement a good social network campaign. The main reason people get involved is for content. Fresh content is important to search engines and one of the best ways to this is with a social network program.

The other part of this step is to refresh you site every three or four months. This does not mean re-doing the entire site. Changing some text, adding new images and changing titles on occasion is good practice to keep the content fresh on your website.

Step 6

TEST, TEST and re-test. This means try different approaches, different text, or offers on the site. Not discounts. Position your company as a leader, an expert. For example, offer information to help customers improve their business.

Ok, now that you have read this information, it is time to actually implement a web-marketing program. To your success.