The Fundamentals of Website Marketing

The fundamentals of football are blocking and tackling. It’s silly for a team to work on other things before it has the blocking and tackling down cold.

The fundamentals of website marketing are architecture, content and incoming links. Spending time or money on anything else is a waste unless and until you:

• know all you need to know about how to optimally design a website for maximum search engine optimization (SEO), and
• have designed your site — and are continually updating and maintaining your site — in adherence to SEO “best practices” for architecture, content and incoming links

For most business owners today, this is not just about your website. It’s about the ongoing success of your business. The very survival of your business.

The playbook for the game of business has changed. In the age of the Internet, teams win and lose based on, in whole or in part, their ability to execute on the Web.

The first and foremost essential of Web execution is getting ranked highly for relevant keywords by the main search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing). Search engine rankings are driven by three things: architecture, content and incoming links. So build your winning Web strategy on a solid foundation. The only foundation that makes any strategic sense.

Architecture

This is about how the site is programmed and built. For example, each page of the website should have a keyword-focused summary about the page in the page title and meta description. Also, the URL for each page should be short and made up of real words that explain what is on the page. We’re talking plain English. Avoid formulas and cryptic symbols.

Search engines rank pages based on their relevance for certain keywords. Page titles, meta descriptions and URLs are given higher levels of importance than the words in page text.

Content

Does your site offer any information or tools that are unique? Helpful? Insightful? Interesting? This is referred to as content. The Wall Street Journal offers proprietary content on the publicly traded securities, financial markets and investing. People interested in these topics subscribe and, judging by the circulation, find value. Aspen Sojourner contains information about the people and happenings of Aspen, Colorado. People interested in these matters subscribe. Noria provides information about machinery lubrication and plant maintenance. Acquisition Advisors provides information about how to best go about quietly and professionally buying or selling a private company.

Search engines provide people with the information (“content”) they want to find. To begin winning the search engine game, you need to develop unique, relevant and authoritative content in the area of your focus.

Incoming Links

Search engines give higher rankings to websites and/or Web pages that are popular. Popularity is gauged, in no small part, by how many other relevant websites contain links back to it. We include the term “relevant” because the search engines have gotten smarter. It’s no longer a “more is better” game but one of quality of links. For example, if you’re an industrial manufacturing consultant and trusted experts (i.e., their blogs, articles and websites) in your industry link to your website or pages of your site, the search engines will give you a higher ranking than if you had links from random websites such as those of all your non-industry friends.

Of lesser quality but still well worth your time are links from business associates, business associations, directories and other membership organizations.

Do your plans for success include beating your competitors on the Web?

They should. The Web offers an amazing opportunity to expose more people to your company, strengthen your brand and add profitable revenue. But make the most of your time and energy, and do as Stephen Covey suggests: First Things First. In the game of website marketing that’s Architecture, Content and Incoming Links.

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Matt Bailey of SiteLogic provided his expertise for this article.