Every retailer needs a website. Every dentist, lawyer, accountant and minister needs one. Every cafe, restaurant, coffee shop and nightclub needs one. Every business listed in the Yellow Pages needs a presence on the Internet – it’s where your customers expect to find you.
It takes only a byte or two of outdated information for visitors to conclude they’ve hit a dead end or landed on an orphaned site. Internet-savvy businesses refresh their websites’ content regularly and redesign their sites at least once a year.
There’s no shortage of advice about what to put on your website. But what about elements you should avoid? Poor planning, bad content, special effects and neglect can lead to lost business, security concerns, and other headaches.
When done right, e-mail marketing is not only breathtakingly affordable but also extremely effective. Regardless of how you measure your success rate (by opened messages, click-throughs or conversion rates), e-mail marketing can yield responses that range from a satisfying 5% to a heady 50%.
Why do so many businesses build websites, invest in online marketing campaigns and then devote little or no effort to analyzing the return on their investment? Find out where your traffic is coming from, and why. And evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
How to get websites to link to your site
Microsoft Small Business Center
“Link popularity” is important to search engines. It's an endorsement of your site by other websites. Getting other websites to link to your site is like one of your neighbors recommending a good plumber or handyman. It carries more weight than if a person just stumbled across your website.
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Get published and draw attention
by Catherine Seda, Entrepreneur.com
Posting articles on your website is a great way to attract new customers. Readers can find them easily through blogs, search engines, e-mails and other websites that link to them. Articles linked to your website can improve your organic search engine rankings. And they draw prospects to your website immediately. Read the article »
Get quick results from pay-per-click ads
by Diana Ransom, smSmallBiz.com
You’ve got a search engine-friendly website that’s skillfully optimized for your keywords. But then you do a keyword search and … nothing. Your site isn’t even on the radar of Google, MSN or any of the other search engines. So how do you guarantee positions in keyword searches? You buy them.
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Tips for effective search engine keywords
by Joanna L. Krotz, Microsoft Small Business Center
What’s attracting paying customers and boosting profits today? Here’s one proven strategy: using keywords effectively to market your business online. Here's a swift lesson in solving the keyword puzzle by choosing your keywords carefully.
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Search engine optimization tips to help people find your site
by Kim Komando, Microsoft Small Business Center
Simply putting up a website won’t bring visitors. Most people find websites through search engines such as Google. But good page rankings don’t happen by chance. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of creating Web pages that will garner high rankings. Here are eight steps to successful SEO. Read the article »
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