Website Marketing: A First Glance

by: Stephan Goutoulli

I recently started working as a consultant for MarketFinders, a Ventura County/ Santa Barbara marketing company in Southern California. Lynn Sarkany, founder and principal, communicated her interest in knowing more about web marketing as the interest in this "arcane art" is exponentially growing.

I said "arcane art" because, unlike conventional marketing, the approach can be quite different and unpredictable. In this article, I will review a few things that should or shouldn't be done in order to improve your site's prominence.

Let's assume that you do not have a website. Your first task is to hire a professional designer. Why do you ask? You could use one of those great designing programs, right? Well, you may have heard this before and it's not a myth: most of these programs generate unnecessary code that does not need to be there and may very well hurt your website. Search engines do prefer up-to-date clean code and a professional web designer is one of the most qualified people to do this. With a strong structure, your site will also be liked by spiders and bots (these are the programs gathering info for search engines) thus making it easier for it to be ranked at its value (given the algorithm used by the specific spider/bot). The higher the value and relevancy, the more likely others will view your site.

If you already have a website, several factors come into play, including age of site, website design, content dynamics, and any type of web marketing. A website professional should analyze your site, including its age, history, structure, and previous marketing attempts. From that point on, he/she should be in a position to tell you if your site needs structural work and how you should proceed to optimize your site.

Next, make sure search engines know who you are and where you are. In other words, make sure your contact information is complete with street address, phone number(s), fax (optional), and email address(es). Telling visitors who you are increases your site legitimacy and search engines, starting with Google, are starting to pay attention to that. The “where” is also important since some search engines, and most directories, offer local searches and listings

About The Author

Stephan Goutoulli is the owner of WebStudio, NY, and has been working as a designer, programmer, and webmaster for over 4 years.
View their website at: http://www.hamptonswebsitedesign.com