You have built a website because you want to increase sales of your product or service. With small business marketing situations we do not have the budget or the time to concentrate on brand building, instead our marketing must be targeted so that we get a rapid return on our expenditure. So if website design and good marketing go hand-in-hand, then the wrong way to build your website is to think about the products and services or information that you wish to offer and then build the site.
The correct way to build your website is to do some market research first. Talk with your customers, visit forums on the internet, see what problems are being talked about the most that your product or service solves. What do people aspire to have or what experience do they want that your business solves.
Most importantly what words do they use to describe these wants and experiences?
Build a list of all those terms and then you can go to the free Google keyword tool and type in some keywords for the services that you offer.
Google will then return results to you showing the most popular keywords that your potential customers or readers type into Google when they are searching for the stuff that you wish to sell, be it products or consulting.
The Google keyword tool gives you a graphical representation of the number of searches and competition out there for those keywords.
You can choose 10 or so keywords from that list and optimise your site for them. This is done by writing an article for each specific keyword phrase and publishing that article on your website or blog. As time goes by Google will index these pages and your site now has a good chance of ranking for those terms. You have now built a website the proper way. That is by researching your market finding out what your customers really want AND are searching for on Google.
You have also responded to their demands by building a website which is optimised for the terms that your potential customers are searching for.
For each page of your website the keywords that the page is being optimised for should appear in the title tag of your page, in the header, once or twice in the body of your text and in the final paragraph of your page. These rules are not cast in stone, you may have more less keywords in your article depending on how long your article is.
Search engine marketing is a constantly evolving field and the rules can change month to month.
This article has covered the high level view of how to build a website from a marketing perspective. If you adjust your site with these principles in mind you will most likley increase sales due to an increased flow of targeted customers to your site.
