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A few years ago, my business partner stumbled across a great web copywriting resource – Net Words, a book by Nick Usborne. The book is easy to read and to apply, regardless of your particular role in your business. We read, we learned and we used many of his principles for writing effective headlines,  powerful emails and dynamic website content. I recently rediscovered Mr. Usborne and his website Excess Voice, which contains tips, articles and a variety of other website copywriting resources (including a very useful newsletter). If you’ll be writing copy for the web, whether a few pages or thousands, I strongly recommend you check out his website – especially if you are interested in creating optimized copy that will help you with your customers and the search engines at once.

When optimizing a website, you’ll need to first identify the keywords that are most relevant to your business and are most likely to be used by potential customers to search for you. There are a variety of tools online that you can use to come up with your list of keywords, but before you start using a tool, I recommend brainstorming a basic list yourself.

First, think of all the words and phrases you would use to describe your core services. If you sell necklaces, perhaps you’d use keyword phrases like “buy necklace” or “jewelry store” to describe your business.  Try to think of at least 10 phrases relevant to your business.

Next, use the thesaurus. While you may use “car sales” to describe your business, your customer may be looking for “auto sales” or “buy new truck.” It’s important to think about the different ways a potential client might try to find you.

Then, look at competitor sites! It’s always a good idea to know what your competitors are up to, and they may have thought of wording that you hadn’t considered.

Finally, once you’ve come up with the widest variety of possibilities on your own, then you can use an online tool to figure out how many people are searching for the keywords your chose. You can use Overture, Wordtracker, or a variety of free tools you’ll find by searching for “keyword research tool” in Google or your search engine of choice. These tools allow you to search for a keyword and find out how many people searched for it over a period of time. You can use this information to prioritize your keywords.

For instance, if 1000 people searched for “auto sales” but 10,000 searched for “car sales,” you might want to use the higher volume phrase in your optimization efforts. On the other hand, more searches means more competition and it may be harder to rank high for high volume words. Tools like Wordtrackerwill also allow you to run a competiton search to see how competitive each keyword you chose is.

It’s one thing to think about marketing your website. It’s another thing entirely to actually have a plan and write it down. I cannot stress enough the importance of establishing a plan for marketing your website before you start (or hire someone). 

Now, I’m not saying that you need to be an expert or even know anything at all about Internet marketing to come up with a plan. But the important thing is to really think about what it is you’re trying to accomplish. Are you trying to increase sales? Improve traffic? Create a better message? Whatever your particular goals are, its important to have those goals in mind when you start the the process of marketing your site.

Moreover, it is really critical to have an idea of what you are trying to accomplish before you hire a consultant or SEO firm to work with. The reasons: 1) if you don’t know what you want, it’s going to take extra time to define your goals (a task which, hopefully,  your website marketing consultant will do first thing). 2) if you don’t know what you want, its going to be difficult for you to measure success. This is really important, because, when you invest time and money into your website, you want to feel like you’re seeing a return on that investment. Without knowing what you are trying to accomplish, it is impossible to tell whether you’ve gotten there or not.

 Okay, so enough theory. Here’s how you can put this into practice:

1. Brainstorm: Sit down either by yourself or with members of your staff and think about all the things you’d like the website to do (even if some of these things are “long-term” goals, it”ll help you understand the bigger picture).

2. Write it down! I cannot emphasize this enough. Don’t waste your time trying to remember what you brainstormed about. Write it all down so that you can easily review and prioritize your ideas.

3. Review & prioritize: Read through your list and prioritize based on relative importance to your business and on the resources available to you. If you know you cannot afford to add live video to your site now, this should not be your #1 priority. On the other hand, don’t be afraid of the costs at this point. You may find that there are inexpensive solutions to items on your wishlist.

Whether you’re doing your own website marketing or hiring a firm to help you, coming up with a basic plan – a list of priorities and goals – will put you in control of the situation and allow you to better measure success!

How well is your website doing? For many website owners, understanding how their website is performing can be a confusing task. It can be very difficult to determine success, especially for business owners, who may not be involved in the technical creation or maintenance of their websites . In fact, defining success can become a Herculean task. Consider the following:

• How much traffic does your website get?
• How many visitors email you after viewing your website?
• If an ecommerce site, how many sales do you make?
• Are visitors able to find the information they need?

How do the answers to these questions relate to the overall success of your business? In other words, is the website having an impact? Even the answers to these questions lend to the confusion due to the variety of statistics available on the web.

In my experience, the first problem most business owners face is understanding what statistics are meaningful to their business. For instance, I was once approached by a client who was extremely concerned about the number of hits his website was receiving. His main goal “I want to generate 1 million hits.” But upon further discussion, I discovered that he was confusing hits with unique visitors. And with a graphic laden website, the number of hits his website received was disproportionately high relative to the number of unique visitors to his website. At the end of the day, his real concern was with unique visits, and not just that, but also how those visits converted to sales.

For a more in-depth discussion of website analytics, visit amyrivers.com/resources.

In addition to website statistics, there are many external ways to gauge the success of your website. For instance, many website owners look at Alexa ratings to determine the success of their website. And while these ratings can paint a picture of day-to-day changes in website popularity, it is important to consider how these ratings are determined.

With Alexa, the traffic ranking system is based on information gathered from Internet users who have voluntarily installed the Alexa toolbar in their browser. On the Alexa website, you will find a description of the Alexa traffic ranking system, as well as some disclaimers regarding known limitations in this data.

Ultimately, the business owner needs to determine the statistics and analytics that are right for them. If you need to track traffic, finding a good analytics program will go along way to more effectively monitoring the performance of your website. And you need not break the bank to access these stats. Most website hosts already track statistics for your website, so contact your host or webmaster to learn how to access this information.

Alternatively, you can sign-up for Google Analytics. By uploading a small piece of code to your website, you can take advantage of Google’s free Analytics program, which allows you to track traffic and to set specific goals for determining website success.

No matter which course of action you take, make sure that you are comparing apples to apples. The results you see in different website analytics programs may vary, so it is important to gatehr statistics over time using the same program(s) so that you can compare information that was gathered using the same sets of criteria and methodolgy.

In my career as an Internet marketing professional, I often find myself educating clients. Whether they come to me with an intimate knowledge of the Internet and/or their website, or they basically know they want to make more of an impact online, it’s been my goal to try and speak about the Internet, websites and website marketing in a way that will help my clients get more involved in actively undertanding and improving their online presence.

In this blog, I hope to provide some insight into these topics based on my own experiences. I will try to provide as many useful resources as possible, both here and through my website as a whole. I look forward to discussing topics of interest and hope to engage you, my readers, in a dialogue that will help you achieve your goals online.