Marketing Your Small-Business Website
in an Economy Like This

Internet Marketing

Someone should coordinate your Internet marketing in-house, but it doesn’t have to be the boss. You may have an employee who knows your business well — an intelligent, creative person who welcomes a challenge, maybe someone who grew up using the Internet. Make Internet marketing, along with website management and collaboration with your web designer, part of his or her job at specific times every month.

Some people use search engine optimization as a comprehensive term for marketing a website, but SEO is just the beginning. But think about Internet marketing as having two components — search marketing and social marketing.

Search Marketing Means Useful Content

Obviously, just having a website doesn’t mean that your target audiences will find it or become your customers if they do. Search marketing, which can make your site more visible, includes the SEO that has to be part of your content development. But it also involves a long-term commitment to adding useful information to your site, and to monitoring your online competitors and the traffic on your site.

SEO is a way of editing a website to position it for success with Google and the other search engines. For example, you should target no more than five search terms for a major page on your site and then use each of them three times on that page. Some people used to think of SEO as a set of tricks that could outsmart the search engines, but that kind of “black hat marketing” will eventually hurt you.