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Website Design Series

Internet Marketing Elements

Our first two web design articles focused on how you can prepare for developing a new website and organizing your content around your target customers. This article takes a different approach and focuses on the overall topic of internet marketing. Internet marketing is the broader focus of getting interested customers to your website and then doing the rights with them once there.

We believe internet marketing strategies have 5 major elements as follows:

• Organic Search Engine Optimization
• Pay-per-Click Search Engine Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Website design
• Analytics

Let’s take each of these five elements of internet marketing and explain briefly what role they should play in your overall plan.

Organic search engine optimization should be considered your ongoing “branding” strategy online. Getting a first-page ranking in Google will establish your presence online, give your website great visibility and result in good increases in traffic. Also, having high rankings on the “organic” (left side) of a search engine page leads to much higher credibility than the Pay-Click side.

Pay-per-Click search engine marketing can get you significant and immediate traffic. It is a very flexible method of getting interested customers to your website. However, if you are successful at organic Search Engine Optimization, Pay-per-Click search marketing is best used to get visibility for very competitive search phrases and for promoting special products and services.

Email marketing is one of the most cost effective marketing tools available and is often considered as the “glue that binds everything else together”. Email marketing (not SPAM) is great at staying in touch with your existing contacts and increasing sales from your current customers. We recommend your emails contain information that is helpful to your customers and special promotions.

Website design is a critical element, but we won’t go into much depth here. Read our previous articles about web design and those in the future.

They say, “what you can’t measure, you can’t manage”, and we agree. Installation of a good web analytics package is absolutely critical to a successful internet marketing strategy. We recommend Google Analytics because it is both robust and free – and you can’t beat free. From analytics you can see what people are doing on your website, how they are getting there and what search terms are being used to find you.

With the internet quickly becoming the dominant marketing medium, a solid internet marketing strategy is a must. To learn more about each element visit our internet marketing section on our website.