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If you are designing or maintaining a website it can be a good idea to stop for a moment and try to take in what your website is all about. What is the overall theme of your site?

It’s quite an ambiguous thing to do, but slowing down, taking a step back and trying to view your website in a different way can broaden your perspective. This process can show you parts of your site that you perhaps never spotted whilst you were busy working on it.

Another great way to get this different perspective is to ask some friends or new people to take a look and to see what they feel is the overarching context of the whole thing. Take their advice to heart, even if it hurts, it can serve you greatly if you feel the site needs re-designing or improving in any way.

Fresh content can tell search engines and visitor alike that you’re active, up to speed and ready for business. Of course, content should be well researched, written in good English and presented nicely if you wan to generate leads.

A blog or news section on your website can be ideal for adding fresh content, however, many websites now also include Twitter and Facebook feeds too. The more engaging content there is on your website, the better, and if it’s added regularly and designed to interest your target audience, then it can generate leads, and help you perform better on search engines.

If you want to go into further detail on a product, explain a new service, congratulate an employee or simply share your business’s option, then create a news item or a blog post and improve the overall performance of your website.

One of the most important parts about marketing your website is getting fresh content on your websites, and blogs are great at doing this. The  question of this post isn’t answered quite so easily though, as managing a blog once you have it while ensuring the quality of the content you’re producing remains high.

A lot of things need to be considered when you put a blog on your website, like whether or not you’ll have the time to generate engaging content which people will actually want to read; including things like featured images, studies of the industry you’re working in, and case studies of the work you’ve done. It also massively reduces the value of the blog to your marketing campaigns if you start putting a lot of irrelevant content onto your website.

If you want a blog, but you think you won’t be able to provide at least one engaging blogpost a month, then it is probably not worth doing it at all.

If you have some very strong positions in search engines and you’re attracting a good amount of traffic, it’s important to make sure you’re converting these visitors; otherwise your SEO campaign could be pointless.

Without engaging content on your website and an element of ‘lead nurturing’ you’re not going to be able to make visitors become customers. If you have a good idea on who your target audience is and you know what they want from you, then give it to them on a plate, and you could eventually see them become loyal, returning customers.

Some websites with decent rankings fail to take the visitor to the next level, and this is something you’re going to need to do if you want to convert them. Small features like call to actions, infographics, enquiry forms and email signup forms can be nice touches, and you’ll begin to understand your audience even more along the way.

Social media may be largely recognised for its ability to connect with potential customers, allowing businesses to share engaging content and reach out to new customers. You can also boost website traffic using social media, and many businesses will regularly update their social media accounts with posts that contain links back to their business’s website.

You will need to have a large following to reap the rewards, while these posts should not be sent out too often, otherwise you can come across as too ‘pushy’, meaning people unfollow or unsubscribe from your account.

In most cases, it’s important to find the best time to include a link, whilst it should also be relevant to do so. You have to give followers interesting information, but social media updates should vary, so try to link back to the site when you can but don’t force it too much.

When a search engine crawls your website, it does not appear how it does to me and you. The spiders that are sent out to crawl your site can only interpret certain things and that is why it is important to build a website that is designed with SEO in mind. An example of this is an image that contains text within it, the search engines will not be able to read the text within the image but it can understand what the image is a bout from the file name, alt tags and image titles.

You need to ensure that your most important information on your site is in HTML format as Java applets, Flash files, images and other non-text content are often ignored or devalued by search engine spiders, despite the advances in crawling technology.

Having a crawable navigation to your site is crucial. Many companies make the mistake of not having a search engine friendly navigation thus meaning many of their pages do not get crawled and therefore do not show up in the search engines results pages.

Web marketing is basically a form of online marketing which can include use of affiliate marketing, email marketing, social marketing among others. Many online businesses hire web marketers in order to drive more traffic to their sites to buy their products. For web marketing in Northants or any other UK town, to be successful it requires hard work.

To do an effective web marketing you need learn about search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation (often abbreviated as SEO) basically entails making a blog or a website more accessible to search-engine users, that is you make the site much easier to find. In a nutshell, SEO is the process whereby you make a website more visible and relevant to both web users and search engines. The major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo have results where the webpages and other content like videos, ranked based-on what the search-engine considers most relevant to the web user.

SEO Techniques:

• Make sure your web marketing-strategy matches your target audience. Understand your target audience, this plays a major role in a successful search-engine optimisation strategy. Pin-point what type of users you’ll be marketing the products and services to, and then write your web content accordingly.

• Make sure your website has search engine friendly keywords and phrases. Keywords are the targeted words which determine what category your website will be listed-under in search engines. You need to create article titles and content which contain relevant keywords and phrases. The important keywords or phrases for your content should be present in both the content’s URL and the HTML title-tag.

Optimise your title tags. Major search engines normally index content of the title-tag, and they actually make it a key factor when ranking.

• Engage in social-bookmarking. Allow visitors and users to recommend your blog or website on social sites like Digg, Google+, Facebook and Twitter. A recommendation from a visitor may bring more visitors to your site. Search engines can also use these recommendations to determine your site’s position on search engine-results. For-example, Bing places sites much higher on the result pages if they’ve been recommended by Facebook friends.

• Write good and compelling content. Good content on your blog or website is essential to good search engine result ranking. There are many other factors which search engine-spiders look for when indexing a blog or website, but good content is a great foundation on which high page rankings are built.

• Start building your link-partners. Find blogs and websites which have high-page rankings and are ready to exchange-links with you. Ask the website’s web-master to use your key words when they are linking to your site. Search engines treat incoming-links to your site as votes. The more votes you get the better your ranking will be. Google’s “Page-Rank” algorithm normally determines your website’s authority by the-number of sites that are linked to it.

Add meta-description and keyword-tags to your content. Your description-tag should have an overview of the article’s content, and should have less than 200-characters. Google displays only the first 156-characters of the page’s-description in search engine results. The keyword-tag should have a list of the key words and key word phrases that are relevant to the article.

The fundamentals of schema markup, at the side of 3 compelling reasons to begin using it in your website today.

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When it comes to gaining business online, it is no longer usually good enough just to have a website. There is new competition added every day and if you do not keep marketing your website you will quickly fall behind. Search Engine Optimisation also known as SEO is a must for anyone who is wants to be found online, whether it is to sell a product / service or to generate enquiries. SEO is something that is made up of many marketing components and really the majority of it should be undertaken by a professional online marketing company, or at least structured and monitored by one. The basic idea of SEO is to improve your website’s visibility on the search engines, pushing you higher up the ranks so that when someone searches for something that is relevant to what you offer, your site appears closest to the top so they click on it.