The root goal of a website business will ultimately be to generate targeted traffic and monetize that traffic. This can be done via on-page and off-page search engine optimization, the use of videos, images, and a constantly updated informative blog. As more content and products are created, newly optimized pages can be created to house that content and those products.
Stage 1: Infancy
The very first thing in our strategy is keyword research. Using popular and effective keywords on your website will help to assure that it will be visible in the search engine results instead of being buried under thousands of other websites in the search results. In order to gain a better understanding for how potential customers will find our website, we look at what keywords are related to our product/service, and try to decipher which ones have the highest number of searches. We use Google as a tool to do our keyword research because Google holds a very large percentage of searchers in comparison to other engines.
Once we’ve done some extensive keyword research, we now know what to use in our title tags, image’s ALT tags, meta data, as well as what to name our files. When deciding what keywords to use where, one thing that must be kept in mind is relevancy. We want to rank for our keywords, but we do not want to over-use them, or use them in an irrelevant fashion. By understanding what keywords we are trying to rank for, we now have a decent idea of what types of content our potential visitors are searching for. This leads us to the next stage in our website business plan.
Stage 2: Design and Implementation
It’s good to understand design and SEO implementaion before you start your site. That way, instead of updating an existing site for search engine optimization, your site will be created from the ground up with search engine optimization as a priority. Your site potentially could have easily become a flash website, but instead will become a XHTML/CSS based site. All your web pages will contain 100% unique content, and will target different keywords. Visuals should be kept relatively simple, although hopefully aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Every link needs to have been carefully placed with intended anchor text and destinations. Every image should be tagged and every bit of information should go through a personally conducted “relevancy test”.
Stage 3: Traffic Driving
Every aspect of search engine optimization boils down to a methodology to obtain more traffic from search engines. Traffic can be converted into money, and we want traffic! We have developed a checklist of operation to complete after when your site goes live.
o Site will be submitted to the major search engines.
o A press release will be submitted.
o Video content will be submitted to YouTube and various other video sites.
o Industry related articles will be written and submitted to EzineArticles and GoArticles, as well and any additional article services that are found to be credible.
o Small-scale testing will begin with pay-per-click campaigns.
o Multiple social networks will be explored, with a link back to our site in each profile.
o Questions will be answered on message boards with links to relevant information our website provides in the form of tutorials.
o Images will be submitted to image-based search engines.
o Website will be submitted to relevant Google Directory listings.
Stage 4: Ongoing Maintenance
We’ve come up with a weekly regimen that will help both build traffic over time, and keep the site maintained:
o Write and submit one article.
o Make 1-2 Forum postings containing a informative post and a relevant link back to your website.
o A new blog post will be posted or new page created on your website.
o A request will be sent to another reputable and relevant website for a one-way link.
Conclusion
With the help of search engine optimization, quality content, constant updating, and the viral nature of video, your site could take it’s first step into the website business world. This year, your website could be on the correct path to generating many potential customers and a working business model.
