The branding of a company is important as it builds long-term trust and recognition; people need to believe in a company before they make a purchase.

The Internet can be used to build brand awareness and to pass on information about products and services.It can also allow the company to communicate with visitors and inform them of its goals, ethos and standpoint on different issues.

Companies which have successfully built on-line brands include Google, eBay, Amazon and Yahoo and they are now easily as recognisable as off-line branding giants like Coca-cola and Nike.

You need to take your keyword research very seriously as it is the foundation of your entire on-line marketing campaign. If you start to optimise and promote phrases that people are not using, you will not get the visitor numbers you need to succeed.

You can analyse your own statistics to see how people have found your site and then build on those phrases. There is powerful software available that can suggest terms in your niche and provide estimated visitor numbers and competition analysis. Look at your competition and see what they are trying to rank well for.

When conducting your keyword research you need to have an integrated balance of research and ‘buying’ phrases.

Wordtracker is an online tool that can be used to grow the seed words into a keyword list, it is a powerful tool and can give us a lot of information including suggesting words related to our own, looking for keywords on a competitors site, showing us how many times a keyword is used in the past month.

Using all this information we can build a comprehensive list of keywords that are targeted to our market.

Full details of how to log into and use wordtracker can be found in the technical manual.

Social networking and social book marking sites allow people with similar interests to get together in groups and discuss the subjects and products they are interested in.

This can be of use if you are marketing your products and services on-line as you can also join these groups.

You can find out what people are talking about and what they are looking for when it comes to your products. This will help you with your keyword research and with producing tools or information to attract new visitors to your site.

When using these sites, you must be careful not to appear ‘spammy’ and just out to promote your site.

You should offer help and advice to members of the group and become recognised as the expert in your field. This will result in not only more visitors but also visitors who trust you and are ready to buy from you.

Using 0845 numbers on your website and only on your website allows you to track how many people are calling you as a result of having seen your website.

The calls can only come from your website as that is the only place you have advertised it.

The 0845 numbers allow you to receive calls to any location in the country as they are non geographic numbers that are able to give you a wide range of statistics on the calls you receive including the number called from (so long as they have not chosen to hide it), duration of the call, was the call answered, the time and date of the call.

Using this information you can target your on-line marketing to get the best responses, you can ascertain where in the country people are calling from, see if you need more people answering the phones, check when peak times are and much more.

I can highly recommend Windsor telecom if you are interested in using 0845 numbers as they have the best reporting software I have seen.

Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace provide a forum where people with similar interests can get together.

Social networking and book marking sites are among the most popular sites on the Internet and they allow users to share information on the products and websites they like in an informal manner.

These groups can be arranged geographically and may only have the one subject in common. A member of the social networking site can join as many groups as they like, so someone in Dorset with an interest in dogs can join groups related to Dorset, beaches in Dorset, Bournemouth night life, dog grooming and anything else that might be connected.

If you have a website that offers information as well as products and if you have the time to post new information regularly, then you should have a blog.

A blog can be a useful addition to your existing site and as an expert you can give helpful information about new products, write product reviews and give tips on how to get the most from new purchases.

Blogs can be a good way of interacting with your visitors and discovering what they need from your site. However, it is very important that the information is up-to-date and relevant.

A website is made up of web pages, each of these pages can and should rank in the search engine results (SERPS) in their own right, and the way we make this happen is to focus each page on a keyword.

With some of the pages it will be clear witch of the keywords to use, for example if you are on the page that talks about how to value a companies share price the keywords should related to that, like “share price analysis tips”, however if the page is the contact us page it might be more useful to optimise it for something like, “contact us for share dealing advice”

Each page needs to have a unique keyword attached to it within the overall topic of the site.

Remember

Always think what will the customer be looking for?
What are the goals for the site?
Never assume the keyword research done by someone else is correct.
Treat each page as though it were a separate site.

Conducting Competitor analysis will help get higher search engine rankings for your website.

Before we make the final decision on what keywords to use we need to look at who the competition are, and why they are raking so well for the keyword.

There can be several reasons for a site to rank well for a keyword and these can range from the accidental to the professionally optimised.

Obviously if we can find keywords that have little or no professionally managed sites then we can dominate these keywords with little effort.

If however we find keywords with professional optimisation we need to make a decision on how valuable that work is to us.

If it is going to take a lot of resources to get a word that will deliver us only 1% more sales then it might not be worth it, if however we could expect 20% more sales from that keyword then it might be worth putting in the extra effort.

Remember sometimes it is easier and more efficient to rank for 2 or 3 keywords that combined bring you 500 visitors than it is to take on Amazon for the one keyword to bring you the same visitors.

Ranking well for many keywords rather than just a few also has an effect on how the search engines react to your site, they think you know your subject and give you more credit for new terms you are attempting to rank for, this is how sites like Amazon, eBay and the BBC all rank so well for so many words.

Using this approach you can take a longer term view on some keywords and rank for them without spending the intense resources some newer sites might have too.

Wordtracker is an online tool that can be used to grow the seed words into a keyword list, it is a powerful tool and can give us a lot of information including suggesting words related to our own, looking for keywords on a competitors site, showing us how many times a keyword is used in the past month.

Using all this information we can build a comprehensive list of keywords that are targeted to our market.

Full details of how to log into and use wordtracker can be found in the technical manual.