Onsharp

A well-optimized website is the first step toward a successful web strategy. Good keyword-rich content, standards-compliant coding, and a well-thought-out design will get you far.

But you can't sit back after that and wait for someone to come to your site. You'll need to submit your site to search engines (yes, they'll probably notice it eventually even if you don't, but we saw a site this morning which is five months old and still unindexed. Do you want to wait that long?) and do basic linkbuilding to make sure you can be found easily. You'll want to watch the keywords your visitors are using to make sure that the search engines understand what your site is about and are offering it to people who are looking for the goods and services you offer. You'll want to develop a marketing strategy that includes your website as one of the primary tools.

These things are part of the set-up process for your website. They give you essential information that may lead to some tweaks in your content and design.

Then you need ongoing follow up. You need to keep track of your rankings and your analytics on a weekly or monthly basis (depends how fast things change in your industry) to make certain that you get the results you want. Here are some things that this kind of regular oversight offers:

• You can see whether everything is going as it should, in the direction of steady growth, or whether you need to make changes to respond to changes in circumstances.
• You can identify and respond to opportunities -- an increase in visitors from an unexpected source, for example.
• You can see what kinds of results you get from specific marketing efforts, including offline actions.
• You can tell what kind of content brings traffic to your site, and add or update that kind of content frequently to keep your site fresh and appealing to human visitors and to search engines.
• You can see seasonal trends, or general market trends, early enough to adjust your strategy.
• You can catch small problems before they become big problems.

If you don't keep track, you won't get the information you need. It's that simple. So you need to gather and analyze data about your website, and to use that infromation in decision-making. You need to be prepared to make changes at your website or in your use of your website as they're needed.

You can do this yourself. If you can tell that doing so wouldn't be the best use of your time, you can contact Onsharp to discuss our affordable SEO packages.