A successful web presence that attracts your ideal client and makes a great first impression is now much more complex, incorporating not only your website and blog, but also your social media profiles, business directories and review sites.

It’s no longer enough to just have a website. Your website is just one component of a complex network of information about your business that projects your brand and expertise to those in search of a product or solution.

The opportunity to develop an solid web presence as part of your online marketing is immense. A well thought-out plan can help you gain visibility, develop an expert reputation and create a large digital footprint that attracts attention of your ideal prospects.

There are many steps and tactics to make your web presence effective that will be different depending on your business model. But regardless of your tactics, there are six overarching elements that are required for successfully creating a powerful web presence.

1. Solid Strategy

Developing a web presence strategy is not a difficult exercise as it should be integrated into your overall marketing strategy. If you have your marketing strategy defined, include the following additional information:

• Figure out your goals for this effort. Are you looking to increase visibility, obtain an expert reputation or drive inbound leads? Knowing what you are trying to achieve heads you towards the right activities and eliminates wasting time on exercises that won’t get you where you want to go.
• Understand all the places that your business listing can be found and determine which ones are worth the time to claim. Do a search for your business name and catalog the various directories where it is listed. Compiling this list helps you understand the overall effort it will take to pull it all together and help you plan your time and resources.

2. Coherent and Consistent Brand

Web Presence - 6 Elements to Ensure Success

Is every place I can find a reference to your company consistent in what it says and how it looks?

Think about how many businesses that have a similar name to yours. When someone searches for your business and finds you on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+, or finds your Google Places page or a listing on a review site, including the Better Business Bureau, will they immediately know it is you?

To ensure people always recognize your web properties and to build a recognizable expert brand, be consistent in all you do including using the same design elements such as color, images and logos. When a visitor finds your business, make sure there is no doubt that they have found the right business.

3. Continuous Participation

You can’t just set it and forget it. You have to be present regularly to respond to questions, participate in conversations and acknowledge those who mention you on social sites. You also need to keep content flowing regularly, updating your blog, offering new content to your visitors and sharing content from others you find interesting.

On the local search front, it is also not enough to just let your business listings lay dormant. Seek them out and claim them, ensuring your company name, address, phone numbers and all other relevant information is accurate and consistent. To search engines, Masterful Marketing and Masterful Marketing, LLC are not the same.

4. Relevant Content

Creating the right content for your audience is difficult, but if you create a content strategy that defines what you are going to write and a content marketing strategy to define how you will use that great content to gain visibility, you will be more likely to be found when your audience is searching for a solution. Get their attention and help them out of a problem and you become a valuable resource they will keep going back to for advice.

5. Ongoing Optimization

You have an opportunity to optimize your web presence, including website, social profiles and business listings using your top keyword phrases. Once again, you can’t just set it and forget it because search engines change how they index web pages frequently, so you need to produce new content and incorporate basic SEO components to stay visible and highly ranked in the search engine results.

6. Religious Review

Periodically do a review of your web presence to be sure all listings are kept up to date. If something changes, update it across all properties. If you get a review on one of the review sites, know about it. You never want to be surprised by a good or bad review. Keep a spreadsheet of all the sites where you have claimed your listing so you can keep them updated when necessary.

How does your business look to searchers?

Web presence takes a commitment in time, effort and persistence, but the payoff is huge. Ensuring that all of your web properties work together to project the consistent image and professional reputation you want is important to getting found regularly. Make this the year that you commit to your online web presence and make it the best that it can be.

Have you done a web presence analysis and put together your plan?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

6 Critical Elements to Guarantee a Successful Web Presence is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

You finally have a powerful website and blog that you are proud to show off, with messages that clearly explain how you help your clients and the value you provide. Now, how do you drive your target audience to your site and generate qualified leads? The following 10 tips create an inbound marketing plan that will drive traffic to and turn your website into a powerful hub for your web presence.

1. Optimize your site around your top keywords

Understanding how people search for your products or services enables you to develop a keyword list that you use for all of your marketing activities. Then optimize each page of your website around one keyword phrase, making sure you use it in your web page title, the meta description tag and appropriately throughout your content.

2. Blog regularly

When you first start to blog, you feel as if you are talking to yourself. However, the search engines do hear you and in time, your content will make its way into the hands of those interested in what you have to say. Good content attracts the right audience and if you know what they care about, what pain they are in or what challenge they need help with, the combination of your content and the search engines will lead them to you.

3. Syndicate your content

Syndicate your blog content to your Facebook Business Page, LinkedIn profile and out through Twitter, making your content visible to your friends, connections and followers. Also use legitimate sites like the 8 communities created by Social Media Today such as MyVenturePad, Social Media Today and Sustainable Cities Collective (the list of the 8 communities is on each of these sites) to distribute your content to a much larger audience, making you visible to their readers and providing inbound links.

4. Build quality inbound links

This is not an easy task that can be done quickly. Don’t believe those who solicit your business by saying they can build thousands of inbound links in a couple of weeks. What they do is connect your website to link farms that hurt more than help. The best way for you to get inbound links is to connect with reputable websites through reciprocal efforts and to implement a blog comment and syndication strategy.

5. Develop a blog comment strategy

Adding to the conversation by commenting on blogs can help you develop your expertise, build natural inbound links, and help others find you. If someone reads your comment and likes what you have to say, they will click through your link to see other written, visual or audio works you may have done.

6. Create a powerful web presence

Your web presence does not end with your website. You need to take control of other online properties that list your business. Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local are a good start, creating credible listings for your business and providing inbound links. Depending on your industry, InsiderPages, Merchant Circle and Yelp are others. Both directories and review sites are valuable properties in building a strong web presence because the number of citations are now taken into consideration for rankings.

7. Engage in social media

Actively participating in social media makes you visible and helps people find you. Your Facebook Business Page and LinkedIn profile include your website link, again helping those who find you via these networks make their way back to your hub. Even if your target market does not use Facebook, create a powerful personal presence to help people find you when they are searching. If your audience is on these networks, develop your business profile and attract your target market, giving them a reason to learn more about you.

8. Add article and email marketing to the mix

Distributing your content via article marketing or email marketing can also drive visitors to your website. Sites such as IdeaMarketers and eZineArticles create more visibility for you and direct traffic back to your website.  A quality eNewsletter can be easily forwarded to others, encouraging them to visit your website. Both build your expert reputation which naturally attracts people to your website.

9. Create compelling free offers

Create offers that are valuable to your ideal client to help them find you. Offer a useful white paper, ebook or template that will be found when someone is searching on that topic. If the offer is valuable to them, they will sign up for your mailing list to receive the offer. You not only attract more visitors but you are building your email list that will build a community around your products and services.

10. Sales Tools

Prominently display your website address on your business card and include a QR code with your website address in it so those with smart phones can easily scan your contact information. Include your website address in your email signature, along with your social media links, so people know where to find information on what you have to offer. All paths lead to your website and it doesn’t matter where they start, as long as they get to the proper destination.

What other cost-effective ideas do you have to drive people to your website?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

10 Ways to Drive Qualified Visitors to Your Website is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Web presence analysis

A Web presence analysis is an exercise that helps you determine how your business is perceived when someone searches for your area of expertise. Important to your online marketing strategy, this analysis answers questions such as:

• How well can your business be found when someone searches?
• Is your brand consistent across all of your online properties?
• How is your business seen with respect to your competition?

Evaluating how you are perceived online will help you pinpoint areas that need attention, enabling you to develop a better online marketing plan that focuses on these specific areas and puts activities in place that will improve the effectiveness of your online marketing.

Web Presence Analysis Overview

A Web presence analysis should include:

• Keyword analysis and research – For your top keyword phrases, where do you rank if at all?
• Search engine visibility – How well can I find you and what is missing?
• Website structure analysis – Does your website lack the proper items that lead to being found?
• Social media analysis – Is your social presence consistent and well integrated with other social properties and your website?
• Competitive understanding – How do you compare to your competitors?

To get started and to make this task easier, I suggest you download and install the SEO Toolbar for Firefox from SEOBook, a set of SEO tools in one convenient toolbar that enables you to gather a wealth of information about your website and those of your competitors that will help in the analysis.

Step 1 – Keyword Analysis and Research

For those of you who follow this blog regularly, you know that I am pretty anal when it comes to researching and then using your top keyword phrases in your web content, your social media profiles and all of your marketing activity. If you search this blog, you’ll find a post or two that talk about the reason for doing this research and the tools that make it easier. Speaking of tools, a nice feature of the SEO Toolbar is the keyword suggest tool. Type in a keyword, select the tools you want to use and get suggestions for other keywords.

Step 2 – Search Engine Visibility

There are two areas of search engine visibility:

• Where your website ranks for your top keywords
• How visible your business is in general (i.e. via social sites, directories and links to your properties).

To find out how well you rank for your top keywords, you can use the Rank Checker. Enter your domain name, your top keywords and hit start and it runs a report that says where your site ranks for those keywords in Google, Yahoo and Bing. You can save the report and run it regularly to track how well you are rising in the ranks.

To see how well your business is listed in various online directories, check out GetListed.org. They check Google, Yahoo, Bing, Best of the Web and now Yelp and HotFrog for your listing. If your business is not listed in any of these directories, you have work to do. Creating your local business listings has two benefits:

• It makes your business more visible throughout the social web;
• It creates more links back to your website.

Step 3 – Website Structure Analysis

How your website is structured has a lot to do with how well you will be indexed in the search engines and how readily you will be found. This may be something you will need help with, but if your site is created in WordPress, which naturally embraces search engines, you will be in good shape. If not, make sure your site isn’t loaded with JavaScript, Flash and other items search engines can’t index and that you follow the usual on page SEO techniques to help search engines better index your site.

Step 4 – Social Media Analysis

Analyzing your presence on the social media sites for this exercise is about brand consistency, message communication and participation across all the sites. Take a hard look at your profiles and make sure you are sending the same message to the same audience for all of them and that you are linking all your profiles and website for maximum visibility.

Step 5 – Competitive understanding

Now that you know how you are seen online, compare your results with that of your competition. Understanding where you are stronger or weaker in relation to their presence will help you determine where you should be channeling your marketing efforts. The SEO toolbar can be used quite effectively to gather that information.

• Visit the site and look at the information the SEO toolbar provides;
• Run Rank Checker for the same keywords to see where they rank;
• Use the “compare sites” feature on the SEO toolbar to get more statistics.

In addition, review their website and social media profiles for their messages, brand consistency and keyword usage.

How visible are you?

If you have never monitored your presence on the Internet to see how well your marketing activities are working, you should do one now to set a baseline for measuring your improvement over the next few months. As you increase your visibility, great things can happen for your business.

What have I missed? Is there something else we should include in this analysis? Add your ideas to the comments. And let us know how well you are doing.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

5 Steps to Analyzing Your Web Presence for Better Online Marketing is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

The beauty of marketing on the Internet is that, in most cases, you can test, change, modify and update your campaigns once they go live. Having everything completely perfect prior to getting out there and being seen is no longer a necessity. It is more important to take action and become visible, even if it’s not perfect, than sit around and wait.

Recently, I’ve noticed this trend of waiting for perfection with some small business owners. The problem with this strategy is:

• The longer you wait, the more chance you give your competition to be found before you, potentially stealing the thunder from something you thought was unique;
• The Web changes too quickly to worry about finding small imperfections that can be fixed quickly once they are discovered;
• Marketing takes time to work and waiting just lengthens the time before you will see results.

Understand that I’m not saying not to strive for excellence in your business. However, there is a difference between striving for excellence as a goal and waiting for everything to be perfect before you take action. I totally agree that you should:

• Review your Web site and blog for spelling, grammar and other flaws that hurt the image of your business;
• Test your forms, landing pages and interactive components to make sure they work the way you want them to;
• Ensure that your brand is consistent and well designed;
• Target the right market, use the right keywords and communicate the right messages in your pay-per-click advertising.

But trying to get everything “right” (whatever that is), whether it’s your Web site, social media profiles, email campaigns or your pay-per-click advertising, is costing you clients, visibility and money.

Waiting to begin marketing on the Internet so everything is perfect is futile. Get it to a point where no one but you knows it’s not “done” and go live. The longer you wait for perfection, the more the world is passing you by!

Are you waiting for perfection before you begin a marketing campaign?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Don’t Wait for Perfection is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.