Website Marketing Mistakes and how to avoid them (Part 1)

A website is a wonderful marketing tool especially for start-up entrepreneurs and businessmen. It is an inexpensive way of marketing your products and services – a great incentive for the cash strapped businessman who have allotted a majority of his resources on getting his business off the ground.

But even after your company formations have taken place, if a website is a great marketing tool, you would still have to market the website itself to achieve its intended goals. Marketing a website has its own set of pitfalls too. To more effectively market your website avoid making the following website marketing mistakes:

Spam. Doing this is the most effective and fastest way of getting your website blacklisted in all of the major search engines. There are some people who might advise you that making thousand of doorway and cloaked pages peppered with hidden text is the most effective method of having your website rank high in search engine placements. Don’t listen to them, because you are just putting your website at risk.

Generating untargeted traffic. You may be able to generate a lot of traffic for your new business website but you have to ask yourself, “is this the right traffic?” It wouldn’t benefit your website if you do get the type of traffic that will not even make a significant dent on your business. A good way to prevent this from happening and to get the type of clientele that you need is to be clear about what your site does in the meta information.

Using single keywords. Single keywords will not be effective in generating traffic -- unless of course you are part of a market that is so specific a single word can be used to identify your product amidst its competitors. Multiple keyword phrases are what you should be using to ensure a successful campaign to generate traffic. For example, instead of using “window” you can use “window cleaning supplies” or “window cleaning services”. Try to determine what your target market is and make the appropriate keyword compositions based on that. By using multiple keyword phrases you are limiting your competition for the keyword phrase.

Poor website design. A poor website design is an inexcusable offence. Your business may enjoy the highest rankings in all the search engines on Earth but if your website looks atrocious then you’ll definitely lose your traffic as fast as it comes in. Web surfers are easily turned off by poorly laid out website design where they had to make unnecessary mouse clicks just to get to the information that they want – that is, if they could even find it. And when these visitors leave your website in disgust it will be near impossible to entice them to go back again. A good, clean and simple web design is always a safe bet.