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How do search engines rank your website? There are many rules when it comes to Google search engine marketing and other top search engines, but one you rarely see is creating useful, unique content. If you create useful content, preferably as unique as possible, you can achieve top rankings in the major search engines. If you focus on filling your web pages with ads … if readers see your site and try to escape fast … if you have dead links and poor navigation – these things combined can destroy your web marketing efforts.

Creating useful content is one of the pillars of web marketing. In his short eBook “Money for Nothing”, Seth Godin highlights this, stating search engines know if your pages are bad. How do they know? Readers quickly bounce away from your blog or home page and they never come back. In seconds, they decide your website has nothing to offer.

If you provide useful content on a constant basis, you don’t always have to be unique. Being unique is very difficult when it comes to web marketing. Even if your main goals are different, everything has already been said in marketing speak. However, not everything in marketing is written to be useful for the consumer, business owner, or fellow internet expert.

How do you create the useful content you need for web marketing?
Every product and every service out there either solves a problem or fulfills a need. And believe it or not, but consumers are not always aware of these problems until the right products comes along to fix it. That being said, as a business owner, your main goal is to help your consumer solve a problem. Maybe you first have to make them aware that this problem exists, but nonetheless, solving a problem sounds like useful content to me.

If you can help, you can get readers. If you get readers, you can get links from all across the web telling everyone (including Google) that your site has useful, unique content.

How do you know if your content is useful and unique?
Unique, useful content spreads. Viral marketing, not a sickness but a way of spreading messages, is all about one single point of contact spreading to many other degrees. It can be the email about the sale going on for books on Amazon that gets forwarded to 25 people or the Digg post that gets 500 “digs.” Whatever it is, once you get a viral following, social networks, directories, and the thousands of other web pages linking back to your site, will actually market for you, telling their friends, followers and even search engines that you are the expert on this topic.

What’s so powerful about content?
Search engine optimized content is what brings visitors to a site. Useful content is what keeps visitors at a site. Compelling content is what makes the sale. Unique content is what will spread virally and get other sites to link back to your website. All web marketing, whether it’s SEO, pay-per-click, link building, display ads, public relations or email marketing, can benefit from good content. Unique, useful content can not only get more people interested in your product or service, but it can improve your search engine rankings

When in social or networking events, I’m usually asked what I do for a living, which is kind of a tricky question to answer. If I reply that I work for an “Internet Marketing company”, I usually get a glazed-back look of mixed understanding. So naturally I proceed to tell them that I’m the guy that invented the annoying pop-up or spam e-mail, which typically leads me to dodge a punch in the nose. (That’s a Joke…but not too far from the truth.)

But in all seriousness, Internet marketing is loosely defined for most people in that they aren’t sure what it is or what it does. This becomes evidently clear in front of new prospects that want to know more about getting their business online and promoting their business into cyberspace. Even responses such as “We help your company get listed in search engines” or “we help customers find you online” is typically not descriptive enough for the guy that has been purchasing radio and yellowpage advertising for the last couple of decades.

This is unfortunate because the above phenomenon typically leads to general misunderstanding as to what one can expect when diving into online marketing…the so-called hottest advancements since television. So to benefit all, I thought I would take a stab at offering a more descriptive definition to marketing online for those who are unsure of what the web has to offer.

First, i would like to lay out the elementary components of the marketing mix (also known as the 4 P’s):

1. Product
2. Price
3. Place
4. Promotion

The main reason why I choose to spell out marketing in this fashion, is that many businesses that I have had the pleasure to meet with are only most concerned with the last variable “promotion” as the cornerstone of their strategy, when unarguably this is really only 1/4 of the marketing equation. I believe that this is significant point because most marketing problems rarely occur from this variable alone. I touched on this subject just a few of posts ago when i was discussing if search engine marketing was really marketing. In any regard, the message is simple. How you communicate, price, and place your products are equally as important as how you promote them.

With that said, here is what i believe to be the 4 key fundamental results of online marketing:

1. Increase or position branding & exposure
2. Generate Sales & Leads
3. Maintain or develop customer intimacy
4. Reduce operating costs

All of which utilize the 4 P’s of marketing in some capacity. (If you believe I have left something out, please don’t be shy.) Although you would beleive that generating sales or increasing leads would be the most important for any company, you can’t deny the importance of the other 3 as significant marketing outcomes that businesses also want to achieve.

Therefore, getting back to brass tacks, I would like to reply to those interested in what I do: “I help companies use the web to increase their exposure online, generate business, and stay in touch with their customers while reducing their overall costs.” All of which may not sound perfect, but I believe its the beginning of a solution to an age old marketing problem.

Interestingly enough, most websites I run across don’t have as much of a problem in getting traffic as they do in converting the traffic they have. Sure, we all would agree that getting some more traffic certainly wouldn’t hurt. But generally speaking, there are usually many easy to implement website changes that most companies can perform to their website that will immediately add to the bottom line before spending a dime on website promotion.

Ok, so what are the secrets you ask? Well believe it or not, making your website lead generation firendly isnt as hard as you think as long as you stick to the basics. The below 3 tips may seam elementary to some, however i assure you than if you follow these basic guidelines, your lead generation efforts will thank you.

1. The phone number- The last thing you want is a qualified prospect having to work at trying to contact you. I’m a fan of putting important contact information in the upper right hand corner of every page. Many web users like to call rather than e-mail or fill out a form. So, if you plan to track leads, make sure you purchase a unique phone number for your website.
2. Clean-up your form submissions- This is not the easiest or the most fun task to perform, but does have one of the largest pay-outs in my opinion. First, start out by outlining the information that you would like to know about a potential customer that would make your qualifying efforts easier. Next, try to shorten your list to the “bare minimum,” as most website users typically don’t like long forms to fill out. Lastly, add a captcha (a number or letter field that prevents spam) and a form validator that will notify users if they missed a field. Lastly- test, test, test!
3. Focus your content- “Our business is your business.” Does your content describe what your product or service does well or could be used for any company? It wasn’t until recently that marketing and advertising professionals started to recognize that web content writing is different than print. More specifically, web users are time poor. If they don’t find what they are looking for, they literally are a click away from your competitor. As a general rule of thumb, try to keep your content down to 300 words or less per page. Additionally, focus your writing on solving customer “pain points”…that is what your customers likely care the most about your product or service.

As you may have noted, none of the above related to flashy graphics or web design. These are important aspects to lead generation as well. However, sticking these 3 basics will assure that the visitors you do have can get the information they need as well as contact you when they are near a purchasing decision. Good luck and happy selling!