Fundamentals of small business digital marketing

Here are some digital marketing basics:

Identify keywords Steve Covey in his book 7 habits of highly effective people, taught us that we should begin with the end in mind. This is just as relevant to the digital marketing. You need to consider what people will be looking for - what terms someone will use when they are looking for your business. These terms are called keywords. Keywords will form the foundation of all of the future activities that will be performed on digital marketing.

The objective of digital marketing is to improve and increase your brand exposure and improve and increase sales. So let's discuss a real life example. I am a believer in the value of open source software and I have a website that educates the public on the savings that open source software can generate for small and medium businesses. So what keywords should I choose for these new website?

The obvious starting point would be 'open source software'. Then there are specific types of open source software that people would look for: Opensource CRM, Opensource ERP, Opensource alternative for Microsoft word and you would continue through the list. When you have identified your keywords, you have a starting point to work with the remainder of the additional steps. Remember, you will always be updating, changing and expanding your keywords based on the feedback from your customers and from your website analytics.

Structure website Now that you have your keywords you have the ability to structure your website such that those keywords can easily be found by the search engines and by users. In the structure of your website you need to make sure that these keywords are strategically placed in the site to maximize visibility and prominence of those pages to the search engines. There are many articles out there that explain methods of emphasizing keywords in your web pages. It is sufficient to say in this article that you need to include the words with enough frequency and placement to inform the search engine that the page is important on that particular word.

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