identity to the web. You must create a positive user experience or risk diluting your brand. Think of your website as a business tool, how can you use it to develop your business? You could think about selling online, creating a client area, offering sign ups for the latest news and exclusive content to develop your contacts or adding search functionality to improve customer interaction with your brand.

Signposting

Think about why the user is there. What do they want to find? And perhaps more importantly, what do you want them to find? There’s nothing more annoying than finding a website and then not being able to find what you want because it’s poorly designed. Think about the structure, it should be quick and easy to navigate and use effective signposting to guide users to the content they need and the content you want them to see. Guiding people to your website and through it offers an excellent opportunity to cross sell products/services. This is relevant to search engine results too. Make sure that when customers click through from a PPC result, they are taken straight to the relevant page, as this will increase your conversion rates.

Keywords v keyphrases

Keyword research is essential to know what your target market is searching for, are they look- ing for your brand or your product/service type? Think about the keywords you use, how competitive are these and how do they reflect your brand? Think about using defined key phrases instead, web savvy users are likely to search using longtail phrases rather than generic search terms.

Brand management

Don’t expect your web marketing activities to take care of themselves. Websites need to be continually reviewed and revised and it’s worth getting a good analytics package so you can monitor how effectively your latest campaign is working. Google Analytics provides a good starting point for this.

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