There are many tools out there that allow you to check the level of SEO your website has. Often they will give you a score or percentage based on SEO factors such as Heading tags, Alt tags, Meta data and page loading time.

These tools can be great for a quick overview, but should never be relied upon entirely. Most programs will simply check that these elements are present on the page and not the quality of them, for example, you may see that you have a H1 tag present on the page but it is currently set to “Home” which is of no relevance in terms of search engine optimisation.

Ideally you want to employ an SEO expert to go over the site for you and advise you of what needs to be done. Often some companies will give you a free SEO evaluation which you can then review to see what changes are necessary.

When a website first goes live, it can take sometimes for the search engines to crawl and therefore index it in their search engine results pages. Ideally you should install some sort of statistics tracking software from day one so you can track the improvement of the site and see what effect your marketing is having on the website performance.
Google offer a free stats tracking application called Google Analytics. This can be extremely useful and if used correctly, you can extract a lot of information on it from the most visited pages to what device your website has been viewed on.
Google also have another application called Web Master Tools, which is used more by developers to check for broken links and crawl errors etc. You can also submit site maps, request Google to re-crawl your site and even ask for certain pages to be removed from the search listings. This again is a free service which should be set up for your site as soon as it goes live.

Depending what industry your company is in, you may outsource your marketing to a marketing agency. Choosing the right company can be a challenge as you will need to have a look at their prices, reviews and strategies to be able to compare them and find one that is best suited to you and your requirements.

A good marketing agency will be able to assist you on all aspects of marketing from website, to social media to offline marketing such as leaflet dropping and trade shows. Once you have a marketing company on board then you need to meet with them regularly to discuss the progress of the work being carried out and what the plans are for the future, This needs to be a regular thing as often there are changes within the business that will affect the marketing and there also may be changes in the marketing industry, such as, Google Algorithm changes that need to be addresses.

Most importantly, remember they are the experts so let them do what they’re good at, but make sure you always know what is happening.

Email marketing software is a program that allows you to create an email and send it out to a database of contacts. Many companies, especially larger ones, use email marketing software to promote their business and products/services or to inform customers of information that they need to be aware of. Examples of companies that use these types of software include DVLA, EON and Talk Talk – All of these companies contact their customers via a mass email service. When choosing which software to use, you should consider how many people you will want to send an email to at any one time, how many potential groups of people you would want to split your data in to, how much HTML knowledge you have and also the reports you will get back after sending out an email. So companies offer to look after the whole email marketing side of things for you, where you just supply content and images and they will do the rest, where as others give you a template that you will need to be able to amend yourself.

Social media is fast becoming one of the best ways to build brand awareness. It gives you the option to create your company an online profile and interact with your existing and potential customers. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google +1 are just a few of the sites that business owners are starting to market their brands through, and many have seen fantastic results. With many of the sites not charging a fee for the service, it seems odd not to take advantage of this when looking on how you can build up your brand.

The companies that do best on social media and extremely active and use it in many ways. People do not want to be bombarded with messages and posts from a company about one subject; they want to read something that is interesting and unique. If you have a new product to launch, then you may want to build up a bit of excitement first using social media, you may even want to start some sort of competition, so when you do launch the product people will read about it.

What is PPC and how can it help your business. PPC otherwise known as Pay Per Click is essentially pay for your advert linking to your website to be displayed on different sites and platforms. Google offer probably the biggest PPC programme. With Google Adwords (PPC) you can chose keywords that you with to market and then set up relevant ads which will show on the search engines when this word or phrase is searched for.

There are many options within Adwords for example, being able to select if your ad shows on mobile devices and if it shows across Google Adwords partners websites as well as the search engine. You can also set limits on the amount each click will cost you and a daily budget which will turn your ads off once this limit has been reached. Overall it is a great avenue for marketing your business online and with the help of a PPC specialist can often prove very cost effective.

Building up an online presence and developing your website takes time.  Fop the majority of business this is normally done over the space of a few years. Very often business will start their online profile by having a simple brochure website created. This type of website is often developed over time in to an authority website or an e-commerce website if products are being sold. Every business should aim to have a great website with a good reputation and that performs well for them and their customers.

Over time a company can build up their profile by starting to appear on social media websites and blogging / tweeting etc to get their business know for what they do. Google and other search engines are showing that they favour websites in rankings that actively promote themselves and are seen to be liked by users and other businesses. This is because in their eyes, if you are liked and recommended by others, then they wish to do the same, as the chances are the person that finds you through their site will have a good experience, which in turn also promotes them and makes them look good.