A) Mailing List or Newsletter: Have a mailing list so that you can encourage people to sign up and send them promotions, etc. In present day, words mailing list or newsletter evokes just one response, SPAM. Assure your customers/visitors that you would not spam. Let them know duration of newsletters you would be sending, and most important, "DONT SELL email addresses"

B) Refer-A-Friend: This requires just 10 minutes of your time, but is sure a helpful tool. When you have a site that is pleasing to look at, people sure would want their friends to check it out as well. By having this tool, you will be sure that in that particular moment of excitment, people will use this tool and send it across to their friends.

C) Guest Book: This feature might not be that helpful for a business site, but for individuals or small home business, it is a handy feature to get your visitors feedback.

4. Site promotion

For major part of netizens, web designing is phase 1 and site promotion is phase 2. Well, instead of having two of these done independantly, it would be sensible to work with both aspects in mind. It would save you a lot of money and time in long run. Ensure that your site is optimized at design phase itself. Test site with various tools that are available on Internet. (I will not speak much about this as I have a seperate article coming up)

5. Site maintenance

After all hard work, it is sad to note that most websites are not up-to-date. Ensure that your site is in sync with present so that visitors will have something new everytime they visit your site.

Conclusion: Setting up your online presence is easier said than done. If due planning is not given importance, be sure that website will not last for more than a year, being optimistic. A little effort and some time to think is all you need to get a site that can sure be a shot in arm for your offline business.

John Benjamin is the CEO of ProMinds Inc. An Internet Marketing agency. Having 2 years of experience in SEO and online marketing.

ProMinds Inc http://www.promindsinc.com

Most of you might have noticed that when you type in a keyword or phrase in any of search engines, you would see URL and a short description. This description is taken from Meta Tag's tag.

Instead of targeting a highly competitive keyword, try to broaden your reach by targetting smaller keywords and phrases as well. This way, although you might not rank good on one keyword, chances of your site showing up for other keywords related to florists are pretty good.

3. Robots: Robots, or Bots as they are usually called are scripts which are programmed to "crawl" websites and collect information from site's meta description tags. These bots then store information on their servers and index according to keywords. Consider this example: If you had a site dealing with flower delivery, and your keywords were related to just "roses" and "lillies" then chances of your site showing up for roses or lillies are much higher than showing up for keywords "florists" Keep in mind that you have different kinds of people using search engines. Some may type in word roses to research on that flower, showing up your site for this keyword under this scenario might not be what you intended it to be. The catch phrase here is to target your keywords appropriately.

The bots are smart but not intelligent. You would not want your contactus.html page to show up on search engine. Or any other private page which only you have access to. Or you would not want a page which is under development to show up. By setting up robots.txt file you can specify what directories within your root directory to be indexed. This way you can hide your other pages from showing up on search engine.

4. Link popularity: I came across this very cool definition of Page Rank, or Link Polularity. Conside a community of people. Let's say you have a person A who knows B. B introduces A to C and it goes on upto Z. During this process what happens is that popularity of A increases giving A a higher link polularity or a page rank.

Similarly, you need to link your site to other sites. What happens is that a search engine will promote your site within listing if you have a higher page rank, or in other words, higher popularity. While you might be thinking that you can get this done by linking your site to every other site you come across, keep in mind fact that some search engines actually give you a rank only from relevant sites. So if you are a florist, then dont entertain idea of linking to sites dealing with medical or healthcare. It would be sensible if you went a step further and linked to sites dealing with stationery, gifts, chocolates, etc.

SEO is a field that is gaining recognition. Companies have been built solely relying on SEO by offering its services. Instead of spending money and let someone else do work at which you have absolutely no clue, it is always good to start it on your own and then if need arises call in for a professional. This way you will exactly know strategy and you would be in control rather than being taken for a walk.

John Benjamin is the CEO of ProMinds Inc an Internet marketing agency having more than 2 years of experience.

ProMinds Inc http://www.promindsinc.com/