For those of you with marketing communications anxiety, here’s a step-by-step guide to follow to create a plan.

1.Begin with basics. Marketing communications involves what you say about your business (message) and who you say it to (audience). Start your plan with this information.

2.Solidify your identity. Define your logo and colors and use them consistently. Make sure they’re on your signage, business cards, web site – anywhere you’re seen by your audience. Invest in a professionally-produced logo. It will reflect positively on your entire operation.

There is so much misinformation floating through internet regarding search engine marketing and optimization that it’s important to shed some light on a few common errors and misconceptions. The following list highlights some of most critical issues involved in determining success or failure of a web site’s search engine optimization and marketing strategies.

1. Lack of "Search Friendly" Content. Every week I review web sites with no real search engine indexable content. Web pages composed mostly of graphics, flash and other bells and whistle are commonly over-looked by search engines. Search engines determine what content is of value per web page based on text used on that page. A truly optimized site should contain at least 200 words of keyword-dense text. There is some debate among experts on exactly how many words should be used, but generally 200 words will suffice. As a point of reference this paragraph contains about 200 words. It is equally important for text content to contain keywords that match page titles. For example, a site selling peanut butter owned by a company called "ACME Foods" might have a title of "Acme Foods, Inc. Wholesale Food Products". We have to consider how many people are likely to search for term "Acme Foods, Inc. Wholesale Food Products" it is much more likely that people will search for term "peanut butter". Knowing this, we can say with confidence that it would be a wiser choice to title a page, "Peanut Butter, ACME Foods" and page content should reflect this same keyword strategy.

2. Insufficient Link Popularity. Search engines make every attempt to qualify results which are displayed in search results. One of ways that they do this is by tracking number and quality of incoming links to a web site. A site with a large number of incoming links from quality sites is given a higher ranking in search results. This is an important consideration that is sometimes over-looked by those attempting to market web sites. Services that promise to link your site to thousands of other sites are far from productive; in fact they can sometimes do more harm than good. Most search engines these days consider services like this to be spam, so called "link farming" and often give sites with these types of links a low ranking or drop them all-together from search results. Incoming links to a site that compliment it and are relevant to site contents are golden and can greatly boost a site's ranking. Google's page ranking system is a good example. A site with a page rank of 1 if given a link from a site with a page rank of 8 can see its page rank boost to 4! Link popularity is one of most time consuming and difficult aspects of search engine optimization. It's no wonder that many of search engines give so much importance to this web site measurement.

3. Lack of Keyword Research And Updates So, you have a web site. Do you know what pages in your web site are generating most interest? Do you know what terms people are searching for that result in them finding your site? Probably not. Let’s use peanut butter analogy again. You own a web site that sells peanut butter. You spend some money on paid search advertising, logically; you assume that key phrase "peanut butter" is a prime candidate to target. What happens? usually one of two things, one, term peanut butter is such a popular search term that thirty million other web sites are competing for same key phrase. Two, term peanut butter is so unpopular that it’s unlikely that it's searched for more than once in this lifetime. Proper keyword research can solve these problems. Let’s say for sake of argument that keyword research is performed and that it is determined that a significant number of people are searching for "organic peanut butter". It just so happens that our peanut butter company manufactures a whole line of organic, all natural peanut butter. We have discovered a niche. The right amount of people searching for specific product that we want to sell. It's perfect match. So, what must be done to capitalize on our findings? First we optimize our web pages for our target keyword, we change title, and content so that they include term "organic peanut butter", then we scrap all of paid search advertising that wasn't working and focus on targeting our "organic peanut butter" market. The point is, successful search engine marketing relies on constant research and updates internet is fluid and evolving. What works today might not work tomorrow, we have to be able to identify strengths and weaknesses in our internet marketing campaigns and must be prepared to research, update and adapt.

4. Designing First, Optimizing Later I have seen this mistake repeated hundreds of times. Even experienced web designers fail to consider results of design decisions on search optimization until it’s too late. What is point of spending thousands of dollars for a well "designed" web site if nobody ever sees it? Consult a search engine specialist early in design process. Even if your web site marketing strategy relies heavily on paid search advertising a consultation with a professional optimization expert may expose flaws in your site's layout. Points in flow of information that tend to cause users to lose interest or become confused may become apparent, better to address these issues early on.

5. Relying Too Heavily On Paid Search Advertising This is a mistake made by Fortune 500 companies and small businesses alike. The fact is that most businesses, small and large aren't getting it right. The rationale is that since search advertising can be purchased it isn't necessary to focus on search optimization techniques. On surface this might make some sense, you can buy certain keyword phrases that people are searching for, so why bother optimizing your site for search engines? For a company with a huge internet advertising budget this means spending huge amounts of money to drive traffic to their sites, when, if their site had been properly optimized from beginning, these costs might be half as much for same amount of viewers. For many smaller businesses trying to compete in internet marketplace simply becomes overwhelming. While paid search advertising is a highly effective means of targeting an audience, organic search optimization greatly increases chances of success for any web site. Make sure that site you are advertising is one that people can find easily without assistance of a paid search campaign.