The first step to developing an effective website promotion strategy is to determine your objectives. Think of it like writing a mission statement for your website. I asked Jason a few questions to aid him in this process.

Editor: Jason, you have a lot of products. You sell both wholesale and retail. What product do you want to be your main focus?

Jason: Our most important products are the scripture covers. Our wholesale customers generally just have a set order that they call in to have refilled, and I usually have to make the original sale to a wholesale customer personally. I want the website to promote the retail sale of scripture covers.

Editor: What key word phrases do you think that your potential customers would use to find your product?

Jason: What I really want is when someone types in "lds scripture covers", "mormon scripture covers", or just "scripture covers" on Yahoo!, my site comes up first. If I need to pay a little for that then so be it.

Editor: Let’s look at your site. What could you do to better achieve the objective you described? (Note: Jason built his site himself)

Jason: I think I have it so that you have too many clicks to get to where you can actually order my product. I’d like to improve my site’s navigation and usability. I’ve wanted to do that for some time, but I haven’t had the time.

Editor: That’s what I would suggest. Get rid of the big "splash" graphic on the home page, and replace it with promotional information about your scripture covers. This will help ensure that your visitors become customers, but this will also improve your chances with the search engines. Put some text on there about scripture covers and make sure to reference your key word phrases.

Jason has decided to go ahead and implement these ideas. He will be redesigning the navigation and the homepage. He is going to add relevant text about the scripture covers to improve his rankings on the search engines. He’s going to experiment with different keyword phrases, and make sure that they are referred to in the text on the homepage. He will also be putting meta tags (titles, keywords, and descriptions) on every page.

Look for the follow-up article next month where you will be able to see the changes that Jason makes. Also, we will learn what it takes for Jason to achieve his goals of high rankings on Yahoo!.