If you have been speaking to a marketing company recently about your website marketing strategy then you may have heard the terms on page and off page marketing or optimisation. This can often be confusing at first but our easy guide below gives you an over view of what you need to know for both.

On page optimisation is essentially that. It is changes that you make on a page within your site or by adding new content to your site. It may be that you add a blog or that you optimisation the content on a page in include more keywords. On page optimisation also includes adding internal links to other pages and improving or adding meta data, adding XML site maps and robots.txt files. This is just a few examples.

Off page or off site optimisation is marketing that you do off your website that is aimed at improving the traffic to your site and your rankings on the search engines. This may be building up external links to your site, creating blogs and comments on other sites, social media interaction, uploading videos to sites such as YouTube and PPC campaigns. These can all influenced your website success whist being controlled away from your website.

Many companies decide to invest heavily in Google Adwords, often being attracted by the quick results that it can offer. Google Adwords spend varies from company to company with some spending only a hundred pounds or so a month and others spending in excess of £10,000 a month. Usually the more you invest in something the more you will get back but with Adwords you need to ensure that your budget is being spent where it should be and giving you a good return on your investment before you start.

There are so many options and settings within Google Adwords that it often pays to have a specialist set up and manage the accounts for you as they can usually see where the budget needs to be spent to get you the most clicks from the people that are genuinely looking for your products and services. There is no point in just getting clicks to your website if the person is not looking for what you can offer, and a marketing agency will be able to help you achieve this. They will often charge a fee to set the campaigns up and then another monthly/ weekly fee to manage them but this should more than be recovered in the increase in sales / enquiries you get.

If you have a website then you will probably want to know how many people are coming to your site, where they are finding you and what they are doing once they land on your site. I am always surprised by the number of companies that do not have access to this information as it is vital to allow you to evaluate your marketing performance as well as improve your website customer experience.

There are many programs that offer statistic tracking the most commonly used on being Google Analytics. Although Google Analytics is very user friendly and free, it is not always the most accurate in terms of real visitors.

Web server stats are usually bolted on to every hosting package but these are often quite limited in terms of data and also sometimes record visits from spiders that crawl your site.  Ideally you should use a number of stats packages to try and get a true picture of how your website is performing.

Every website owner wants to know how well they are performing on the search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. You can of course do this manually by typing the phrases in to the search engines but this cannot only give you inaccurate results but also be very time consuming.  There are plenty of software packages out there that will do the tracking for you and produce a nice report to show overall how your site is performing. Depending on how many terms you want to track and how in depth of an analysis you want should influence your choice on which software to go with.

There are some marketing companies have even created their own ranking software that often works better than many off the shelf ones as it has been built to allow it to be amended and to add in additional features if needs be.

With any ranking software, there is a good chance that at some point it will go wrong. This can happen for a number of reasons. You should also be aware of the risks involved in using some ranking software. If the software is ran off the same server that your website is hosted on, you may find that your server becomes black listed for running too many searches. If this happens then all the sites on that server will also be affected.

Marketing is a fast evolving industry and is constantly changing. There has been so many technological advancements over the past few years that has made marketing very exciting. When companies first started to really realise the importance of marketing, they were limited as to how they could do it. Often most marketing avenues were very expensive and therefore companies simply could not afford to do much.

Social media has played a massive part recently in marketing, allowing you to reach an audience within a couple of seconds and often at a low cost. Some companies use social media simply to give their customers another way to contact them, but there is so much more available on these sites that really can increase your business. Social media can particularly work well for industries that deal direct with the public. Having a profile on Facebook for example can not only allow people to contact you quickly and with ease but can give you a way of sharing photos, reviews important information and special offers or events that you have coming up. One other great thing about social media is that unless you want to do the paid for advertising, it’s all free!