Having a website is the first step to online marketing, but having a website is often not enough on its own. You need to invest time and money to get your website up the search engines and to stay there.

When you have a website, it is important to know how it is performing on the search engines. The first thing you need to do is track how many visitors you are getting to the site. This will show you an overview of how many people are visiting you site on a daily basis. Some servers have stats packages installed on them to allow you to do this or you may wish to use Google Analytics which is user friendly and free. If you find that you are not getting many visitors to the site then there may be an issue with your rankings. To check your rankings, you need to have a list of at least 20 keywords or phrases that you want to be found for. These phrases are what people type in on the search engines, which then pulls up a list that is relevant to that term. Often the more generic phrases will be a lot harder to compete for so ideally you want to have a mix of generic and long tail phrases so see the bigger picture. You can track these yourself by going on to the search engine like Google and typing the keyword in. You have to be careful when doing this as Google will often order the sites you see in order of how often you have visited them rather than if you were just a member of the public searching for the first time