The CEO of my company once said to me, “A good website is worth ten sales guys.”  The surprising part of this assertion is that our CEO is a die-hard sales guy, and has been for many years, and to him, a great sales team - that is, people on the phone and in meetings with potential customers - is his number one priority.

But he does have a point.  In the online world, your website is your number one sales and marketing tool, and the way you present it to the public can determine your company’s immediate and long-term future in the marketplace.

It is important to consider this as so many of you are veering in a “marketing with social media” direction, which, though still in its infancy, is proving to provide fantastic results with minimal spend, something that is extremely attractive in the current economy.  However, with this migration to social networks, blogging/microblogging, and viral media, a website is often left dusty and neglected in the background.  This is one of the worst things to happen, because, like it or not, in the online world your website will always be perceived as the number one face of your company.  Plus, any good online marketing campaign has a corporate website as its centerpiece.

So what role is your website playing now?  Is it merely a brochure, a high-level glimpse into what your company does, or is it an evolving, informative, and interactive sales machine?

If your answer is the former, but you realize the importance of making your website become the latter, do consider the following points in your mission.

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize

On the very basic level, ensure that your website is optimized for search engines.  If you’ve not done this before, there are plenty of great resources out there that cover the importance of crisp title tags, keyword-rich meta descriptions, effective link-building techniques, and meaty content.  And if you have done this before, remember that things get outdated very quickly on the ‘Net, so it might be a good time for you to do a thorough sweep of your site to ensure that everything is nicely aligned in true SEO fashion.

Exploit the Customizability of Your Corporate Site

By having a presence on MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter, for example, you can easily market to your ‘friends’ or ‘followers,’ but think about how those profile pages are laid out.  You can’t create a realistically usable support forum for your customers.  You can’t create registration forms for potential customers to fill out in order to join your mailing list.  Sure, you can add your press releases, announcements, blog articles, and so on, but you have little to no say over how they look and feel.  Take advantage of the fact that your website - the central hub of your entire online existence - can be changed to look exactly as you want it to look, feel exactly as you want it to feel, and portray your message exactly as it is intended.

Manage the Whole Sales Cycle in One Place

Your web site should not be an outward-looking glorified advertisement for your company.  As with all methods by which people build communities with social media, your web site needs to

• contain information for both potential and existing clients
• allow for discussion about your product or service, whether in a forum or a blog setting
• have enough dynamic content to bring visitors back to your site, or at least have them voluntarily subscribe to your RSS feeds or email list for update notifications
• be interactive enough, whether with forms so that potential and existing customers have easy, straightforward methods for getting in touch with you

Bring the basic theories of social media into your web site and use these as your foundation.  From here, your site can be a one-stop-shop for the community that your efforts are constantly building.  Through the use of these methods, and by working on your web site as much as you work on your other social media outlets, you can turn your corporate website into a smooth, customer-attaining machine.

• Strategies to Make Your Website a Powerful Internet Marketing Tool
  
• How to Use Your Website to Make Your Company More Profitable
• Building the Social Media Marketing Foundation

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Traditional PR has involved a public relations firm dropping your press release on the wire and hoping somebody picks it up. Sure, they may have conversations with analysts prior to the drop, but in this Web 2.0 era even you can make a huge splash on a ‘Net, grab the attention of thousands, and, perhaps, even get some conversions or sales out of it, all for no added cost to you. All it requires is a little elbow grease and the right kind of thinking.

Ensure that your title, header, and first paragraph include your targeted keywords.

The title of your press release needs to include your biggest keywords, and these keywords should be emphasized within the introductory paragraph of the release as well. The introduction can be normal paragraph length, but do make sure that you have a headline between the title and the introductory paragraph that sums up the piece in 100 characters or less. And don’t over-saturate your press release with your keywords, either. You lose valuable search engine points for that.

Utilize headers to their full potential.

Headers benefit you in two ways: one, it breaks up the content and makes your press release much easier to read, and two, they’re an easy SEO tweak. <h1> tags are the strongest rated by search engines, and they go down from there. Remember, though, to only have one <h1> tag in a release, otherwise they are likely to be disregarded by the search engine spiders as trying to mess with the crawling system. Plus, it looks juvenile, and is not pleasant on the eyes.

Use descriptive, keyword-rich text anchors for links to your website.

You cannot expect your appearance in Google searches to improve dramatically if the links to your site just look like URLs. Ensure that links within your press release have appropriate, keyword-rich anchor text. This way, wherever the press release is picked up on the ‘Net will link to your site with the keywords that are important to your company. ‘Tis far better for people to link to you with “online PR tips” as the anchor than it is with “www.yourcompanyname.com/products/newamazingproduct.html.”

Also, never waste these links by directing them at your home page. Guide clickthroughs to an informative, valuable inner page, even if it means creating a landing page from scratch. This way, the meat of your web site is what gets viewed, rather than the superficial, oft-bounced-from home page.

Allow viewers to share the content easily.

Through RSS feeds, links to social bookmarking sites, and email subscriptions, your press release’s message can travel further and be seen by thousands more people than it otherwise would by simply dropping it on the wire as in the days before social media. Of these thousands of people, Justin Levy, author of That’s Great PR! Blog, says, “Many will click on the link to your website to see what you’re all about. Some of those will even buy from you. So rather than putting all your eggs in one basket with the … major media channel of your choice, you do better to diversify and let larger numbers of people in smaller, under served niches find you.” When you post your press release to your web site, ensure that you have links to various social media outlets. Insert a means of allowing readers to subscribe to your feed, thereby allowing them to automatically view any new press releases you may have in the future.

Perhaps most importantly, set up a Google alert to let you know when your press release is being discussed by outside sources, and be sure to submit these articles to social bookmarking sites. It is important to note that straight press releases are Dugg or Stumbled-Upon far, far less than the commentary surrounding it.

Provide a straightforward call to action.

You have the most incredible news story in the world. People will read your press release, no doubt about it - but then what? Conversions come from giving visitors a single path to the information they desire, and they’ll continue along that path provided each step gives them information or content that is a little more valuable than the stuff before. Thus, drop the press release with a paragraph that details a new whitepaper that is available on the same subject, or link to a free trial of the product you’re launching.

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• How to Write and Optimize Press Releases for Search Engines - SEO for PR
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• Why Press Releases Work Better Than Ever

Julie Batten, e-marketing manager at The ClickZ Network, wrote a great blog post today that lists some of the top resources for those intending to tackle optimizing their web sites and/or blogs.  The list ranges from the webmaster guidelines for both Google and Yahoo! to various SEO-related forums and learning centers.  For those of you who require a primer, or for those who just want a SEO refresher course, it’s worth checking out.

Inbound links - that is, web sites that link to your site - are key to increasing your search engine position.

The best method of building links and rapport is, of course, providing interesting, informative, and useful content to your visitors. Doing this, along with updating regularly with relevant content, is key to building a solid list of people who will link to you, thus pushing you up in search positions.

Another method is to partner with related companies, as your logo and/or company information will undoubtedly be listed on their web sites, linking to yours (you do the same for them, of course). With luck, these partners will have a high Google page rank, preferably above 7, that will further benefit you. Before we continue, it is important to understand page ranking as Google sees it:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important.’”

It’s also good to make sure that those who link to you use adequate copy as the text of the link. If you have an SEO company and the link to your site reads “internet marketing,” that is a clear picture of what your site is about, and thus you up your chances of getting a higher spot in searches. However, if you have the same SEO company and someone is linking to you with “free prescription meds,” you will likely be penalized. Having a descriptive link text is even preferable to having your company name as the link.

As far as bad link building goes, first and foremost you must be wary of directories. There are hundreds of them out there currently, and while getting your link posted on so many web sites does increase awareness of your company, if the directories do not pertain to your industry or product, search engines can look at that unfavorably.

The same applies to wandering around other sites and posting comments that say, “Hey, link to www.mycompany.com.” First of all, no one with any sense will link to you, and if they do, again it all has to do with relevance and Google page rank. If the sites linking to you are in no way related to your business, or if they are ranked low on the Google scale, these links to you won’t do you any favors. Search engines aren’t dumb, and they make most of the rules.

Stefanie Ulrike Dürr, member of the Search Quality Team at Google, sums it up nicely: “Always focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your optimization strategy. Ask yourself what creates value for your users. Investing in the quality of your content and thereby earning natural backlinks benefits both the users and drives more qualified traffic to your site.”