Website strategy has by now become an integral part of both growing and developing businesses. It’s no secret that online presence is of vital importance for organizations and qualified professionals alike, websites now being the foremost tools to raise the world’s awareness to services both online and otherwise.

There is also arguably no better way to demonstrate and stress the company’s quality values and professionalism to a wider audience than through a well thought out internet presence.

With all the above being the case, it would make no sense to invest time and money into a website that wouldn’t appear on the first or second page on Google (or any other search engine) when somebody searches for information related to your work or services. If a website only shows up on page five or six, then the majority of potential clients would never get to see it at all.

On the other hand, planning your website strategy properly can lead to a business’s increased visibility, bringing your business both clients and the knowledge about the services that you provide. This is essential for businesses big and small.

The question is which way would one tackle this vast subject of a website’s strategy when there is so much information on the topic that it might be difficult to see from which end to start? There are literally hundreds of articles on online marketing strategies available online, and at least as many, if not more, on different strategies for building and maintaining high-ranking websites.

It’s hardly possible to write a definite guide to website strategy within the confines of a single article, but at least we can highlight the stages worth considering when thinking about the strategy of your online presence.

• Stage One

The first and foremost stage is, of course, having a clear picture about how you want to represent yourself and your business. This is knowing who your clients are and what they are interested in. This is the basis of a successful website exactly the same way as it is the basis of successful offline marketing. A good idea at this stage would be to write down a list of key words and phrases that you could imagine people thinking about when they make a search for a service in your niche of expertise. It would also be just as practical at this point to have a good idea of your website’s layout and the experience that those who do visit it would receive.

• Stage Two

Actual implementation of a website that follows a well-defined online marketing strategy would involve things like the so called “meta” and “title” tags with key words that best define your site’s targets, a good header that indicates what visitors can find on your page (good headers are of extreme importance for search engines to pick up your site), planning the site’s navigational structure, and thinking about which outbound links to put on your page that would be most relevant to the subject at hand.

• Stage Three

Speaking from the perspective of search engines, a website aimed to attract views is useless without content. A much better strategy would be to populate the site with information that your website visitors would find useful and interesting, while at the same time introducing key words and phrases into your website’s text as with as little distraction for the viewers as possible.

• Stage Four

After finally putting your website online (or editing it to improve the amount of potential hits using the principles above), it’s always a good idea to test it. For example, if you feel that changing the title or the headline of the site to be more specific might bring in more clients and rate the page higher when somebody would look for your service, change it accordingly and see if it brings any results. In terms of website strategy in general, this would also include altering the website’s design to look more attractive and professional and the site’s layout to be more user friendly towards the business’s potential customers.

There is of course much more to defining a clear website strategy than the above, but if you stick these four stages while designing and building your site, then there’s a high chance that you would be much ahead of the competition that doesn’t. Simple things such as knowing your keywords from Stage One may benefit your business immensely. As a case in point, this very article uses the word “online” 8 times, the word “website” 19 times, the word “marketing” 4 times and the word “strategy” 11 times.

And it’s as simple as that.