Building up a website from scratch is never an easy task. It begins with customer interaction and forming a team around a project manager, developers, designers and the client. Internet marketing is growing at a rapid pace as more and more people spend time online to buy products and search for services available to them in their area. When you’re developing an online presence you have to be focused on a few things: search engine optimization, customer conversion and website usability. Just because you have a beautiful website doesn’t mean people will actually find it out there on the Web without executing some sort of search engine optimization strategy. Just as well, you can have a high ranking website that nobody can understand how to use.

All of these pieces are important to your websites success and should be carefully planned while wireframing out the sites design. Pay particular attention to how the information flows and where your eyes go on the page. It will most certainly change when you start adding graphics and color, but at least you can begin visualizing how the website will appear to a user.

Call-to-actions should be clear and positioned strategically on the page. It’s also important that you select the right color scheme that’s going to attract an audience.

There is a science behind building websites and careful planning can result in much greater conversion rates.

So, by now most of us either know about or have played with social networking sites like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. What do most of these sites have in common? They have activity streams. An activity stream could contain just about anything. A whole stream could be devoted to individuals swapping images back and forth or, most commonly, a stream will consist of “instant message” style chatting where one person will post something on your profile and then you comment back or post something on their profile. You can see this flawlessly in action on Facebook.

Facebook allows you to sort your streams by news, pages, status updates, photos and links. Twitter, is one massive activity stream, that’s all there is, but that’s why it’s so effective. A simple design in a “fast forward” world allows people to communicate to one another easier and faster than ever before. You can download plugins for your Firefox to pop-up Twitter messages just like when you receive a new email through Outlook.

Activity streams are making their way into the workplace. Businesses are using them to communicate internally and there’s a chance that in the future company executives will be more accessible than ever as customers may be able to communicate with higher-ups directly through the companies website.

Social media continues to grow and expand like never before. Google has taken a shot at the market by developing Google Wave which essentially is a way for people to interact with one another on the fly. If you and a friend are typing message to each other you’ll be able to see what they’re typing as their doing it.

Internet technology is getting more advanced and expect these systems and features to play a major role in your marketing efforts down the road.

Have you heard of a landing page? Maybe you have and maybe you haven’t, but it’s important that you know what they are as recent trends have shown that landing pages can convert customers in a way that’s never been seen before. So, what’s the secret?

Landing pages is a hot marketing strategy where you create a single page with a very clear call-to-action and direct traffic to it. This could be done in one of two ways. Firstly, you can go with the standard SEO approach where you optimize each landing page using a specific set of keyword phrases. You would then work those phrases into the content of the page and the code as needed. When someone finds the page in a search engine they’re taken directly to a page that’s specifically targeted towards the keyword phrase they were using.

A landing page get’s right to the point and limits the options of the user down to taking action or just plain leaving. Another landing page strategy is to implement standard SEO on to a page and then link that page with a Pay-Per-Click campaign (PPC). This is proven to be highly effective, but to really get the results you need you should consider creating upwards of 50 landing pages each one unique from the other in some way and hooked to a PPC account.

A websites standard conversion rate is somewhere between 0.5%-2% (source). Conversion rates are obviously higher for e-commerce sites like Amazon and E-Bay, but for now, PPC linked with landing pages seems to be the key to increase conversion rates and while will Google’s PPC remains the dominant force, Bing’s advertising methods are on the rise because it’s cheaper and tends to bring in more conversions than Google.

The design of a landing page is complicated and requires you to think outside the box which I’ll save for another post.

For now, ponder the strategy behind landing pages. If used correctly, they can be a very powerful asset.