When you work with a designer, keep your focus on the message and let the designer design. You hired a professional for reason and becoming too involved with the design will often compromises the results.  In the end, the money you spend on quality website design, content and copy writing will pay dividends in sales for years to come. (more)

If you don’t have a website, I have to ask what are you waiting for? People are going on-line, not only to find your phone number and addresses, but for reviews and recommendations. A website not only gives you the opportunity to list the standard info like you’re address, when you’re open, closed and list years in business, but also detailed information and photos about your products and services.

If your still not convinced that you need a website or that it’s too expensive or too hard, at least claim your Google “Places Page“.  A Places Page is akin to an on-line version of the Yellowpages, except unlike Yellowpages, Google Places Pages are the first thing listed for local search results. Claiming your page is free, its easy to do and only requires that your confirm your information and answer a few questions and gives web users a way to identify that your business exists.

Today none of the major engines now support meta keywords (Yahoo now relies on Bing for its search results). However, I still recommend using them in all your pages. There are a lot of spiders crawling the web that still use this information to categorize your content and can result in welcomed back-links to your site.

So use the Keywords tag, but don’t abuse it. Like your meta description keep it unique, limit the list of words to relevant terms on the page (don’t just make one list and copy it to every page).

A professional designer can help you identify with an audience and project an appropriate image for your company. Even small details like font type, font sizes, colors, and ease of navigation all come together to set your company apart from the crowd and can make a huge difference in how your business is perceived on the web.

Remember trade shows?

This point was really driven home years ago when much of product marketing was done at trade shows. When walking the aisles of a large trade show it was easy to spot the homemade designs. Sure, sometimes the product was so compelling or unique that the homespun booth design didn’t get in the way, but more often than not, it just identified that company as a minor player in a much larger market.

A website is not a brochure

Somehow the importance of all this seems to be lost on many company executives. Companies who wouldn’t think twice about spending thousands on booth design, brochures, promotional items, and direct mail for a one time event, will attempt to market the same products and services on the Internet on a budget they might allocate tor the production of a brochure. Or worse, hire a friend that “does websites,” paste in some blurbs from a brochure and feel they have covered their bases.

The website should be your top producing sales rep (read more)

An excellent article on this topic: Google AdWords Marketing: Exact Match Bidding