Unless you’ve been living in a barrel at the bottom of the sea you know that when it comes to marketing your website online what you need is a good grasp of SEO. It’s a bit of a no-brainer. Search engines are key to a website’s success and search engine optimization is what you need and books like SEO Help (an Amazon best-seller on three continents) certainly help you to achieve search engine dominance. The best SEO book in the world however will be of little use unless you understand what you are doing online.

In the transition from offline idea to online execution what is usually lost in translation is the coherence of the business model which guides it. In the offline world, for instance, you would not dream of opening up a coffee shop without having a crystal-clear idea of what it is which makes it different to all the hundreds of coffee shops competing with you within a certain radius. The jump from that to the relatively new medium of the web loads the average business owner with a whole lot of new, technical considerations which, as a result, tend to become the primary focus. The net result is (and I have seen it many times) online business which operate without a model, or a poorly thought-out business model and online business which go from one technical innovation to the next as a way of solving a moribund approach to marketing who they are.

Focusing on SEO and going through the many things which will make your site totally visible online is great provided, of course, that you can harness that to the real operation of your business. Applying it blindly and hoping it will make a difference is entirely self-defeating. Yes, your site will become more visible and yes, again, as a result you will gain more traffic and probably a few more customers but it will not save your online business or even come close to taking it where you want it to go. For that to happen you have to do the same hard work as you do offline.

Here’s a list of things you need to start off with (and it is useful to go through them even if you are running an established business and need to make sure that it is on track):

1. What is your business model. Are you a vertical business dealing with the public or are you a B2B product or service?

2. What is your unique selling point (USP)? Without a concise, clear answer to this question you have simply joined the millions of hopefuls who think that somehow being online is the way to riches.

3. What are the daily tasks you need to do which reinforce your online business uniqueness? Without this each day starts and ends in a muddle.

4. What are your online business’ primary aims? This is what will guide your target-orientated online activities.

5. What are the monthly targets your online business needs to hit? These are necessary in order to give you a specific number of steps you need to take each month and a metric against which to measure the effectiveness of your online marketing strategy.

Provided you have worked out the five steps above then your business operates in a way which is totally unique to you. You can then go ahead and implement the kind of SEO strategy you learn about in SEO Help. The only way your site will be held back then is only if you fail to work at it and just the fact that you are reading this now is proof enough that this is not going to be the case.