If you have a website and you might have a couple of different goals in order for that site to be successful.  Depending on what your goals are will help to determine your marketing strategy for the site.  For example, you might have a simple landing page for your business and simply want to get more people to sign up for your email newsletter.  This is a very different type of goal than if, say, you have a website that is essentially a store and is attempting to make direct sales to customers in order to turn a profit.  The problem is that many people would actually use the same tactics to try and market both types of websites, even though the objectives are completely different.

So let's say your goal is that you have a corporate website that your company established mostly out of obligation.  Everyone else has a website so you feel that you need one too.  Now the question is, what do you want to do with that website?  Is it an opportunity for you to connect with your customers in a more meaningful way?  Is there a way that you can add huge value to your customers through the website somehow?  Is there a way to establish some line of communication with your customer base and actually provide value to them while keeping them informed about new products that they might be interested in?  Is there a way to do this without just turning it into a sales pitch? 

Maybe your company website can become a portal for making direct sales.  Maybe it is a place to get information or even for visitors to be entertained instead.  And maybe it is all of these things and can also be a powerful branding experience for your company.  If you have a corporate blog, then a popular strategy is to get your readers to subscribe to the blog so that they receive updates when you publish them.  If you can build a big following in this way by providing real value in what you publish, then this can translate into a powerful marketing tool down the road.  The website marketing strategies that you choose will depend on what your exact goals are.

One way to think about marketing strategies is to look at both paid and "organic" traffic.  With paid traffic, you will generally be using pay per click (ppc) in order to drive traffic to your website by bidding on keywords.  This can be very easy and profitable if you have a concrete offer and can determine your conversion rate on certain keywords.  If you are making good money off of your paid traffic then simply buy more of it until you cannot find any more sources and have exhausted all search engines.  If you are using ppc traffic and are not yet profitable, then you need to tweak your campaign, your landing page, or your product offer until you are turning a consistent profit from your campaigns. 

If you are leery of spending money in order to make money, or if you are leery of attempting to manage an enormous and fairly complex pay per click campaign, then you might want to take a look instead at pursuing a more organic strategy with seo.  Seo stands for Search Engine Optimization and the idea here is to design your web site so that it is going to get natural traffic from the search engines.  This traffic is usually very well targeted and it is essentially free once it is rolling in.  Also, search engine rankings are generally pretty stable so once you have built up to a certain level the traffic will continue to flow in every day.  This is nice because if you can monetize that traffic or convert it into subscribers to your website then you have a long term asset that you can continue to build on. 

The basic idea behind this marketing strategy is to identify the keywords that are associated with your product, service, or brand.  Then you need to design your site with those keywords in mind and optimize the different web pages for those key words.  This represents only a fraction of the effort though, because what will really determine your placement in the search engines for those keywords is the links that are coming in to your website.  If you don't have good links pointing at your site with those keywords in the anchor text then you are not going to rank well.  Building links is hard and time consuming but it is definitely the most important part of your organic traffic strategy.