There are literally hundreds of subtle techniques that will get your web site's page rank increased. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and others look closely at the relevancy of your web site's content to the search terms entered by their users. Be sure that the company developing your web site understands these techniques and can explain to you in detail how and why.

Using online advertising systems like Google Adwords© is a great way to drive qualified traffic to your web site. While getting started with these systems is easy, running your campaigns efficiently is tricky business and requires detailed analysis. Be sure the company your working with can back up there decisions with detailed analytic reporting. PPC marketing dollars can be easily wasted if managed improperly.

Often referred to as Pay Per Performance advertising, this method uses systems like Commission Junction© to broker banner and link advertising on other web sites around the web. Sophisticated tracking methods allow coupling your conversions \ sales directly to traffic from specific publishers, who will receive a commission for their effort. These systems can be very effective but require extensive start-up resources and expertise in understanding how to launch and manage campaigns effectively.

By far the best bang for the buck, transaction based email marketing can make a huge impact on your bottom line. Transactional emails are based on events initiated by visitors to your web site, physical location, or sales people, rather than lists of email address who have never heard of you (often referred to as mass emailing and considered by many as SPAM). Events like registration, newsletter sign-up, contest entries, polling, information requests, sales completion, shipping status, product reviews, product\catalog updates, meeting follow-ups, job status, and many more. Each one of these events provide you with a special opportunity to communicate with your visitors at THEIR request, which means they are very likely to read it (thoroughly)!

The question is, are you making the most of these opportunities, or even worse, not using them at all. Many sites that do take advantage of some of these events often miss the opportunity to re-enforce their branding and provide opportunities for additional transactions. Often they send some simple text based message with a very limited response. Remember, these visitors have already told you they like your web site. They want know more and be given opportunities to take advantage of your offers.

The best part, is that the only major costs to you for this exceptional opportunity is developing the automated systems to handle it. Once implemented, sending the emails is essentially free! No other marketing resource can provide that kind of return on investment.

So your probably asking yourself, why don't more web sites take better advantage of this? The reason is that you have 2 ways to make it happen, and both have their hurdles. Hire people to take care of it manually or build a system to handle it automatically. Doing this kind of work manually has no up front costs but of course becomes expensive per transaction due to labor costs, is often riddled with mistakes, and quickly breaks down as transaction volume increases.

Automated systems solve all these problems but requires using an experienced web professional who can integrate these types of systems using the existing framework your web site data resides in, which obviously requires some up front costs. Companies who have the foresight to see how this type of fixed price up front cost can provide ongoing returns with little costs, quickly recognize the real value.