I find that many business websites are designed upside down, which means the site communicates more from the perspective of, for and by the company than it does of, for and by the target audience that the company wants to engage. This kind of upside down website focuses on getting tons of traffic so they can sell sell sell, without thinking through how their target audience perceives and interacts with the website. What I’m getting at is planning for optimal website conversion rates.

Conversion should be the goal of all marketing campaigns – and target audience relevance is key to getting the kind of response you want from your website. If your target audience perceives that your business is all about serving them by helping them find solutions, they will be more inclined to deliver the most wanted response that you are looking for. An excellent customer experience on your website starts with a well thought out plan.

If your website is already getting plenty of traffic, your next job is to turn that traffic into interested visitors. The following are guidelines to successful interest marketing.

• Identify with your online audience by showing them that you understand their problem or pain.
• Make allowances for the different ways that web visitors have in making decisions, by understanding their various approaches and personalities.
• Develop personas that reflect the attitudes and behaviors of each of your online audiences, so you can address each one specifically.
• Create content that leads each persona down a path to solve a problem as far as he/she wants to go.

If you are looking for a legitimate search engine marketing or search engine optimization company, here are some ethical SEO indicators you should look for:

1. Explains what they intend to do in terms of making changes to your website to gain higher rankings.
2. Relates why keyword research is so important to the overall goal and strategy of targeting your online market, and how copywriting is critical to gaining audience response as well as good rankings in search engines.
3. Knows that ethical SEO technique involves both on the page and off the page optimization, much more than simply updating the meta tags. They know about and avoid "black hat" techniques like keyword stuffing, doorway pages, hidden text, duplicate content and cloaking. Search engines can detect these types of tricks and they have been known to filter out the websites that employ them.