The whole B2B process tends to be more complex than its B2C cousin. Whether you are talking about the buying cycle for the intended consumer or the longer selling cycle for the organization itself, the B2B process in general is longer and more intricate. Hence the reason you see many marketers who have a need to simplify their solutions. Really this is the greatest secret. Being able to simplify your messaging, your marketing campaigns and even your tracking can be extremely rewarding. When it comes to your online marketing campaigns, quite often marketers start going after the latest and greatest or start thinking about these elaborate schemes that will hopefully improve the return on investment. The online campaign gets compilcated in a hurry and these marketers tend to fall into old habits. Inadvertently, the simplicity of the required strategy gets lost in the shuffle.

So what can you do to prevent this from happening as you plan out your online strategy? Well you begin with a process to get back to simplicity. Keep it simple.

10 Overlooked Website Optimization Tips for B2B Marketers

1. Revisit and Refine Your Keyword List - understand the terminiology that users who are looking for your B2B solution are using when they perform a search is still paramount if you are to drive qualified traffic in hope of generating more leads from your web properties.

2.Optimize Your Page Titles - Once you have updated your keywords, work to incoporate them into your page titles. You would be surprised how often this gets overlooked. Yet one of the best ways to get the search engines to index and rank your pages is to ensure that you have a keyword rich title on your important site pages.

3. Optimize Your Meta Data - If you are going to optimize your titles, you might as well take the time to optimize your meta data specifically your meta description tags. These tags should be found within the head copy of your source code. Incorporating relevant keywords into your description will provide information to the search engines as to what your page is about. Meta data is simply data about data. Help the engines understand what you are trying to communicate. Remember the first step in a successful online campaign is getting the traffic to your web properties. Fundamental optimization of your site is the first step in getting there.

4. Direct the Search Engines to Your Site with an Updated XML Sitemap - In order to ensure that the search engines can find all of your content, be sure to update and submit (or resubmit) your XML sitemap to the search engines. Remember that on an XML sitemap, you can have up to 50, 000 URLs listed, so this is a great way to provide a "roadmap" to the search engines for your content that is available to them.

5. Optimize for Blended Search - Optimize your site for at least one type of blended search. Again this is an item that is always overlooked for some reason. It’s not difficult to optimize your images with alt text, keyword rich files names and supporting copy around the image. It has become extremely easy to optimize video or blogposts. If you want to be found on a search engine results page in the future, you’ll need to optimize for blended search.

6. Content on the Homepage - I find that with a lot of B2B sites, there is a tendency to make the homepage flashy with a huge image taking up the entire "above the fold" portion of the page. Yet you have to remember, if this is the user’s first time to your site, they are looking for information and they are looking to find this informaiton quickly. Time is very valuable to them. If you don’t communicate what your product or solution is on your homepage, how do you expect the user to find what they are looking for? Don’t make them work for it. Present a brief description as to what you do and how you can solve their needs on your homepage. If you offer B2B price management software solutions, then state that on your homepage. While the first part of the solution is getting the searcher/user to your site, the second part is keeping them there. Strive for site stickiness.

7. Place Your Full Address on your Contact Us Page - Want to help the engines with their local search index? Be sure to include your full address on your main contact us page. Yes there are still companies that do not do this.

8. Respect Your Visitors with a Custome 404 Error Page - There are a ton of websites out there that do not leverage effective use of a custom 404 error page. If a site visitor is served up with an error page when visiting your site, be sure to guide them back to relevant parts of your site with a custom 404 error page. This could be the difference between them abandoning your site and visiting one of your competitor’s sites.

9. Update Your HTML SiteMap - Don’t forget to update your HTML sitemap when you add new content to the site. From a user point of view this is a great way to direct site visitors to new content that is published on your site.

10. Update Content Regularly - Do not expect to rank well and drive a lot of traffic to your website with a 40 page website. To be an authority on a topic or solution, you need to continue to prodice content around this theme. Whether it is through blog posts, news articles, press releases or good old fashioned pages of HTML content, adding new content to your site will only improve your visibility in the online world. Having said that, do not just throw any old content up on the Web. This pollutes the Web and in the end had a direct impact on the results that are served (or not served) up by the search engines.

When planning your online campaigns and thinking about what to do next, do not overlook the small stuff. Remember the "Serenity Now" episode of Seinfeld, well in the online world you might want to treat this as Simplicity Now!

Copyright 2008 - Enquiro Search Solutions.