The online marketing world is growing and all successful businesses have now invested in an online presence to communicate with their target audiences. There are now more channels than ever to exploit with the advent of Web 2.0 and the rising importance of social media.

A good website is a must for any organisation and their marketing mix, so here are 5 ways that you can maximise its success:

1. Make sure you are getting the best that you can afford when recruiting an individual or agency to design and build your website. For the best results, use a digital designer that specialises in website design to create the HTML combined with a programmer to build the back end of your website.

2. Become THE authority in your area of expertise (e.g. mortgages, swimming pools or travel) by providing lots of meaningful content on your website, blogs, articles and press releases that actually point to your site. This will keep Google coming back to your site and help to improve your organic search ranking (SEO).

3. Once your site is looking good and the content is regularly updated you can then utilise many online tools to start sharing it with others. Post news on Facebook and Twitter for example, bookmark your content on Digg.com or del.icio.us and add an RSS feed to your site that will send content directly to people as you post it.

4. Start marketing your website via a host of online methods:

-Organic search through search engine optimisation (SEO).-Paid search using Google Adwords, for example.-Email marketing.-Social media.

5.  Google Analytics can tell you how many visitors are coming to your website – but you can also work out how many callers are originating from there by using a memorable non-geographic telephone number (e.g. an 0800 number) on your site and/or in your paid search marketing. For example, 0800 numbers (www.windsor-telecom.co.uk/0800-freephone-numbers.php) are free to call from UK landlines which means that you are highly likely to receive more sales and enquiries if you use them. In fact, research by the Institute of Direct Marketing has found that using an 0800 number can increase response rates by up to 185%. You can also see exactly how many calls you are receiving via your website if you combine an 0800 number with online call statistics (www.windsor-telecom.co.uk/call-statistics.php) which are easily added to your number. Additionally if you employ the same strategy with your PPC advertising you can see how many calls you are receiving via your ad and whether it’s a worthwhile ROI.

In all, there are a variety of successful techniques that companies can employ to maximise their websites’ potential. The above 5 tips offer a good starting point as to achieving that aim; generating more online visitors and seeing precisely how successful your efforts actually are by combining your web marketing with a memorable 0800 number (www.windsor-telecom.co.uk/0800-freephone-numbers.php)