Your website is the front door and reception room of your business. Increasingly, it is the first place prospective customers look before deciding to do business with you. And you know about first impressions. All things being equal, managers that actively engage with their sites will engage more customers. Here are three website management questions that successful website managers are constantly asking:

What is so powerful about email marketing¹? Opt in. That's right. Opt in. Opt in email makes for laser like precision narrowcasting. Your prospects opt in to your email because they are interested in what you have to offer. Therefore you are marketing to prospects and not to broadcasting¹ to everyone in Florida.

There is always a bunch of stuff to do when you optimize a site. You've got to make a list.

When I optimize a site for local search, I begin with this local seo list.

John Quarto-von Tivador seizes upon successful agriculture culture as a metaphor for good website promotion (are you from Calif. John?).

He says that it's the toughest kind of farming, like lettuce growing and not at all a cherry picking operation. Successful sites, like successful lettuce fields, require constant tending.

Too many people still look upon websites like print publications. Once they are "launched," they're done. In fact, the launch is just the beginning. Success lies in many hours of careful tending.

Do you like traffic to your website? Start a blog.

Hubspot looked at about 1500 websites and determined that those with blogs had 55 percent more traffic and 97 percent more inbund links and 434 percent more indexed pages¹.

Promoting a website requires lots of tools to tell us what's going on.

Fortunately, most of these tools are free. Anyone just starting should not spend a dime on analytical software. Maybe with time your site will require a more sophisitcated approach, but you won't have to spend money on software to find out.

Here is a fabulous list of free keyword and link analysis tools.

Mark Twain said, "There are three kind of liars: liars, damn liars and statistics."

Every now and then a marketing effort hits the jackpot and the lines form and the cash register rings. Someone writes a blog that goes viral and brings in oceans of traffic. Your PR firm gets you placement in a hot pub. Oprah recommends your book.

Content management¹ systems for websites like Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla provide simple forms for website content providers to fill out. When the content is ready to be published, the content provider hits a button and, poof, new content for the website. CMSs allow people to focus on content, the real heart of a website, and not be impeded by coding and technological barriers.

Sometimes it's good to think of your site as part of the Internet.

In that sense a keyword or keyword phrase would function as a sort of dynamic menu item. Let's call it a keyword question.

A seeker types in a keyword question. For example, "road bike tires tampa." She's asking the question, "Search engine, where can I find out something about road bike tires in Tampa?"

Make your site easy to find by search engines.

On page optimization

If you own a store, you learn what your customers want by asking them. "How can I help you?"