Search engines list web pages that include the keywords for which a visitor has searched.

To ensure your website contains pages that search engines love to display to their visitors, be sure to include words and phrases that your potential customers are likely to type into a search engine. You don’t really need to repeat them endlessly, or hide them, or put them in special tags — but it does help if each page focuses on a certain theme or core idea.

If you’re unsure about your customers’ lingo, flick through some of the initial emails that prospective customers have sent you, and common trends will jump out.

Poor spelling harms your business’ image and gives potential customers the impression you lack attention to detail.

On your website, it goes a step further: bad spelling sticks out its leg and trips up your eyes. Even if your visitor couldn’t care less about your ability to spell, when you are trying to hold their interest in such an evanescent medium, jarring their thoughts with a misplaced apostrophe or a muddled ‘there’/'their’ is a certain way to lose that connection.

So much emphasis is placed upon marketing your website online, often the simple ways of spreading the word are overlooked.

Conduct an audit of your business’ presence to ensure every aspect is promoting your website as a way to learn more about your company’s products and services. Check your literature: business cards, brochures, sales packs. Check your promotions: flyers, vouchers, discount cards, posters, giveaways. Signage: cars, billboards, banners. Sponsorship: literature, signage, printed spiels. Commercial media: print, television, radio.

Leave no sign unturned.

A Wiki is a type of website that allows multiple people to contribute and update content within a thematically related set of web pages. Wikipedia is an excellent example of a Wiki.

You can use a Wiki in your business as a collection of articles pertaining to parts of your business. The ease with which users can create new pages (articles) and correct out-of-date information within existing pages makes it an ideal tool for business policies, procedures, systems, training notes, manuals, meeting minutes and ideas.

By password-protecting the Wiki and defining a strict set of trusted users within your company who can contribute content, you can also maintain the security of this information.

Make sure your business has a policy that describes what happens with an employee’s email account when they leave the company.

I recommend:

• Create an email forwarder that will forward emails sent to the ex employee to someone else in the business (and make sure that person knows to expect these emails)
• Delete the email account so the ex employee cannot login to it
• Archive the emails within that account and save the file somewhere accessible. If you later upgrade your email software, make sure you have a way of accessing the archived email, as formats can change.
• Check any marketing literature, websites and internal documents and update references to that employee’s email address, if used
• Maintain a spreadsheet of historical email addresses and use this as a checklist to ensure your procedure is being followed