In today’s day and age just about every company has to have a website. It’s widely accepted that if your company doesn’t have a website, it’s not considered credible in its market. Yet how many companies actually consider their website to be truly an online sales tool? In fact most companies spend a lot of money to design and build fancy websites but they neglect to think of how they’re going to turn the website into a work horse for generating leads and online sales opportunities for their company.

Most business owners and executives don’t understand that even if they’re not engaged in selling a product through an e-commerce system, there’s still a great vast opportunity to increase their lead generation through guerilla marketing techniques related to internet marketing. And the core competencies in that area are performing good search engine optimization and having strong pay per click advertising campaigns that are focusing in your core markets.

85% of business buyers go to search engines to find vendors when they don’t have a preferred source, so it’s absolutely critical that you have an online presence and that you are well optimized with your website so that when people type in keywords related to your product or service you come up at the top of the search engine, whether it be MSN, Google or Yahoo. From there once a person who’s searching for your product or service clicks through to your website, what do they find? Do they find a nice “about us” page, or a pretty picture of your company? Or do they find readily engaging tools, free guides and offers that compel them to actually click on an offer and fill out a form and convert themselves into a sales lead.

Companies that are building websites without thinking about optimizing them for the search engines and without thinking about optimizing them for conversion of sales leads are entirely missing the boat. If your company is in the process of building a new website or redesigning its website and it’s not considering search engine optimization and developing great offers and conversion mechanisms in calls to action on its website, my suggestion is don’t waste your money. It’s not enough today to just have a nice piece of brochure-ware that does nothing. Companies that are really winning with their marketing expenses as it relates to web presence are the ones that understand the power of internet marketing and are turning their websites into workhorses for sales.