One of the simple tenets of doing business on the Internet is that if visitors can’t find your web site, they can’t do business with you. Given how large the Internet is, it’s pretty easy to get lost in the vastness of cyberspace. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that businesses are very concerned with being findable on the Internet.

More and more, businesses are developing their web site as a business hub where all attention and visitors are directed to the web site first to do business. Think of it as a a hub and spoke model or a wheel model. In this model, your web site is the hub, and the spokes are the different marketing tactics that direct people back to your web site. The logic behind the hub and spoke model is fairly straightforward. The more quality links that point back to your web site, the higher the ranking you’ll achieve on an Internet query. Furthermore, your web site is where you want visitors to go because it provides the best, most detailed and authoritative information about your business.

Marketing tactics can be a variety of approaches and include traditional networking, content marketing, on-site optimization, search engine optimization, social media and so forth.

Because your web site is on the Internet, you’ll naturally want to take part in lots of on-line marketing tactics. Of particular interest these days are the social media platforms. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter, just to name a few, are much more flexible than web sites and allow users an easy and fast means to provide news or updates on products. They are a very powerful way of communicating quickly, directly and informally with your clients, friends, fans, followers and so on. A popular trend these days is to create a social media page on your web site to centralize these platforms. By doing so, you make it much easier for your contacts and visitors to follow you. Although you’re sending them off your site, you’re still connected to them via the platform, and with the all important backlink, you can direct them back to your web site. Social media networks, when used for business, must be managed quite carefully because of the rather informal nature of how they are used and how broadly connected they can be.

It’s important to diversify your marketing efforts and not rely on any one type of tactic. Instead of using only social media networks as your tactics, use backlinks from web sites with a strong page ranking (7 or higher). Furthermore, since the Internet is constantly changing, don’t rely only on web-based tactics. Traditional non-Internet based approaches are also an effective means of getting visitors to your web site. Being connected socially, or within your industry, can be a powerful means to point people to your web site.

Make sure, of course, that you put the link to your web site on your business cards, brochures, tech sheets, email signatures, even as a message on your voicemail, to direct people to your site.

With so many advances on the web these days, we may have thought that corporate web sites were going the way of the horse and buggy. Although the way we use our web site may be changing, the more static nature of these sites may very well be what gives them their staying power and importance as business marketing tools. By using the hub and spoke model and a diverse set of marketing tactics, you can definitely improve your web presence and direct many more visitors to your web site, aka business hub.