The Foundation of Online Marketing

Small businesses owners often face the arduous task of building an online presence that must bring in customers. While spending money on flashy animation may make a website look good it is a waste of resources for owners that have the need to market their small business online. Professional internet marketers have developed proven methods for helping their clients to gain returns in the placement of search engine results and work with small businesses to help them gain a solid foothold with their SEO marketing in the competitive online world.

Many small businesses cannot afford to build flash-based websites that incorporate the latest animated technologies to promote their products and services. While animated landing pages and introductions are impressive for web surfers to look at they can cost thousands of dollars to produce and are actually a waste of money when it comes to creating a presence on the internet. Getting noticed, and more importantly being utilized by new and returning website visitors is the goal of internet marketing. Businesses of every size can use the World Wide Web equally promote their products or services and watch their website rise to the top of the search engines.

Because search engine optimization is the most important element for any small businesses to consider when establishing an online presence, it is vital that owners look at where their marketing dollars are being spent and spend their budgets only on the methodologies that have been proven to return a result. Any marketing effort must return a result and finding the right mix of marketing can make a dramatic difference in the way that business performance is measured. Small businesses in particular cannot afford to waste money or energy on schemes and tactics that do not return an income on their investment. Navigating the shark filled waters of the internet can be a challenge for some uninitiated small business owners; however there are certain marks of integrity that can be identified by those that are looking for small business internet marketing.

First, it is crucial to find help with online marketing projects. While the new buzz words for online marketing are targeting social media campaigns the small business owner should be aware that they will need a solid foundation of search engine optimization before lunging forward with a tricky or complicated social networking campaign. The basics of SEO are the foundation for all internet marketing and without an SEO strategy a small business has little chance for survival among the millions of websites that are competing for customers.

While it is possible for a business owner to conduct some optimization of their website by themselves there are many hours of work ahead in fully marketing a website. Blogs are good way to attract attention from consumers, as is article writing and submission through publishing websites. The underlying use of keywords and Meta tags are what draw the results of the search engines and moves the small business website up in the ranks of the search engine results.

Search engines look for keywords, page titles and descriptions that are embedded within the HTML coding of the website and match that information with the written content of the website to begin returning results to online web searchers. Internet marketing professionals help small business owners gather the tools they need to optimize a website. The key to online marketing success is to build a solid foundation of optimization and expand promotions through continuous link building efforts. Professional Internet marketers have proven methods for helping businesses climb the search engine results listings. Online strategy experts give small business a leg up in the world of internet marketing by delivering customized campaigns that target specific consumers.

Keywords Build Links that Unlock a Website's Potential

A website is like a balloon floats through cyberspace. For some people a website marketing strategy provides them with the direction that they are traveling in as they navigate the search engines hunting for people that are looking for them. Using links that are attached to the website, a marketing plan allows consumers who are searching the World Wide Web to find the individual sites that have something to offer them. 

People use the search engines to guide them through a maze of websites to find the information they want to see. This is where keywords come into play. A keyword is designed to make it easy for someone searching the web to unlock the information that they are looking for. Search engine marketing allows a website to use keywords to optimize a website and build links that anchor the website and make it easier to find. Like the anchors that are attached to a ship, the links to a website hold it in place so that is not being tossed around in the ocean of websites that appear online.

There are more than 300 million websites on the Internet and each year more and more people launch a site that is designed to promote certain products, services, organizations, or individual people. There are entertainment sites, non-profit charities, and news services online that have something for everyone on the planet to look at. While people have different interests and look for different websites to visit, they are drawn to the places that appear in the results of a web search because they associate a series of keywords with the information that they are looking up.

Keywords and phrases help to single out the hundreds of millions of websites from one another by allowing differentiation. No two websites are identical even when they are based on the same template, so it makes sense that keyword optimization helps to set each individual website apart from other sites that are hosted online.

Link building adds to the presence of a website in the search engines by increasing the number of times a keyword appears on the Internet. Articles and blogs that are written about a keyword and include the same optimized words that are associated with a website provide the anchors that link the site to the search engines. When someone enters a keyword search into their browser bar the results appear based on the popularity of the website (or how many times it has been linked to relevant material online).

It is important to build links on a continual basis. Even after reaching the first page of search engine results there is a need to constantly add content to the Internet that links information on a website to the related articles that are published online. When building links it is important to use the same keywords in the same order as they are coded into the source code of a website and included in the written content that is provided on the pages of the site. Together with strategic campaigns that target an ideal consumer audience the selected keywords provide the means to attract people to a website from all over the world.  

Whether you want a local audience in the same city and neighborhood to visit your website or you are looking to spread the word about the benefits of your services, products, or information that appears on the pages of your website, you can use keywords to build links that improve the placement of your site in the search engines by adding anchors to the information you are hosting online.

Comments Left on Websites Influence Search Results

Articles that are written in an unbiased yet positive format are an excellent way to help promote a business. By submitting content to any number of online publishers, corporations across the globe are finding that their rankings within the search engine directories is being influenced for the reinforcement of their marketing efforts that place a website in the resource channels of the search media. By targeting the keywords that are linked to the offerings of a business, the owners and managers are able to coordinate their tactics for driving traffic to their virtual storefront. Any increase their ecommerce sales comes as a result of their constant delivery of new material through articles and blogs that are of interest to the cyber community.

Another useful tool that is gaining recognition in the strategic placement of a website is the incorporation of comments or recommendations that are being made by clients or customers who are satisfied with their experience in dealing with a business. Satisfied customers favorably share the successes that are directly tied to the work or services of am organization that they have hired to help them. Service providers rely on referrals as much as they do their advertising efforts. The feedback that is given by their clients aides in the overall promotion of the business and its offerings. The endorsements that appear online add to the overall promotion of the company and assist in the placement of the website in the search directories.

Online marketing that includes comments and posts from current or past customers is a valuable piece of the puzzle that generates more business for a company. Websites that allow visitors to leave their comments have an influence on the search engines that rank a business based on the relevancy of the content and the links that support the work being done by the company. By soliciting positive posts on your site you can increase the ranking of our landing pages in the search engines.

The Goal of every marketing Media Strategy

The goal of any online marketing campaign is not to gain a better grip on the search engines or place the website into the upper listings of search results. Although these are the results of a successful marketing media strategy they in fact are side effects of the actual goal of SEO work. No, the real purpose of search optimization is to produce increases in traffic from unique visitors and generate conversions of people that browse a website into people that purchase from that website. The fact that a website rises through the Search Engine Results Page(s) (SERPs) is a byproduct of a campaign that is designed to deliver a Return on Investment (ROI) for any business owner that is working with a skilled SEO professional.

Page placement may be important to some people but for the marketers that are working on building an online reputation the goal must always focus on delivering a high return on investment. First and foremost the work of any optimization campaign must deliver targeted leads to a business that is performing SEO for their website. While the positioning of the site in the search engines is affected by the work of link building and contributes to the page ranking of the site the more important aspect of any campaign should always be to the revenue that is being earned as a result of an optimization campaign.

 

All too often SEO companies focus on the delivery of where their client's site ends up in the search engine results pages instead of developing campaigns that turn site visitors into buyers. The work of Internet marketing involves a number of strategies that include social media marketing, site optimization and pay-per-click advertising. Nowadays social content is just as important as optimization when it comes to establishing a brand and developing an online reputation but underneath all of the strategies and tactics that add to the popularity of the website must be a reason that consumers should spend their money.

Internet marketing is designed to deliver increased traffic to a website, but the unique visitors that are being delivered by the search engines must be converted from qualified targeted leads that may be casually browsing the site to buyers that are spending their money. Even when a website is not set up for ecommerce transactions the conversions of qualified leads are the real reason anyone hires an online marketing firm to provide SEO services. Presenting a call to action that requires visitors to do something that entices them to open their wallets is what an effective and measurable marketing campaign is all about. By focusing on the bottom line of what will more than cover the costs of any marketing media strategy business owners that are looking for search engine optimization and link building can find the professionals that will deliver a return on investment that exceeds anything they are spending on their internet marketing budget.

Optimize Page links for better SEO Placement

In writing content for different clients I have noticed that certain website have very long and complex links that take the website visitor from one page of the site to the next. Instead of using the common link for the pages home.html; about us.html; and contact.html, the links provide some important information to the search engines and aid in the overall creation of an optimized website.

To the casual visitor that is viewing the page the button that is clicked is a normal looking icon that can be found on every website. Simply noting the different page names that are of interest to someone browsing the site the navigation buttons provide the link to another page appear to be colorful additions to the design of a layout.

Like this one is...

However, when clicked on the navigation bar at the top of the screen reports back an elaborate string of words that are related to the company, the page or a particular service or product being promoted.

When building a web page it is now common practice to identify the page title that appears in the browser above the site content. Adding a small logo and name to the page tab makes it possible for the search directories to store more information related to the website, but what is remarkable is that the same "robot" programs that are gathering and indexing a website's written content are also looking at the links and names that are being used by some designers to aid in the optimization of the entire site. 

Allow me illustrate what I mean. For one company a link from their index or home page might look like this http://www.MarketingMediaStrategy.com/services.html, which is perfectly acceptable and will do the job of site navigation, but with some tweaking the same link is optimized when it is written like this: http://www.MarketingMediaStrategy.com/services-writing-graphics-strategic-planning.html

The difference is that while the same page appears on the screen the indexing of that page is unlike any other website. That means that when someone is searching the Internet and types in writing, graphics or planning there is a greater connection to the site that is offering those services. In addition to adding page descriptions that are unique for each page on the website the descriptive navigation link name may boost the ranking of the website within the individual search parameters of an online inquiry.

Whether you are designing you site yourself or having a professional company develop you domain for you it is a beneficial to have them make the page links more usable for the search engines by choosing the words that describe the page and enhance the relevant terms that are being incorporated to optimize your website. Used as covert yet appropriate marketing media strategy when building the pages of a website the lengthy navigation links allow additional optimization work to be done on the website as it is launched and is first scanned and indexed by the "search robots" and "spider programs" that crawl through a website and index the information for the search engines.