What is Web Marketing?
Web marketing is part of your overall marketing strategy and consists of all facets of Internet marketing. Web marketing includes: search engine placement, banner advertising, email advertising, online communities, and more! Web marketing is an important area for all companies to review and continually redevelop a marketing plan for. As long as the Internet is changing and evolving, we need to effectively take advantage of its strengths as a marketing vehicle and look for ways to move around its weaknesses.
This Guide to Web Marketing introduces you to Internet marketing, how to promote your website, improve sales, and explains a lot of areas of web marketing which are difficult to understand. Additionally, we present several creative marketing strategies you can use to improve traffic to your website.
Types of Internet Marketing
There are several types of web marketing that you need to be aware of when developing a web marketing plan. These are different avenues for you to promote your website. You can choose to use some or all of these areas when marketing on the Internet. Think of these different areas like the different areas you can promote a company in the brick and mortar world: billboards, radio ads, newspaper ads, TV ads, public relations, news releases, sport team sponsorship, community service, etc. These normal methods of promoting your company range from free to very expensive. The same is true for many of these marketing techniques – some are free while others can become very expensive.
Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing can range from the free (finding ways to move up in the search engine results) to the expensive (paying for search engine advertising). We know many very successful businesses who have made a lot of money with no advertising expenditures. We also know people who have made small investments in search engine advertising and have turned their businesses into big cash flow generating machines. The decision as to whether or not you pay for search engine advertising depends on the nature of your business, the income generation method, and your competition.
Email Marketing
Email marketing has unfortunately taken on a bad image due to the volumes of spam people receive on any given day. With millions of spam messages sent each day, legitimate email advertising has suffered. Despite these problems, email advertising is one of the most effective advertising methods – especially when the emails are targeted to individuals with an interest in the area you are advertising in.
We will look at ways you can create your own email marketing list, how to effectively advertise to people who want to read about your website or product, and things to avoid with email marketing.
Promoting Your Website
There are a wide range of methods you can use to promote your website. It's important for your firm to match a strategy for promoting your website with the goals of your Internet presence. One of the common goals companies make for their Internet marketing strategy is to create a buzz for your products and services.
Understanding Search Engines
Big search engines have been around since the mid-1990s. A search engine uses a computer software procedure called an ‘algorithm’ to determine the best results for your search terms. Google, the most popular search engine, has thousands of servers which run billions of calculations per second to take your search term and produce the list of results for you to best find what you’re looking for.
Only the developers of the Google search engine have a complete understanding of how their search algorithm works, we have a good understanding about the components which make up the algorithm and methods you can use to improve your search engine ranking.
Have you ever received a job because of someone you know? It is often said it is “who you know, not what you know” which will help you get ahead. The same concept with a twist holds true on the Internet - it’s who knows you (sites linking to your site) which helps make your site more popular with search engines and it’s what you know (your content or products) which will help keep people coming back to your site.
At the heart of the search engine is a popularity contest. The basic premise is the search engines looks at the number of sites linking to your site and the quality of each of those sites.
How Do Search Engines Rank Sites?
How search engines rank sites is fairly well understood now. Typically, a search engine follows this process:
- Crawl a webpage and cache the non-common words on the page. Generate a score of the frequency of terms on the page.
- Generate a value ranking based on how old the site is, how many links the page has, the "quality" score of those pages linking in, the frequency of the search terms in the content, title, headers, and more.
- Generate a search results page for a given term based on how "fresh" the content is, what the site ranking is, what the page ranking is, and the frequency of the search term on the page.
Now, we're going to look at some steps to get your site list high in search engine results.
Steps
Purchase a descriptive domain name. "flowersandbaskets.com" is a lot more descriptive for users and a search engine for the terms "flowers" and "baskets" than juliesshop.com.
Create quality content with keyword rich copy. If you are setting up a site to sell collectible football gear, write some articles about collectible helmets, jerseys, and pictures. Add some interesting articles about people who have large collections of sports related collectibles. Rich content is one of the top ways to attract good search engine rankings.
Get links from quality sources. There's nothing like a high quality link from a long-standing site in your subject area. For example, if you are selling products for plant nurseries, links from trade magazine sites and trade associations are extremely valuable. A lot of sites will provide you a free link just for having a quality site for their visitors. Be cautious of the ones trying to sell you link space.
Fresh content sells! Update your site frequently. Google (and many other search engines) more frequently index and rate your site higher if the site is updated on a frequent basis.
Be aware that it isn't easy to get to the top quickly. Some search engine marketing firms promise a meteoric rise to the top of search engines. It can't be done that quickly and many firms follow unscrupulous practices which could get you banned from search listings.
Be patient! I know, I know, you want it to happen now! Unfortunately, sometimes you just have to be patient to get to the point you want to be in the search engine.
Tips and Tactics
When linking, don't link the words click here. Instead, link something more meaningful to the search engine, for example, Joe's Sports Memoribilia or Jenny's Collectibles and Dolls.
Don't spam your links. Do not go around to guestbooks and forums and post your site links expecting it to lead to anything positive! Not only will you make a lot of people upset, search engines have caught on to those tricks and will likely penalize you.
Links to Resources
www.clickz.com/: Internet marketing site with a lot of articles on web advertising and marketing.
www.wilsonweb.com: One of the oldest Internet marketing sites out there.
Links to Blogs and Forums
www.paidcontent.org: For content sites.
