How to Start a Business on the Internet: Lesson 8
There is an incredible vast array of promotional techniques at your fingertips from SEO copy for organic marketing to paid advertising, newsletter publication, banner ads, link exchanges, classified advertising, auctions, permission marketing, article writing and email campaigns.
Web Traffic
There are many ways to attract visitors to your website. Simply… you have both the option to generate free traffic and you have the option to pay for traffic:
Free traffic generally means search engine optimization or another term is organic marketing, but there are other ways that do not require a huge financial investment and can result in 100s of visitors.
Paid traffic refers to the money you pay to get people to visit your site. Typically, this refers to pay-per-click advertising where you pay a bid price every time a visitor clicks a link and lands on your site.
Clearly, one takes time and effort and the other takes money – although some of each is obviously required for success. If you have a big marketing budget, you might hire out your SEO copywriting and Internet marketing services. If you are on a limited budget, you may want to do it yourself.
How to Prepare to Attract Visitors
1. Insure at least your home page, preferably a minimum of 4 of your most important information web pages, and at best, all of your web pages - are search engine optimized.
2. Your site needs quality inbound and outbound links. To move your position up in the rankings - to one of the first 10 pages - you need quality inbound links, preferably with a high PR ranking. Search engines determine that if many quality sites link to your page, it must be valuable and so they move your site listing up on the search engine found page.
3. Your web pages need to be constructed with current HTML W3C compliant standards. You do this to make it as easy as possible for search engines to index your pages. Keep in mind that indexing is done by robots who read the hidden code that is not visible to the general public. When your web page code meets current standards, it has a higher opportunity to rank at the top of the listing.
4. Submit your web site listing to major search engines one-by-one or by engaging a search marketing specialist.
5. Submit to directories. Many people don't realize that search engines and directories are not the same thing. Many quality directories require a fee, but there are also many high-traffic directories that you can submit your listing to for free.
Directories have two benefits: First, you gain visibility and clicks from qualified visitors without paying for the click. Second, you gain a quality inbound link - that you need to move you UP in the search engine found listing.
Invest in a good business web site and update it yearly. Everything changes, especially when it comes to this new medium called the Internet. You wouldn’t wear the same shoes forever. Keep the same haircut. Or watch the same TV. Update your site and reap the benefits.
Understanding Search Engines
Search engines are a key that opens the door to 100s and 1000s of visitors for your site. Pay close attention to search engines and their requirements. Here are the four basic types of search engines and web directories:
Relevancy Based Search Engines. The results of a search on a traditional “relevancy” based search engine are based on the content of a website. These search engines ‘spider’ your website and search through it, adding information from your site to their index, then rank your site according to certain ‘relevancy’ factors. Obviously, you want to know what these ‘spiders’ are searching for, and provide it.
Web Directories. Web directories are large topical, searchable directories maintained by gasp… actual humans! No ‘robot spiders’ checking your site! A human being checks your site, and decides whether or not to include your website in their index. Sites in the index are found by browsing, by category, or by searching sites in the index with simple key word matching.
Meta Search Engines. Meta Search Engines, or Meta Crawlers, do not maintain their own index of websites, but rather “crawl” other search engines, and display the imported results. You get your website listed in the meta-crawlers by getting listed in the regular search engines first. If you are in the other three categories, you end up in the meta-crawlers by default. Meta-crawlers include metacrawler.com, search.com, dogpile.com, matchsite.com, mamma.com and others.
Pay-per-click Search Engines. PPC engines (also called bid-ranked search engines) do things entirely differently. They don’t have human’s deciding who is listed where. Instead, they let YOU choose your list ranking with your pennies. You establish your ranking on the list based on the amount you bid for certain search words and phrases.
Search engines are by far the most-used method people choose to search on the Internet.
People enter keywords and search the Internet for sites where they can find information, products and services they want. You want your site to show up in the found listing when someone searches for products and services you offer. But how? You put keywords on your web pages.
Web Promotion
There is an incredibly vast array of promotional techniques at your fingertips. From organic marketing to paid advertising to newsletter publication to banner ad, link exchanges, classified advertising, auctions, permission marketing, article writing, email campaigns and more… too many to describe here.
It’s not about the gadgets. It’s not about one magical promotional technique. It’s about using techniques in a full onslaught strategy to bring hundreds or even thousands of unique visitors a day to your site. What this means is that you are going to have to work at it, step by step, building one promotional technique first, then when it is mastered... working on another. Start with search engine marketing! Worksheet About Creating Your Bio |
