Aug

Driving Web Traffic – Seo And Common Practices

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Common, Driving, Practices, Traffic

Driving Web Traffic – Seo And Common Practices

DRIVING WEB TRAFFIC

What good is having a store without customers? A TV commercial with no viewers? Similarly, a website without visitors is a waste of cyberspace and money. The reality is that many businesses have ineffective website marketing that fails to deliver sufficient return for the time, effort and money spent.

How does a small business draw visitors to its site? It can be like finding a needle in a haystack without the proper methods of identification and promotion. One solution is Search Engine Optimization.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

There are millions of websites vying for attention. The worldwide web contains over 5 billion web pages, with nearly 7 million new pages—added daily! Optimum search engine optimization (SEO) is one way to ensure a constant stream of traffic to the site.

SEO is a necessity so that your website ranks in the top 30 search engine results. Submitting a site that is successfully indexed by a search engine is only the beginning. Content must be relevant to the search terms. Reciprocal links with complimentary websites also give a big boost in search engines.

HINTS FOR UTILIZING SEO

When you use the internet, what do you use for searching across billions of websites for the information you need? Do you use Google? Yahoo? AOL? MSN? There are hundreds of smaller search engines, but over 95% of all web searching is done on these search engines.

So how do you actually find relevant information? Do you go to Page 31 for results, or do you stop on Page 1 or 2? Search Engine Optimization is the art of structuring a website and providing content that is clear, cohesive, relevant, and popular—a crucial element of internet marketing.

It is the most economical method of achieving best results with search engines, and a great accomplishment to appear on a search engine under a keyword that is relevant to your business. Here are a few things to consider for your website so you can get the most out of SEO:

ü Content. Offer lots of content that is relevant to your small business or industry.

ü Keyword Enrichment. Make sure keywords that relate to your small business appear often throughout the body of your content.

ü Clarity and Grammar. Complex algorithms can look at the sentence structure and format, and will favor the sites that are well written.

ü Links. Send links to your website to your friends and family through email and explain what the company does in a clear, cohesive method. Have them forward the information to their friends, family and even acquaintances. Encourage them to talk about it with people on the internet.

ü Forums. Find forums that are related to your industry, product, or service. Create an account and offer free advice. Make sure to provide some links to your website where they can go to get additional information, but be careful to avoid spamming. (See below.)

ü Chatrooms. Offer free help and advice in chatrooms. If your website contains useful information, direct people there. Avoid spamming at all costs.

ü Traffic.Websites that receive high traffic are more popular than those that don’t. Even if the content is better on one that receives less traffic, it will not appear as close to the top of the first results page as the one with poorer content with higher traffic. In order for your website to be considered popular, it should receive more traffic than your competitors for that top position. This is where all visitors to your website make a difference. The more news you spread about your website (non-spam), and the more people you get involved, the more visitors your website will receive. With increased visitors, your website is more likely to be ranked higher, and therefore displayed higher.

SEARCH ENGINE ADVERTISING

Web advertising through search engines is also called sponsored search and search engine advertising. The most popular programs are offered by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. Some offer Pay Per Click (PPC) services, also known as Cost Per Click (CPC), where the advertiser is only charged when a user visits the ad. Others use a Cost Per Impression (CPM) model where advertisers are charged every time the Advertisement appears on their website. Ads can take many forms, including text, banner ads, video ads, map ads, and even audio ads.

KEYWORD-BASED WEB MARKETING

Marketing based on a keyword search could take place through a search engine such as google.com, or a search engine partner site, such as shopping.com. For example, Google offers a service called AdWords, which allows companies, for a small fee, to have a link to their website featured when a user searches a specific keyword.

CONTENT-BASED WEB MARKETING

Many search engines (Google, Ask.com, Yahoo!, Search, etc.) have partner websites with specific content. The websites agree to let the search engines place content-specific advertising on their website, in return for a fee. The search engine then finds companies interested in advertising on websites with their desired content. For example, an online dog food retailer might have their advertisement placed on a site about dogs.

Both of these advertising formats allow advertisers to target specific users with certain interests. Generally, these advertisements are paid for based on either a pay per click campaign or an impression-based campaign.

SPAM AND OTHER BAD INTERNET MARKETING PRACTICES

Spamming is the abuse of the internet and email in order to send unsolicited and undesired bulk messages. The best recognized method of spamming is junk email. In fact, over 95% of email messages transmitted over the internet is SPAM.

Sincerely,

Ilya Bodner

Small Business Owner