Tips and Ideas for Better Internet Marketing
Internet marketing is a broad term which covers all of the strategies, tactics, and processes to create and promote an online presence. Internet marketing is a challenging process done in a highly competitive, dynamic, and fluid environment. Your website’s online ranking, visibility, and effectiveness are in a constant competition against other websites in your industry. This could be compared to a company’s need to provide ongoing development to their salespeople in order to compete with the salespeople of their competitors. Internet marketing is never finished . . . if you want to succeed online.
Successful Internet marketing has two key objectives:
- Create A Great Website that is content rich, employs sound user functionality, is aesthetically pleasing, and is search engine friendly.
- Drive Traffic to Your Website from search engines, portals, vertical directories, and offline marketing efforts (i.e., advertising your domain name on business cards letterhead, invoices, etc.). For the objectives here, we will focus on how to Drive Traffic To Your Website.
Online marketing is comprised of two components: 1) Search Engine Optimization, and 2) Search Engine Marketing. An overview of these two components is as follows:
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): is the process that determine the ranking of a website in the natural (organic) section of search engine results pages (SERP’s) for a given keyword or key-phrase. Each search engine has a proprietary method of evaluating a website’s quality for, or value to, a user’s search query. This proprietary method is called an algorithm. The exact methodology of any algorithm is not public knowledge and search engines periodically revise their algorithms. Every SEO practitioner maintains their own manner of executing SEO based on established web standards, experience, observation skills, and ongoing education. There is no official or formal process to create, manage, or master SEO. Although SEO is very complex, some of the basic parts of effective SEO are developing rich content, proper use of key-phrases, and that make reasonable efforts to meet W3C web standards. A critical part of achieving, and maintaining, competitive natural ranking is acquiring links from relevant sites to the client’s website. (Effective link building is a separate area requiring specialized knowledge and skills).
Search engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing (SEM): is the process through which a company is promoted online to increase online visibility and develop brand identity. There are a multitude of strategies and tactics to achieve effective search engine results. Typical search engine marketing efforts are submissions to search engines and portals, listings or advertising on vertical directories, pay-per-click programs (i.e., Google Ads), blogging, and online press releases. The bottom-line objective of any SEM program or service is to increase visibility of the client organization throughout online search mediums. Effective SEM programs are highly customized initiatives based on the unique situation of the client organization.
In summary, SEO and SEM are the two components used to position a client organization’s website, and achieve competitive placement, for targeted key-phrases that deliver exposure to the desired target market. The positioning, placement, and visibility of a website should consider all possible places where the client organization has an opportunity to engage a qualified prospect or relevant audience.
