Internet Marketing Basics

There are tons of articles out there purporting to tell you how to get traffic to your site. So how do you get the best out of your marketing campaigns?

1) Search Engines

Google gets 300 million searches every week. Only 20% of searchers go past the 3rd page when looking for something.

If you can get your page ranked highly with Google, or one of the other top search engines (Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask) you have a huge amount of free advertising done for you. Unfortunately it's not that easy. Here are a few important points:

* Search engines try to provide users with the most relevant content. Therefore the better written and more comprehensive your content the better the search engines will rank them.

* Search engines like regularly updated content. This is why blogs do so well on search engines. If your content is updated weekly, or even better daily, you will get much higher search rankings.

* Search engines like pages which are linked to from other sites, especially ones about the same topics. It helps to convince the search engine that this is a good site if it is linked to by many similar sites. Later suggestions build on this.

* Search engines don't like cheaters. People using tricks, such as 'invisible text' stuffed with keywords, or keywords stuffed into the alt text of images, get marked heavily down by search engines. Don't try it.

* Specific searches liked to specific pages. If your site is about fishing, and you have a page about how to get started in the hobby, that page is more likely to be found by people searching for that exact information. You can easily create a mini-niche in any topic which you can dominate on a search engine.

2) Try to get people talking Word of mouth has a trendy new name: 'viral marketing'. If you have something fascinating on your site - an interesting set of images, an outrageous video or some amazing articles you're in business. They can quickly spread through emails and blogs and can easily reach a million people in a day, all with your name attached to the end. Try to create something which will stick in peoples mind and will get people interested in sending it to colleagues and family.

3) Linking As touched on above - search engines love sites which are linked to on lots of sites. What you need to do is to find lots of sites which will take your link.

* There are lots of sites out there which want articles. If you can write a good article and submit it to a free article directory it can find it's way onto hundreds of sites - all with a one way link to your site on the end. * There are lots of old, abandoned sites and blogs out there which will allow you to post comments on, including a link. * Contact owners of similar sites and ask to exchange links.

4) Blogs Blogs are immensely powerful - if you use them well. If you have a blog on your website, or on a free site like Blogger you have a content rich site with regularly updated content (see 'what do search engines like' above). Plus bloggers regularly link to other bloggers, giving you an ever expanding link base.