Ez Internet Money

Internet Promotion And Search Engine Optimization Are Not The Same

As a business owner or manager, you probably realize the importance your website in making sales or promoting your brand or message. Your website is often the primary resource for clients, customers, and information seekers.  Without these visitors, your site is not adding anything to your bottom line and may even be costing your business money!  You are wasting money paying a web designer money for constant updates to your site if the site isn’t converting visitors into revenue. But do you know how to get visitors to your site?

Internet Promotion And SEO – Two Different Ways To Get More Visitors

Internet promotion is leveraging the power of the internet to bring visitors to your site. “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results…” [1] To get a better idea of how each one has a place in your online marketing strategy, let’s take a look at how each one accomplishes this task.

Internet Promotion

Internet promotion can be thought of advertising and marketing for your website. This can accomplished in many different ways. The most commonly recognized and accepted way is advertising on another website that attracts the same visitor demographic that you want to target. Another popular and widely accepted form of internet promotion is the use of social networking. This grassroots promotion includes sites like Facebook and Myspace and also the use of blogging and micro-blogging. Search engine marketing is a form of advertising in which you ad is placed in a search engine results page when someone is using a search engine.

Other forms of internet promotion that aren’t as widely used or accepted are traffic exchanges, paid to read emails, paid to surf sites, and viral marketing such as ebooks. These typically are low cost/low reward methods that do not produce long term results. Instead they are used as a “short term stop gap” measure or as a form of blitzkrieg marketing used to deliver large amounts of traffic for a short duration. A good example of blitzkrieg internet marketing is the use of a traffic exchange, paid to read email, paid to surf, and search engine marketing over the period of 3-4 days leading up to a release of a new product or a massive sale.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is the manipulation of website code, site structure, inbound and outbound links, and site content to provide a favorable position in search engine results. For example, search engines recognize bold text and place more importance on the emphasized term search engine optimization than the do on the non-emphasized term search engine optimization. Including keywords into your site and page web addresses can have a positive affect on search engine results placement. Finally, the number and quality of links pointing to and away from your site can affect your results placement.

Online Marketing Strategy

As you begin to develop your website, a very important consideration to have early on is your online marketing strategy. Simply put, how you are going to get people to your site. SEO has a lot of importance in the initial design of the site and slowly tapers off to periodic maintenance and support. Internet promotion initially is important to get the word out that the site is live and people should visit it. After that, promotion is a small daily task until there is a new release, sale, or important news to spread.

As with most businesses, your internet marketing budget is limited. It is important to deploy your resources at the correct time to maximize the rate of return on every dollar spent. By identifying the differences between internet promotion and SEO you can now get the most out of every dollar spent.

[1] “Search Engine Optimization.” Wikipedia. 05 Mar. 2010. Web. 06 Mar. 2010.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization>.