Friday, 14. May 2010
Internet Marketing can “ad” a boost of traffic to your site
In today’s internet culture, getting the message out about what your site is offering can be a difficult challenge. Sure, what you have to offer could really help people, or save them money, or revolutionize politics. But if people aren’t finding your site, then what good is your message, product, or service? Isn’t search engine optimization ( SEO ) supposed to bring throngs of traffic to your site? I say not necessarily.
SEO is meant to accomplish a few different things. First and foremost, SEO optimizes your website for search engines to find, follow the links on your site, read and interpret what your site is about, index your site, and then show your site within a search engine results page. Ok, so let’s assume that you rank number one on Google for neoprene accessories. That in itself won’t bring you a great deal of traffic. So how do you bring in more traffic?
Internet marketing to boost relevant traffic
One of the easiest ways to boost traffic with internet marketing is to tap into pop culture. The company that sells neoprene accessories could tap into connecting their product to iPods and urban culture. And this can be as simple as featuring their product in a 30 second video on the website, blog posts featuring their product in different urban settings, and pictures of their product being used by young trend setting college students. After those are in place a simple short ran advertising spots on Facebook, Myspace, other popular high traffic sites will get the traffic jump started.
After traffic starts coming in, analyze your traffic sources to determine which internet marketing efforts are performing and which ones aren’t. Trim out the sites that aren’t performing. What you’re left with is your core advertising demographic. At this point your have to decide if your advertising budget can afford to bring in another site that has the same demographic as your core site(s). If not, you may want to consider cutting your core site(s) click-thru’s in half and spread the advertising money across the other sites in your demographics.
Once you get the core advertising site(s) down to a science, do you know when to get out? Some people say stick with an ad as long as it is working. Others say drop the ad after a certain point, and there is also a school of thought of rotating in new ads to keep the ad spot looking fresh. Certainly, if you are a non-profit entity your getting out position is fairly easy, when your funding stream dries up. As an internet marketer, this is my position, it is time to look at getting out of an advertisement spot when your organic traffic has increased %30 -%60 of the original amount. Now this percentage can be what ever amount you want, or you can have a conversion amount also.
Internet Marketing Goes Viral
The end goal is your site, message, video,e-book, etc to go viral. By this I mean it gets forwarded by people automatically without prompting or incentives. It’s at this point you know your site has made it to the big leagues. You’ll have more traffic than you’ll know what do do with, and chances are you’ll need your own dedicated server. Even if you don’t run paid ads, you can use link building to help bring in traffic and increase the popularity of your site. Whether you do it yourself, pay for someone else to do it, or prefer to run paid ads for you, internet marketing picks up the slack until your organic traffic gets to the level you want.
Posted in Promotion by -
Wednesday, 12. May 2010
ALT tags bring visitors to your site from image searches
Search engine optimization is all about getting ranked high in the search engine results page for a specific search query. And ALT attributes for your your images and other other media do indeed help your web page rank higher if the ALT tags are indeed keywords your are trying to rank for. But does it matter to you if your visitors land on your page because they are looking for information on Kim Kardashian or looking for pictures of Kim Kardashian?
This is the main difference between using image ALT tags for SEO and image ALT attributes for internet promotion. If you care about organic search engine results, then use the ALT tags to gain that last bit of SEO juice to give you that edge. If you care more about traffic, then ALT attributes could bring you more traffic naturally than the normal search engine results page does, either way you won’t lose by using image ALT tags.
Kim Kardashian is tagged on my webpage
If you are ready for better placement in the search engine results page and more traffic from image searches, then it is time to supercharge your images. If you examine the Kim Kardashian bikini tag below…
- Kim Kardashian Bikini
… you’ll find the following information:
- Image Title: Kim Kardashian Bikini
- Image Location: kim_bikini.jpg
- Alt Text: Kim Kardashian Bikini
- WP Caption Text: Kim Kardashian Bikini
As you can see, there are four opportunities to get you keyword text onto the web page. The best part is all of these fields are able to be spidered and indexed by search engine spiders. All of this is fairly easy to do, and most web authoring software has the ALT text data field available for your information. If you are using Wordpress, then these functions are available by default.
If you need help getting your site optimized and ready for search engine spiders to crawl and index, please use my contact form and let me know what services you might need. I can perform a SEO survey of your site and recommend which changes to make and why. And for you Kim Kardashian fans, here is one fore reason to use ALT tags, each one of these pictures will bring about 500 unique visitors to this page each month.
Kim Kardashian Bikini
Posted in Promotion, Search Engine Optimization by -
Sunday, 7. March 2010
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>.
Posted in How To..., Paid To Read, Promotion, Search Engine Optimization by -
