Online Marketing

The Internet has brought many unique benefits to marketing, one of which being lower costs for the distribution of information and media to a global audience. The interactive nature of Internet marketing, both in terms of providing instant response and eliciting responses, is a unique quality of the medium. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to have a broader scope because it refers to digital media such as the Internet, e-mail, and wireless media; however, Internet marketing also includes management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) systems.

Internet marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including design, development, advertising, and sales. Internet marketing does not simply entail building or promoting a website, nor does it mean placing a banner ad on another website. Effective Internet marketing requires a comprehensive strategy that synergizes a given company's business model and sales goals with its website function and appearance, focusing on its target market through proper choice of advertising type, media, and design.

Internet marketing also refers to the placement of media along different stages of the customer engagement cycle through search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, e-mail marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies. In 2008 The New York Times working with comScore published an initial estimate to quantify the user data collected by large Internet-based companies. Counting four types of interactions with company websites in addition to the hits from advertisements served from advertising networks, the authors found the potential for collecting upward of 2,500 pieces of data on average per user per month

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Managing your site to maximize your exposure on the search engines takes a little work from both the web designer, and the business owner. I have broken this down to these three areas that we can together maximize your exposure on the search engines.

Research

  1. You can learn from your competitors, by searching for the competing keywords. Go to the first few sites with high page rank and analyze those sites, see what they have done differently than your site. Granted the site might be just very popular and linked from many other sites, but more often than not reading through the source code of the site can tip you off how to do better. You can find out which sites link to that site by searching Google for link:www.site.com and you may want to try to get your site listed on those sites.

  2. Verify the sitemap to tell the Google crawlers what pages to crawl, how important they are and when Google should revisit your site as you add new changes. The other very useful set of features is the insider view on how Google sees your site, whether it sees some problems with it -- e.g., whether it has problems crawling your pages, statistics -- e.g., what keywords people used to find your site and the page rank of each of those pages.

  3. Analyze your log files and see who refers to you the most. Try to find more similar sites. The referral information also reveals the keywords used to find your site. Often you find new keywords that you haven't thought of when targeting your site. By using those newly discovered keywords you can create more content that targets the unexpected traffic even better.

Links

  1. Google gives high ranking to sites that have inbound links from other sites. But not just any sites. Those need to be sites with high ranking. Get involved in communities relevant to your site. Visit forums and mailing list, and help other people by answering their questions, posting links to your site if they contain information relevant to your replies. Usually you are allowed to have a signature, where you can link to your site.

  2. Publish articles on other sites relevant to your expertise. Make sure that those articles link back to your site.

  3. Make sure you are listed on directories related to your site.

  4. Try to include a few outbound links to high quality sites in every document.

Keywords

  1. Spell check your content (especially your keywords, title, headers, and description)

  2. Verify the title of the document includes the most important keywords and phrases, as Google gives a heavy weight to those. The keywords need to be included in the H1 and H2 header entries, and also once in bold, once in italic and if possible in the URL.

  3. Sometimes your site competes with many other sites for the same keywords. Rather than optimizing all of your site for the same keywords, try to find less competitive keywords and optimize some of your pages for those keywords.

  4. Make sure all images have Alt tags, as these are also searchable by Google.