To succeed on the net; a website just is not enough

Effective web marketing in conjunction with a killer website is key to succeeding on the internet.  We have all heard of search engine optimization and web marketing, but what does it mean? How can it help me? How do I do it?  Web marketing or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential if you want your website to have visitors. Anyone can put up a website but unless that site is actively being marketed it will just get lost in the abyss. According to Business insider March 8, 2012 there were approximately 644 million active websites and that number grows exponentially every day. All of these websites are competing for visitors, but with a limited amount of keywords this can become a tricky process. 
(SEO) can help your business in many ways. First and foremost are better rankings on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. An effective web marketing strategy will help you to rank with keywords related to website content, and be targeted to what consumers are searching for. Your website will also receive visitors from other websites that are linking to you. This, with a well-executed site will work to persuade your visitors to perform an action and convert a high percentage of those visitors into consumers and/or leads for your business. It is very important to know what type of action you want web visitors to take when they get to your website; is it to make a purchase? Join a mailing list? or request more information? This should be a fundamental question you ask before starting any (SEO) campaign. Researching your competition and keywords is crucial to using the most effective means of web marketing.  

There are many aspects to a search optimization campaign. First ,you should know that you will see return on your investment in a relatively short time; although, it will not be dramatic and will take a considerable amount of time before you start seeing any solid increases in your search rankings. (SEO) is not for the short term minded and can take as long as a year or two to see dramatic increases in traffic; this must be looked at as a long term expenditure. Know going into any (SEO) campaign it will take a considerable amount of time and money. The first thing to do regarding your (SEO) campaign is to make sure your web pages are all individually optimized. Make sure all of your page titles, descriptions, and images are all using your keywords properly and effectively. Next make sure your website is easy to navigate, all of your links are working, and pointing to the right place. All of your page content should have quality content and be optimized with your keywords.

Create an XML site map and register with Google Webmaster, as well as Google analytics so that you will be able to measure visits and your Google rankings. Backlinks are very important, and arguably the most important part. Google and other search engines rank the most popular websites first in their rankings. How it works; the search engines measure how many, the relevance, and the quality of websites that link to yours. Basically the more high quality relevant links you get from other websites pointing to yours, the higher your website will rank and in turn you will get more visitors. (When other websites link to yours, search engines consider the anchor text used to link your site.) Anchor text are the words you click on that lead to a site. For example a news site might have an article about cars and in that article “Ford Trucks” is highlighted, so you know this is a link and that link takes you to the website http://www.ford.com; in this example “Ford Trucks” is the anchor text. Anchor text is very important to search engines as it gives credibility to your website regarding subject matter.

Getting websites to link to your site is a time consuming and tedious endeavor, however with a consistent strategy it will prove to be effective. First of all you need to get links from websites. you may ask “How do I get websites to link to me?” The answer to this is first, great content, and second is to actively market your website on other quality websites; such as commenting on high quality relevant blogs, web directories, and forums. To determine whether or not a website is high quality you should consider a few things, what is the websites Page Rank or PR? Is the site nice and easy to navigate? Is the website somehow relevant to yours or in the same industry?  Writing great articles, using social media such as Facebook and Twitter are all effective ways to gain traffic and backlinks. Link trading can still be considered an effective strategy although it is employed less often nowadays due to the fact that one way links from other websites are considered to be 10 times more effective as compared with trading links. Avoid getting links from spammy low quality directories; there are many of them out there and this will only hurt your efforts. No link from a bad website is better than having one. Search engine optimization requires a lot of expertise. You may want to consider a professional to help you along with this process. If you have the time, and are committed long term, any one can do this but it will certainly take an enormous investment of time and energy.

Many (SEO) companies already have processes in place and databases of linkable websites to streamline the process. (SEO) companies must also stay current with the most effective marketing strategies because search engines constantly change their algorithms, therefore marketing strategies must constantly evolve to remain effective. A web marketing strategy that worked yesterday may not necessarily work tomorrow. However you plan to go about your (SEO) strategy just be warned that it is a colossal undertaking and not for the faint of heart; with that said you can succeed with patience and persistence.