Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing

When you use the internet, what do you use for searching across billions of web sites for the information you need? Do you use Google? Yahoo? AOL? MSN? There are hundreds of smaller search engines, but over 95% of all web searching is done on these search engines. This is part of what is known as search engine optimization and internet marketing.

So how do you actually find relevant information? Do you go to Page 31 for results, or do you stop on Page 1 or 2? This is where Search Engine Optimization comes in (SEO). Search Engine Optimization is the art of structuring a web site and providing content that is clear, cohesive, relevant, and popular. It is an element of internet marketing.

It is the most economical method of achieving best results in the search engines. It is a great accomplishment to appear on a search engine under a keyword that is relevant for your business, and there are many things you can do to help this happen. The following is a brief list that you can use to get started:

• Content - Offer lots of content that is relevant to your small business or industry.
• Keyword Enrichment - Make sure keywords that relate to your small business appear often throughout the body of your content.
• Clarity and Grammar - Complex algorithms can look at the sentence structure and format, and will favor the sites that are well written.
• Links - Send links to your website to your friends and family through email and explain what the company does in a clear, cohesive method. Have them forward the information to all their friends and family. Ask them to talk about it with people on the internet.
• Forums - Find forums that are related to your industry, product, or service. Create an account and offer free advice. Make sure to provide some links to your website where they can go to get additional information, but be careful to avoid spamming. (See "Spamming" article to get more information)
• Chatrooms - Offer free help and advice on chatrooms. If your web site contains useful information, direct people there. Be sure you are not spamming. Avoid spamming at all costs.
• Traffic - Websites that receive high traffic are more popular then those that don’t. Even if the content is better on the one that receives less traffic, it will not appear as close to the top of the first results page as the one with poorer content with higher traffic. In order for your website to be considered a more popular website, it should receive more traffic then your competitors for that top position. This is where all visitors to your web site make a difference. The more news you spread about your website (non-spam), and the more people you get involved, the more visitors your web site will receive. With that, your web site will be much more likely to be ranked higher, and therefore displayed higher.

Please contact us for more information about search engine optimization and internet marketing for a small business.