Free Online Web Marketing Guide: Intro

Introduction To The

12 Steps Of Website Marketing

Welcome you are about to learn the fundamentals of web marketing and promotion. You will have to dedicate the time to understand these basic web marketing techniques.

The Mastery Of Web Marketing Includes...

Mastering keyword research techniques. Imagine if you were the owner of a retail store on a busy street, and your store didn't have a sign. You would probably get a lot of people who come into your store just out of curiosity, but would they find what they are looking for? Most likely not. It's the same with the search engines and keywords. If you optimize your site for the wrong keywords, you will get a lot of lookers and no buyers.

Understanding web design and HTML at a very basic level and learn a WYSIWYG HTML editor such as Dreamweaver. If you can't make changes to your web pages and upload them, there is no chance of improving its relevance through keyword optimization. You don't need to have complete control over the website, as you may work with a template based CMS (Content Management System), but you need to be able to make modifications to the Title tags, META description and the body content. Or you have a web designer who makes the changes for you.

Learn to write and insert keywords into web content You don't need to be an expert writer to create well optimized keyword rich content. As long as you understand you potential visitors' needs and wants, writing search engine optimized web copy can be learned by anyone. The important thing to remember is to always write for your web audience first, and then tweak your copy to incorporate your target keywords.

Dedicate enough time to grow your website content.Most small business websites stop expanding their web content after 45 pages, which also include some not so relevant pages like privacy policies, contact us page, etc. Websites with more relevant informational pages do better on the search engines. So commit to writing at least one new page per week on a topic that answers some common questions your visitors may have. Begin with "how to tips, "top 10 lists, and "did you know articles" to start your creative juices flowing.

Grasp the concepts of links and implement a link building plan. If you were a hiring manager for a large company, would you hire someone without checking their references? The references provide some tangible way to validate the candidate's skills. Links are the equivalent to references on the web. The search engines use links as validation of another website's value and quality on a specific search topic. The more "citations" the search engines find from reputable websites linking to another site, the higher they rank them. It's important to develop a sharp "eye" for valuable links from the beginning that can push your site past your competitors.

Remain patient even in the face of sudden ranking drops and continue to learn more about web marketing each day. Overreacting to ranking changes and undoing all the previous work is the single most reason new webmasters fail at website marketing. It could take your site at least a year to attain reasonable ranking. As long as you follow the web site marketing and link building techniques that are described in the following chapters, any ranking fluctuation will be short term and not a reason to change your web marketing plan.

The Big Web Marketing Mystery.

The world of website marketing remains a mystery to most small business owners. Search engines are confusing to website owners because they don't publish the methods they use to rank websites.

If you are serious about your website's visibility, you owe it to yourself to learn as much as you can about the most effective and safe methods to get top ranking on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. What you have to realize is search engines actually need your website for their survival and profitability.

The commercial aspect of the Internet has created an entirely different set of problems for the search engines. Search engines existed long before Google came along in libraries, research institutions, and government facilities. In those early days, the document retrieval process consisted of mainly looking at the content of the documents without any external influences and links. The Internet explosion has single-handedly created the race to invent the "smartest" search engine that is able to find the "diamonds in the rough. The diamonds being the truly valuable web content that is relevant to user queries, and the rough being the junky low quality deceptive web pages that try to mislead the search engines. Organizing the billions of web pages and its content into meaningful, relevant well sorted search results is an immense task even for Google.

Think of search engines as the gate keepers for content on the web. As chief editors, it's the search engines job to retrieve the most suitable web pages in response to a user query. The search engines make money by displaying ads next to the natural search results returned. This is why their search relevancy is the key to their survival. The more relevant the search results are, the more people will make them their favorite search tools. In order to keep their search results relevant, the search engines have to ensure there is a level playing field among websites. They do this by frequently tweaking their algorithms to find bad apples that don't play by the rules.

The main advantage of web marketing.

The main advantages of web marketing is that your site can get visitors from the internet 365 days a year without any cost to you other than your own hosting costs. It's like getting a full page add in the Yellow Pages under the category of your choice indefinitely.

Although getting free visitor traffic from the internet is a very cost effective way to drive targeted traffic to your site, it's not without learning curve. The complexity and difficulty of learning web marketing can be directly traced back to the search engines themselves. Search engines are in the difficult position of trying to reveal as little as possible about the inner workings of their technology to the public, yet they need webmasters like you and me to provide them with the website's that provide the search result in response to the millions of search queries.

Will your website rank well?

Longevity on the web is important, and the search engines reward websites that have a few years under their belts. It's not to say your website has no chance of ranking well if it's only a few months old, but older websites have the staying power many younger competitors just can't match, especially on Google.

Beside the age factor, there are more than a dozen search engine ranking factors that your website may not have incorporated into its pages.

There is a huge difference in time and effort needed to climb to the top of the search results, and it all depends on the keyword phrases you want your visitors to find you by. Attaining top ranking on the search engines depends on the competitiveness of the keyword terms you are targeting. Meaning, the fewer web pages competing for the same terms the higher your chances are of succeeding.

Do not let this discourage you because the search engines rankings are not written in stone, and even the number one website can be unseated with persistent effort and patience.

Your website's age and the Google Sandbox

The Google "Sandbox" is a phenomenon that was first observed in 2003 and ever since we can see evidence of new sites with commercial focus competing for highly popular keyword phrases are ranked artificially low for a period of between 6-12 month depending on the market segment and specific keywords. The theory behind the Google "Sandbox" is Google's attempt to control newly build spam websites and link farms from rising to the top of the search results in a short amount of time.

Achieving high natural search engine ranking is dependent on two main factors....

On-page optimization can be described as the tweaking and tuning of web pages and the website as a whole to achieve a unified keyword theme and an easy to navigate structure. On-page factors can be improved by incorporating keywords into the title tags, body content, and internal navigational links. The actual content of the site falls into the on-page optimization category, and although the on-page factors may contribute less to the overall ranking score, the content will make or break the off-page factors since high quality content will always attract more external links.

Off-page ranking factors are commonly known as link popularity which means, how many links are pointing to your site. While optimizing your web pages is an important step, today's modern search engine algorithms mostly rely on external ranking factors such inbound links pointing to a website. These external links are counted as votes for your websites popularity and quality. You can improve your websites link popularity by acquiring relevant high quality links from many different sources. Some of these source include links from blogs, reciprocal link partners, one-way links, e-zine article links, directory links, government, or trade associations links. Links from press releases or industry news articles are also excellent sources of links.

The Birth Of Web 2.0 Search engines recently started to count links in their ranking algorithms community driven sites such as Technorati, YouTube, Delicious, Stumble Upon and Bloglines. Links from these social websites are given a fair amount of weight because the personal preference of users participating in a particular community is a good indication of a site's value which simply can't be determined by a computer based algorithm. The term often used to describe the propagation of news about a site's value on social websites is called Viral Marketing. Viral marketing is the new traffic generation source for webmasters and we'll be covered in the Social Marketing Web 2.0 section.

New Web Marketing Secrets

Buy an established domain name.Old well established domains still dominate the top results. If you don't already own a domain that has been online for a few years you can always find one. You would be amazed how many people are willing to sell their 4-5 year old domains for next to nothing. But don't go to domain brokers to find good deals on old domains. You need to do your own research the old fashioned way. Page through the search results using your target keywords starting at the 4th or 5th page or maybe even higher. Install the SEO Firefox extension and enable the website's age information. When you find a site that is at least two years old and the information looks a little dated, look up the contact info and send an email to make an offer.

Links from relevant high Google Page Rank sites can give a huge boost to your sites' ranking. These are types of links Google don't want you to buy, but in reality without putting some money down you will very rarely get a PR 7 or 8 link without some serious cash changing hands. Let's face it, if your site brand new and commercial in nature, nobody will do you a favor and give you something for nothing. Understand that you either need cash, time and talent to build links to your site.

Article and directory submissions. Your site needs some sources of inbound links, whether it is editorial links from your peers in your industry or links to a great new tool you have put on your site. The bottom line is one-way inbound links from relevant sites wins the day.

Social media is gaining ground, so you better be sociable too. A link from Bloglines, Technorati, Delicious, Blogpulse, IceRocket or Stumble Upon is the web community's way of saying your site is worth checking out. In recent years the search engines started to rely on the collective opinion of social community websites to supplement and aid the relevancy of their machine based search algorithms. This trend will most likely continue and gain even more momentum in the up coming years.

Conclusion

Web marketing can take your website to the next level of success providing you do your homework and spend the necessary time learning as much as you can about safe and effective web marketing techniques. Website marketing is not hard, but it's very detailed. This book will help to clear up any misconception you may have about your website's potential and the work that lies ahead of you.

Next: Step 1 - How Will Your Customers Find You?