Free Side of Internet Marketing

Do you prefer the free side or the paid side of web site advertising marketing? Your paid choices are buying search engine ads such as on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and a list of others, or purchasing banner ads on websites that relate to your market. Alternatives include solo ads to ezine lists, paid submissions to press release sites and business directories, and of course buying leads. I prefer the free side of web site marketing. It may not involve money, or at least much less of it, but it does involve some work.

The free side of marketing online, through search engine traffic, consists of optimizing my website for the search engines to reward it with a high search engine ranking, and supporting that with search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. A website can get a large amount of traffic from the search engines because that is where people go to look for information about a product or service. When the website is in the top three or four spots on the first page of Google and other search engines, it can enjoy great traffic.

All of this searching and ranking centers around keywords. Key words are phrases are what people type into Google and other search engines when they are looking for information. The search engines find websites to return search results for people. The way they find the websites is through the keywords the website uses on their pages. The work involved on this free side of internet advertising, also called natural or organic, is all centered around optimizing the website for both the search engines and the visitors they will send. The goal is to make the website the authority in its market and then search engines will bestow their respect, and people will be happy with the information they find there.

We can not say too much about the importance of thorough keyword research in web site advertising marketing. Finding the best words that people are searching for when they want information about your website’s product or service is key to getting the traffic you are after. Once the keywords are established, and it is advised to continue to look for good keywords, the information in the code behind the website will need structured properly. Search engines look for certain criteria when they come to visit a website. They want to see that the title matches up with the content of the website, and they like to see keywords in the title and even in the website url. They look for a meta description that is relevant to the content of the website and includes keywords. They look for h1/h2 tags which support the overall content of the website.

The content for the web site advertising marketing should be valuable. It can consist of educational, enlightening, or entertaining information. It is best to add fresh content regularly since it is appealing to both the reader and the search engines. There are many strategies that can be utilized for maintaining the content on a website, including all of its pages. A site map is valuable to the navigation of a website, and it should not be challenging for a visitor or the search engine to move around the website. Linking is another aspect the search engines regard in a very important way. External links with keywords as anchors back to the website are very valuable. Also, the source of those incoming links and their popularity on the internet are evaluated by the search engines.

So we know that optimizing a website is based on the search engine queries that the website wants to rank for so that it can get a share of the traffic that is searching for those keywords. It may sound simple enough, but when you consider the competition that might exist for the same keywords, the process can become quite a challenge. It is important to lay out an SEO plan and to stay consistent with implementing the plan. Ongoing work such as creating new keyword-rich content, and continuous link building, is essential for getting to the first page of Google and other search engines, and staying there. There are tools that help us find the number of searches per month for a given key word or phrase. We can test this with statistics to back up our research.

If your online marketing includes the free side of web marketing, you now have an idea of what you will need to target in order to get the traffic that you want to go to your website. You can combine key words and phrases that you carefully research until you get the numbers of searches that you desire. You can work to get those top spots in the search engines so that you secure the majority of the traffic you know is generated with your keywords. You can build your website to an authority site that people get to know, like, and trust. This is the way that you turn traffic into new business and repeat business. It is how you find success on the free side of internet marketing.