Hi If you really want to take your online business to a successful level then your internet marketing needs to be well thought through, well executed and planned out.
With the right internet marketing strategies you’ll expand your customer base and push your company’s marketing goals into overdrive, bringing you the numbers you want much faster.But the bottom line and the name of the game is traffic. The two ways to get traffic to your websites are to build back links and raise your ranking in the search engines, so today I’ll talk about getting your ranking up through SEO , then tomorrow we’ll cover back links, blogging and articles – so this is what you need to plan for, however remember to be flexible
Plan out Your Strategy BUT Be Flexible
Having a plan & making it work can sometimes be 2 different things. As an example we as a family are currently in ‘choosing a university’ mode for my 17 year old daughter. Now for many of you who may have been through this process you’ll know its one that starts soon after going into higher education here in the UK.
So yep we got a plan, a wish-list of where she believed she’d like to go dependant on grades . But then results from 1st year exams hit, tears of frustration and ‘what am I going to do?’ mode kicks in. So we go back, revise the prospective list of universities in light of results.
OK all’s good but then we have a change of Government with a massively radical overhaul of the education system principally allowing universities to as much as treble their fees – end result this year, the year my daughter should go to uni is the last year for the old fees – so yes you’ve guessed it, competition is probably the fiercest its been for many, many years.
So once again we are back at the drawing board re-thinking our strategy – so this just illustrates the need for flexibility in your planning. The internet changes all the time, Google change their methods – you have to be prepared for these things and be flexible to change your marketing strategies as needs be.
Question – I Understand But How do I Achieve That ?
Answer – Successful SEO
SEO (or search engine optimization) is much simpler than most people imagine. It simply means targeting certain keywords. These are search terms that people are entering into search engines like Google and Yahoo. The idea is to choose terms that are relevant to your business and also get a good amount of traffic. With a little research, you can find these search terms, and optimize your content by using them in your blog posts, articles and other materials.
Don’t Abuse the Search Engines
SEO has changed a bit in the last few years. First of all, the search engines have started ignoring content that is “keyword stuffed” This means that you’ve got your keyword splattered all over the place and it looks to anyone with half a brain like you’ve just stuffed them in where they obviously don’t belong – the search engines will clobber you.
These days, we have to use keywords tastefully. Don’t overstuff! Its all about keywords appearing naturally within the flow of the post or article
Another way things have changed is that there’s more competition. Simple one- or two-word phrases are getting harder to rank highly for in the search engines. To overcome this obstacle, you now need to be targeting long tail keywords that may be in some instances almost a sentence long. For example, if you’ve got a mechanic’s garage, you might target “how do I change my oil” instead of the simpler “oil change” which already has too much competition.
OK that’s it for this post, tomorrow I’ll cover several other strategies to ‘market’ your online business and these activities are pretty straight forward, will grow your traffic over time, so watch out for my post tomorrow.
Tony Phelps
