The well known belief held by many start-up internet businesses ? ?Build it and they will come? ? has been proven false over and again. People don?t just stumble onto your site just as they don?t walk into your shop located in the middle of the Australian Outback. This is where a small but generally poorly understood concept comes in: marketing.
When starting an online business one of the most important aspects of your business plan should be your marketing budget. Ironically this is often the one thing that is left out. This is like going to war without you rifle.
Marketing a website is a complex science. It is a billion dollar industry, with hundreds of experts saying different things. As the online marketing field is not such an old and well established field as off-line marketing, it has become a free-for all with many fly-by-night ?experts?, with little structure and few accepted standards. This is the reason any person starting an online business should make sure they know the basics of website marketing.
Contrary to common belief there are a number of different marketing avenues for an online business. In order to achieve maximum results with your site it is essential that all these areas are covered well.
On-site SEO
This is the most obvious place to start. A large part of on-site SEO is related to the way the site is built. On-site SEO includes good Title tags Nomar Mazara Rangers Jersey , good Meta descriptions for your pages, good meta keywords and good keywords in your content. If you make use of plain HTML, this is easy to achieve as you only have to edit each page to have the right meta data and content.
If you are making use of a CMS (content management system, like Joomla Shin-Soo Choo Rangers Jersey , Drupal, Wordpress), or a dynamic site (a site that generates its content from a database), it becomes a bit more complicated. These sites generate dynamic URL?s (www.yoursiteindex.php?com_some_parameters=1234). Search engines can make no conclusions regarding the content of those URL?s therefore they do not attach much value to them. If you have a dynamic site it is crucial that you make use of plugins that rewrite your URL?s to static URL?s Delino DeShields Rangers Jersey , or you make use of a .htaccess mode rewrite.
One you have achieved all this, your main focus should be on generating large amounts of unique content ? search engines love this. Once they realise you are updating your site regularly, they will start to crawl it more frequently, resulting in more of your pages being indexed and more people finding your site.
There are numerous other techniques that the search engines do not endorse. These are termed ?black-hat? techniques Russell Wilson Rangers Jersey , and their object is to fool the search engines into giving your site an artificially high ranking. We do not recommend using these tactics, as you really need to know what you are doing, and any discovery of these techniques by the search engines will result in a possible ban from the engine.
Off-site SEO
On-site SEO comprises of about 10% of your total SEO effort. The remaining 90% involves the really hard work ? building connections and links to your site. In the past you could get great pagerank by submitting your site to thousands of directories and buying a couple of hundred links. However search engines, and Google in particular Elvis Andrus Rangers Jersey , have taken a stand against paid links and large directories. Their reasoning is that with paid links there is no quality requirement for the link ? as long as the site pays they?ll get a link, no matter how bad or spammy the site. With directories they reasoned that if there is no editorial input into the listings, any spammy site will be listed in the directory. This has made it much harder to get good links and pagerank for a site. Recently the concept of ?link baiting? has evolved. This involves writing content of such a good quality or of such interest that people link to it voluntarily. Together with this the use of social book marking has helped people to rate articles, resulting in the best articles reaching the most users Ferguson Jenkins Rangers Jersey , and being linked to the most.
Link building is a major undertaking, involving building relationships with other sites and making use of good content to obtain links. This can also take a considerable amount of time.
Online brand building
Online brand building links closely to off-site SEO. However where off-site SEO focuses on getting links to your site to increase your site?s ranking, online brand building is more focussed on establishing your site?s brand than on getting your site to rank well. A way to illustrate this is that when your brand is so recognisable, that people type it into their browser address bar Hunter Pence Rangers Jersey , you know you have build a successful online brand, effectively cutting out the search engine. You rely less on your page ranking well in the search engines.
Building your brand online involves interaction with the online community through blogs, forums and social media sites. You have to build a reputation for yourself and your site, and people have to start recognising that you offer value and are an authority in your field. This can take a long time Asdrubal Cabrera Rangers Jersey , and involves building sincere relationships online.