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, 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, 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.yoursite.com/index.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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, and involves building sincere relationships online.
Paid traffic
Another important marketing angle to cover is paid traffic. This is also termed pay-per-click (PPC). The best known PPC system is Google’s Adsense system. This is the ads you see on websites under the heading Ads by Google. With this system you pay for every click on your ad. Your ads are displayed in Google search results (right at the top and on the right, termed sponsored links), and on sites displaying Google ads. Through analysis it has been determined that people tend to ignore these ads while searching for information, while clicking on them when searching for a product or a service to use. These ads are also a great way for new websites to gain exposure, because even if somebody doesn’t click on your ad, they are still displayed and this helps build your brand. Paid traffic should be an integral part of you marketing strategy, as it has been proven that having a high natural ranking as well as occupying a high listing on the sponsored links results in the most traffic.
Offline marketing
The last field to cover (and one that is frequently neglected by site owners) is offline marketing. This can be an extremely powerful marketing channel. It is becoming more and more apparent that big sites are spending increasing amounts of money on offline marketing. Websites are being marketed in print advertising, billboards, television ads, and even endorsements by sportspeople and actors.
Offline marketing doesn’t have to cost a fortune, and making use of good Gorilla marketing techniques can boost your site’s image. To start off, tell all your friends and family about your site, and ask them to spread the word. Print business card for yourself with your site’s URL on. Print and wear shirts with your site on, and hand out those shirts to anyone willing to wear one. Print stickers and stick them wherever your can. You can really be creative with this.
Conclusion
Internet marketing has become a massive industry – and one that is very competitive. These days everyone has a webpage, and it has become a war for traffic. So start marketing your site, and persist with it. It might take some time, but if you keep on doing the right things, like cream, you’ll rise to the top.
