Internet marketing is one of the fastest-growing ways to conduct business in the world today due to its availability and accessibility to millions of people across the globe. Many businesses feel the need to be online, however many of them may not fully understand the importance of a well. Internet marketing isn’t simply about putting your brochures in electronic form on the internet. A common mistake that a business makes — because they just want to be online quickly — is to treat the internet simply as an advertising medium.
If you own or work for a business that is looking to expand its reach to a wider audience in 2014, internet marketing is the most important thing to add to your list of things to do. Internet marketing is different from traditional media such as print, TV and radio advertising and requires a different approach. The basics of internet marketing is not hard to master, and begins from a foundation that that be divided into a few categories, namely Search Engine Optimization, Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing.
When people think of online marketing, search Engine Optimization – or SEO in short – is usually the first thing that comes to mind. Search is one of the primary ways in which a potential customer would find your business online, because it has become so easy to look online for the answers.
Have you ever wondered how certain websites appear on top in search results? Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! use tools called “crawlers” that go through each and every page on the internet to add into their huge database, that is then referenced when someone enters a search query into a search engine. Think of search engines as “answer machines”. When someone looks for something online, search engines scour their database consisting of billions of documents and then return results that are relevant and useful to the searcher’s query, and also ranks those results in order of perceived usefulness. It is both the “relevance” and “importance” that the process of search engine optimization is meant to influence.
This means that it is important to insert relevant keywords and popular searches into your website so that the content you have will come up in searches related to your business, product or service. An SEO strategy will include factors like keyword placement and keyword density. Beware, though, of inserting too many keywords as search engines are also now smart enough to know when a website is trying to manipulate its search results! When a search engine detects that, it will simply ignore that website altogether.
When considering relevant keywords and content for your website, think about your users first and foremost and not for search engines. Do not try to present content that is different to what you are trying to sell online, simply to try to come up first in search engine results. Doing that will not only confuse your users but also be frustrating for users who click onto your website and not find exactly what they are looking for. Create useful, informational content on your website and write pages that accurately describe your content.
Providing a rich experience to your users should be one of the objectives of internet marketing. Before starting on any internet marketing, develop measureable goals and make them in line with your business objectives to ensure that everything you do online integrates with your company strategy. This then feeds your online strategy and plan. Once you have a plan, keeping up with the rapid changes of Internet marketing is essential in making sure that you succeed online.
About the Author: Joshua Turner is a writer who creates informative articles in relation to business. In this article, he offers marketing tips for 2014 and aims to encourage further study with an online masters organizational development.
