Internet Marketing 101

Let me ask you a question? Are you in sales? Well, if you're in business then you're in sales. The only question is how you market your products or services.

Let's begin with online marketing. The best way to direct people looking for your products to your website is through search engines. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo allow people to search the entire internet by keyword or phrase for websites that are relevant to those words and phrases.

When users search online through search engines for a word or phrase, they will not normally scroll past the first 20 to find what they are looking for. Which means that if you are not on the first page or two of the results you should not expect to receive any traffic from the search engines.

In order to optimize your website to receive high rankings you will want to focus on two areas.

The first area is content. When it comes to search engine rankings content is king. Content is defined as the words on your webpage. Not only what you can see but also the invisible words that only the search engines can see. (known as meta tags)

How will you know what words to put on your site? A good page of content will have 2 - 300 words on it with about 3 - 5 % of them being "The phrase that pays". There's three criteria that need to be met for a good "phrase that pays".

The first is that it accurately describes your product or service that you are offering.

Secondly, are people actually typing that exact phrase into the search engines? You can use the search term selection tool link on the right to find out.

When you find a phrase that describes your product and people are using it then type it in Yahoo Search and see how many results it pulls up. If that number is over 2 million then just starting out you will find it hard to receive high rankings.

Less than 2 million and you have a phrase that pays. Make sure that it is saturated on your webpage between 3 - 5% of the content and you are on your way.

If content is king then linking is queen. Linking is when other websites put a link on their site to yours. Each link is like a vote. The more votes you get the higher up the rankings you go.

Here are several ideas to get links to your site. You can pay for them with online banners and advertising. You can trade other websites for a link to their site in return. There are also plenty of other free ways to get links coming to your site on the internet if you search for them.

As you go build your business this week remember the great statesman Benjamin Franklins words, "Energy and persistence conquer all things"