1. Search Engine Marketing and Pay Per Click
The vast majority of users of the Internet use search engines to find websites. By setting up and managing a pay-per-click advertising campaign on Google Adwords, Microsoft Bing’s Ad Centre or other pay-per-click advertising systems, you can instantly increase traffic to your website.
In brief, search marketing allows you to manage a paid advertising campaign that displays your ads on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) triggered by search terms relevant to your website, products, or services and in most cases you pay a bid amount set by you for each click.
Google Adwords goes beyond displaying text ads on its SERPs, however. You can also have your ads displayed in several formats on third party affiliate websites. This extends your reach considerably and best of all, you have far more control over how and where your ads are shown than a lot of other advertising methods.
If you simply want to get traffic, this can be easily accomplished with a PPC campaign, especially if money is no object. The more difficult part is getting targeted traffic that brings visitors that are ready to buy your products or services.
2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Again, those searching for websites tend to use a search engine to achieve that end. Search Engine Optimisation is the process of getting your website to rank highly (preferably appearing on the first page) of the SERPs organically, rather than in the sponsored (paid) results. The traffic that comes from being found organically on Google can be huge if you can be found for the most popular search terms related to your business. Being found for long-tail search terms that have four or more words can be relatively easy compared to single or two word search terms that are very competitive. The long-tail search terms can also more readily convert visitors to customers, but will typically bring less traffic.
While SEO is one of the best methods of traffic generation as far as value for money goes, it is widely misunderstood. Many website owners believe that SEO “gurus” will simply add some magic code to “trick” the search engines into favouring their website over the competition. The fact is that there are many aspects to consider when optimising a website, many of which are not strictly found in the website’s code. Link popularity and website copy have a lot to do with it as well. Anyone wanting to optimise their own website will find that unless their business sits within a unique niche, obtaining a first page organic result on Google requires a lot of knowledge and a lot of work.
3. Social Bookmarking
Anyone in marketing will tell you that word of mouth is absolute gold for your business. Word of mouth is not only cheap; it’s also very, very effective. This is no less true on the Internet. So how can you encourage word of mouth right from your website? The answer is social bookmarks.
Social bookmarks are buttons or icons that visitors can click in order to share your website link on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace to name a few major players. Investment in having these social buttons installed on your website is well worth while for the value of the referrals gained from people sharing your links and recommending your website to friends.
At the very least, have a Facebook “recommend” or “like” button. These buttons are easy to set up and easy for visitors to use. The more people that use the bookmarking buttons, the more referrals you are likely to get to your website.
4. Engage in Social Media
Its one thing to passively provide the tools on your website to share your content with friends and co-workers, but you can take it to the next level by actively using Social Media to engage the public with your messages. The main social networking sites to get involved in are Facebook and Twitter. With Facebook recently tallying 500 million members, the potential for reaching an audience here is hard to ignore. Set up a Facebook page and keep it interesting and informative. Post special offers and company news. Set up competitions and reward programs and post them too. Don’t be pushy or use aggressive tactics on these sites as this will only alienate your would-be customers.
5. Partner With Other Websites
They say “no man is an island.” This is very much true for websites. The World Wide Web is based on interconnecting servers full of web pages. If no website linked to other websites, there would be no World Wide Web. Links are the stuff that binds the web together, get it?
If a website is relevant to yours and useful (not a direct competitor), you should put a link to them. In turn, encourage other websites to link to you. Submit your site to web directories. Links are like roads to your website. The more that exist, the bigger the chance your website will generate traffic.
There are many ways to get links, but the best way is to create what SEO professionals call “link bait.” This is basically a term for really useful content that people will want to link to. This could be a well written article or blog entry, pictures or video content.
Sustained Marketing Is Essential
Sounds like a lot of work doesn’t it? Truth be told, success is never a walk in the park. It takes hard work to turn your website in to marketing machine. Luckily, there are experts whose experience with website promotion can be leveraged to guide you and carry the workload required to effective spread the word and give your website the visibility it deserves on the Internet. Taking your businesses rightful place on the Internet is more than just “submitting” your website to Google and hoping for the best.
Glossary of Terms SEM – Search Engine Marketing
PPC – Pay Per Click
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
SERP – Search Engine Results Page
Professional SEO and Internet Marketing
If you would like to receive a 1 hour consultation discussing your website and what can be done to promote your website in the major search engines, how to get ranked on the first page of Google and how to otherwise effectively promote your website online to get maximum exposure on a budget, then contact the SEO experts in Melbourne.
Call us today!
Our Proven Results
1st page position in Google for
1st page position in Google for
1st page position in Google for
1st page position in Google for
1st page position in Google for
1st page position in Google for
1st page position in Google for
Professional SEO Blog
