Websites And The Tools You Can Use

Creating a great website and promoting your business via search engine optimisation and social medias can be really interesting. Through my experience in managine websites online, I have realise that its a painstaking learning process to start and market and online business.

I love social media marketing. It's an extension of search engine optimisation and represents a powerful medium - us. I hope that by sharing my journey of discovering SEO and how it works you can shorten your own learning curve.

I am not a slick, savvy e-marketer, but I have learned by eavesdropping, experimenting, googgling, reading and mostly participating in blogs and forums. As I have struggled past the first few mile markers on this apparently endless path, I've frequented wished someone could have guided me. I was looking for a simple, step-by-step, everyday language guidance. So, I have decided to leave a few of those trail markers on my blog to help my readers.

First, a few quick definitions (according to Wikipedia):

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - is the practice of maximizing the volume or quality of traffic to a web site (such as a blog) from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing ("SEM") which may deal with paid inclusion. The theory is that the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence. As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
  
• Social Media Marketing (SMM) - is a recent component of organizations' integrated marketing communications plans. Integrated marketing communications is a principle organizations follow to connect with their targeted markets. Integrated marketing communications coordinates the elements of the promotional mix—advertising, personal selling, public relations, publicity, direct marketing, and sales promotion—to produce a customer focused message.[1]  In the traditional marketing communications model, the content, frequency, timing, and medium of communications by the organization is in collaboration with an external agent, i.e. advertising agencies, marketing research firms, and public relations firms.[2]  However, the growth of social media has impacted the way organizations communicate with their customers. In the emergence of Web 2.0, the internet provides a set of tools that allow people to build social and business connections, share information and collaborate on projects online.[3]

• Viral Marketing - The buzzwords  viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing  techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological  and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.[1]  Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages.

• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites  by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of search engine optimization, paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.[1][2]. Usage of the term "search engine marketing" has been inconsistent. The trade association Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) includes search engine optimization (SEO), and SEO is also included in the industry definitions of SEM by Forrester Research, eMarketer, Search Engine Watch, and industry expert Danny Sullivan.[3]. However, the New York Times restricts the definition to 'the practice of buying paid search listings'.[4][5]

OK, I can already imagine the old-school, traditional marketers out there shaking their heads. Right, why should we care about social media like Facebook and Blogs? Because according to Social Media Statistics, more than 50 million visitors have logged into Facebook just end of last year. In early this year, more than 10 billion photos appeared on Facebook and photo traffic peaked at more than 300,000 images served per second. So you see now why a little SMM might be a very good idea?

I asked myself, "If I am a customer in search of my product/services, how would I find me?" I started searching Google and there I was. Seeing me on Google was a strange and wonderful experience. Unfortunately, I appeared nowhere near the top of the list and people rarely click beyond the second page of the Google listings. So how to work my way up to the top of the charts?

SEO my friends, SEO. Listening to conversations with my classmates (who mind you are all top of the notch marketers)..I hear "SEO, the strategies, tactics and techniques for driving our business to to tp of the search engines' list".

Honestly, SEO is so simple its almost frightening. Always use a keyword-rich domain where possible. Place your keywords in the top portion of you page and iclude them in th the title of the page. Then, use variations of the keyword phrase naturally through the copy.

Drive more traffic to your site. I installed site meter web analytics on my new website. Then, I set the site meter to e-mail me each week, sending me detailed reports about my visitors, their locations and what they'd viewed.

Blog about your passion, and do it consistently. I discovered Blogger.com, a site owned by Google. Setting up my blog there, I found how frighteningly easy it was to establish a second web presence--three clicks and I was there.  Following the advice of Problogger, I knew I needed to update frequently and stay consistent. I began updating the blog continuously and developed a great little network of loyal readers who became regular visitors. The counters on my site meter increased, and I saw more visitors per day and a longer stay for each visit.

Get connected through social media sites. Everyone in my family has a Facebook, MySpace or Twitter page. From what I've seen, I'd bet even dogs are setting up "walls" on Facebook and are using them to meet French Poodles. Heck when I was a dog owner, I set up a profile for Mikey in Dogbook, in fact I participated in several forums and blogs as Mikey. 

Facebook is more than a big wave; it's an internet tsunami--in a good way. Most important, Facebook gave me a tool for connecting to old friends, and friends of friends, and friends of their friends who used to be friends. You get the idea. A couple of my Facebook pals had downloaded its mobile application to their PDAs, and they got text messages each time I put up a post on my page. So, I added Facebook posts to my daily to-do list. Right after I blog, I post something on Twitter and Facebook. They both alert my multiple networks that there's something exciting happening in my world.

Stay in Touch. Be helpful, and give simple but useful answers. Twitter asks you simply, "What are you doing?"  I keep things fresh at the website and Twitter when I can. Twitter also helps me begin word-of-mouth promotions--the internet equivalent of whispering, "Hey, have you heard . . . ?"

Update or redesign your original website to include tantalizing new features. The word-of-mouth concept posed a tiny little conundrum: Whispering campaigns require salacious little secrets. If there's no sensational, useful content that's helpful or interesting, there's really no point in whispering. Nobody wants to know that you just had lunch. Therefore, I found myself scratching my head and wondering how to create something interesting and useful. For me, video was the answer, and a simple one, too. Try animoto.com, and you'll see what I mean about video creation being easy. You can upload it directly to YouTube, adding more content to your channel; JingProject.com and ScreenToaster.com are a little more work, but very powerful. They're tools to create new videos of your desktop tutorials, presentations and personal videos.

Obviously, the internet gives us a lot more tools for inviting and engaging traffic, but all our technological sophistication must not carry us too far away from the basics: People still want good products at fair prices, delivered by trustworthy and charming characters who know their stuff and how it works.