Learn Internet Marketing

Learn Internet Marketing, a quick start internet marketing guide.

Internet Marketing can be an imtimidating business; But if you know how to correctly market a website online you can do anything with that knowledge...

   Learning Internet Marketing...

There are hundreds of different places I could start this (meta tags, search engine optimization, submission, etc.) but lets first understand the basic premise behind Internet Marketing.

You have a great looking website.
Every you sees it is impressed.
But without marketing, it is useless.

The theory,If you build it, they shall come. Does not quite work when it comes to the Internet! So how does one go about getting noticed?

Before anything marketing takes place, you must first have a fully completed website (with many pages of content).
 

Content is King

I reccomend having atleast 20-25 pages of content before ever taking your first step in the Internet Marketing world. Develop content, write interesting articles, make your website USEFUL!!

Ease of Use

Now that you have all your content created, you must make it easy to naviagate for both your user and SEARCH ENGINES! Try to build it in a hierarchy starting from your main page, branching off into categories, then to your main pages of content. For example, if you had a website about FOOTBALL, you could stem that off into a TEAMS category. From there you could either link to content pages for each individual team, or if you have alot of pages of content, then you could break it into another sub-category of PLAYERS... and then list your content pages. This will make it both easy for your users, and for search engine spiders to naviagate.

Once you have your a COMPLETED website, it is time to move on to Search Engine Optimization. Search engine optimization is basically taking a normal website, and making it *search engine friendly*. How is this done?

OPTIMIZATION

This is probably the most important aspect of all Internet Marketing... Search engines are your best friends when it comes to increasing traffic, so you want to make your website look its best for them. When I say, *look its best*, that has nothing to do with how the website looks to your users... instead it is how the back-end of your site (code) looks when a search engine spider comes to view it. First of all, you should have META TAGS in place on each of your pages... Im not going to get into meta tags here, as I have written articles specifically about meta tags. You just need to have three meta tags: Keywords, Description, and the Robots tag.

Internet Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization go hand and hand. You must know what you are targeting before implementing any of these strategies. Targeting and selecting your keywords is part of the optimization process, so Ill explain that next.

 

Targeted Keywords

Optimization, and selecting your targeted Keywords are two parts of a whole in Internet Marketing. You could fully optimize your entire website, but if you dont select good keywords to use in optimization, then your efforts are wasted.

If you are in a crowded industry, or if you have many competing websites, you should consider targeting less broad keywords, and more specific keywords. For example: if you sold computers, it may not be wise to target keywords like (Computers, Personal Computers, PC, Desktop, Labtop). There is no use in targeting impossible keywords. In this example, it would be nearly impossible to attain top 10 rankings for the above mentioned keywords because they are far too broad.

Instead put yourself in the shoes of one of your customers, who is at a search engine searching for your kind of products / services. What are they most likely to type in?

Think about that for each individual page of content you have, and select 5-7 keywords for each page you have. (and try not to reuse the same keywords on different pages).

 

Internet Marketing Implementation

At this point you should have a fully completed website, with many pages of content, with an easy to use naviagation, and selected 5-7 targeted keywords for each of your pages. Now its time to make it happen.

Lets look at one of your pages now... Ill use *Search Engine Optimization* as my example page.
First of all, you should name each file with either your number one targeted keyword, or the title. So for this example, I would save the file with a filename: *search_engine_optimization.html* (separated by - OR _ characters).

The web page title, and filename are the two most important factors. For the title, you want to again use your number one targeted keyword at the beginning, followed by a logical sentence describing the page. If you can work in 2-3 keywords, do so, but make sure it makes sense before anything else.

You should already have meta tags, so Ill skip that step, and move onto your HEADINGS (H1, H2, H3 and H4 HTML tags). These tags are intended for the heading(s) of your topics, and most search engines give them high priority. Using these tags will increase the size of the text in each of them, so use them sparingly. If you used your number one keyword in your title and filename, then use your #2-4 keywords inside these tags. (you do not have to use these tags, but search engines like them).

Moving on to the actual content of your website...
Try to implement your keywords throughout the content, without sacrificing readability. Make sure it never appears that you are simply listing keywords, always integrate them into logical sentences.

When you have all of your targeted keywords implemented in your content, then it is sometimes a good idea to place a few of them in BOLD or ITALICS... this sets them apart from the rest of the text when a search engine spider comes to look at your site.

After that, you are pretty much finished...
The last part is inter-linking all your pages of content together. You should use the number one keyword of the page you are linking to for the anchor text(visible portion) of each link. This also adds quite a bit of *points*.

That is the gist of it, now all you have to do is submit the your website to the search engines... and wait for the spiders to come get it... patience! :)