Most people confuse Internet marketing with Internet advertising, courtesy of the Wikipedia, if I do say so myself. Well let us break it down using conventional definitions applied to the real world as against the virtual world of the Internet. Internet marketing is the systematic planning, implementation and control of business activities with the ultimate goal of selling your products and services. Internet advertising, on the other hand, is but a single part of Internet marketing. To put it humorously, Internet marketing is like saying “We are an excellent company” while Internet advertising is saying the same sentence three more times in three different web sites. Regardless how you view these two virtual business tools, Anything Internet can help you achieve maximum results with minimum costs. They will conduct online sales and promotions, mainly through paid advertising using Google Adwords, Yahoo’s Overture and other similar programs. In addition, they will perform support services like keyword research, competitor analysis, and help you with your Internet advertising materials. At Anything Internet, you have a reliable partner that will assist you in all the aspects of the Internet marketing strategy you want to implement.

Anything Internet can help you maximize the advantages of Internet marketing and its adjunct, Internet advertising. When compared to offline marketing, Internet marketing is cheaper simply because you have a wider audience (most homes have personal computers hooked up to the Internet nowadays) while utilizing a small pie out of your marketing budget. You can then reallocate your savings to other uses, like improvements on the products and services. With Internet marketing, you can specifically target your niche by using specific keywords; your Internet advertising modules can be designed in such a way that you reach your target market in the fastest way possible and you get your messages across in the clearest way possible.

Anent thereto, Internet advertising has more chances of reaching its target market by using behavioral targeting methods rather than demographic targeting methods. At Anything Internet, they will help you achieve behavioral targeting with their search engine optimization feature. Furthermore, since Anything Internet provides for monitoring and evaluation mechanisms for your preferred Internet marketing strategies, you can make appropriate changes to your marketing mix; Anything Internet will provide you with advertising results courtesy of the immediate tracking feature inherent in Internet advertising and they will make informed recommendations based on these advertising results, among other factors.

Anything Internet can even help you reach more of your target market through affiliate marketing. This is just like having sales agents working for you but without the hassle of maintaining employment records and paying salaries and benefits even when your employees do not meet their performance targets. In this arrangement, you pay others to sell your products and services, with the advantage that you pay them a commission only on completed sales and at your own commission rates. Anything Internet will assist you in setting up your affiliate marketing system from your banner ads to the commission terms. You can use this system as an integral part of your Internet marketing mix.

Search Engine Optimization Demystified

Part 1 – The Players Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Altavista, MSN Search, and others, have become indispensable as personal and business tools for finding what we all need on the World Wide Web. As web site owners, we know that to take advantage of this reality we must optimize our web sites for search engines. However, there is a lot of confusion, misunderstanding, myth, and even fraud in this area. To demystify this topic, and provide the tools to make intelligent, well-informed decisions for our web sites, it is useful to identify the main players, understand how search engines actually work and follow the money. By understanding the motives involved, one can get a big picture understanding of the issues. In business there is no bigger motivator than money.

There are two main players in the search engine optimization field – the Search Engine companies (like Google), and the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies (they are numerous, no big names stand out).

Search Engine Companies:How do search engine companies (Google) make their money?Primarily with paid advertising.Why would advertisers use a search engine’s web site to promote their product?Eyeballs… lots of them!How does a search engine company get those eyeballs?By providing a tool (the search facility) that works really well, giving reliable, useful, relevant, and current results on keyword searches. It is in the best interest of a Search Engine company to index as many sites as possible, as often as possible, and to have a ranking mechanism that will provide accurate results for key word searches on those web sites.

This bears repeating: yes Search Engines want to list your site in their index! Furthermore, they want to rank it as accurately as possible. There is no need to trick the search engines into finding or ranking your web site. In fact, several practices commonly employed to fool search engines into ranking a site higher than it should be can have quite the opposite result. Search Engine companies actively research such techniques and develop ways to counter them in the interests of maintaining the accuracy and integrity of their search results. So if the Search Engine companies want to rank your site well, why does getting good results seem so difficult and mysterious?

There are three major reasons for this: The exact ranking algorithm used by Search Engine companies is a closely guarded secret. So we, as web site owners or developers, cannot know precisely how to cater to it. In addition, different search engine companies may use different algorithms and they upgrade these algorithms regularly. The result of any web site optimization effort is always a trade off between maximizing your results for a particular set of terms and narrowing your potential scope. In other words, one cannot have both; every key word possible for your product or service, and a specific set of key words optimized to the fullest. The total amount of traffic to a web site is not solely determined by search engine optimization. Traditional marketing can significantly affect results and these would be difficult to separate from results derived from SEO. Confusing the issue further are the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Companies.

It is in the interests of the SEO company to “appear” to be able to increase traffic to a web site in ways not available to a web site owner and seemingly being able to exceed the capabilities of web site designers and developers. In short, keeping the methods they use as a mystery is to their advantage.

We at Back2Front – The Web Site People, have worked with clients who have opted to use SEO companies in addition to the optimization we provide as part of our management service. We have also heard reports from new clients who have tried these services before coming to us. In both scenarios we have seen that there is rarely a perception of a good return on investment. Why is this?

Web site optimization for search engines should be done as an integral part of the development of the web site. The way the site is built, coded, and written affects the results – often dramatically. Most SEO companies (since they usually do not build web sites) come in after the fact, and may have no control over how the site was built. Trying to optimize a web site with key word adjustments on a poorly built site is like trying to shore up the foundations of a building with more coats of paint.

Optimization is an ongoing process, something that should be looked at regularly as part of the management of a web site. As new competition comes online and your business develops, changes should be made to your site’s SEO to compensate. Most SEO companies do not have the necessary long-term association with their clients to accomplish this.

Expectations of web site owners (partly driven by the SEO company’s promises) are often unrealistic. Search engine optimization companies often charge $500 or more for their service. For this kind of money, expectations are understandably high. But know this: if an SEO company promises number one placement of your web site on Google, don’t deal with them. Such a claim is misleading at best and down right fraudulent at worst. Just for fun you could ask them: “number one for what search term?” If their answer is your domain name, i.e., “back2front.ca,” well duh! Of course they can guarantee that! You will get that regardless, since domain names must, by definition, be unique. If they say they can get you number one for some good search terms, for example, “web design,” then ask, “what do I get as compensation if I do not get number one?” Hope they say money, because it’s a sure bet they will be paying! Think about this: this is a company guaranteeing results from a third party they do not have any control over.

With this kind of misleading information, it is no wonder that SEO is mysterious for many people. But search engine companies like Google do make public the criteria used in their algorithms and provide basic web master guidelines for successful search engine optimization. If you are curious, go check it out… http://www.google.ca

In the second part of this 3 part series of articles I will explore how the search engines actually work. ReadSearch Engines Demystified Part 2.

www.back2front.ca

by Candace Carter, Back2Front-The Web Site People, 2009

Every business has a need for tools to make their tasks easier. The same applies to a work from home online business. Tools will reduce the amount of time needed to perform daily tasks therefore creating a higher productivity output. They can also be used to perform tasks that a webmaster may otherwise need to pay some one to do.

Many work from home online webmasters do not know how to write source code so a tool that comes in very handy is a writer such as the free NVU. With NVU the webmaster can just write in plain text in the normal window and while that is being done the source code is automatically being written in another window called source.

This can be used to write page content for a web page, email campaign, articles or even ads that require source code to make links, names, and images clickable. The code is also what creates the spaces between paragraphs, font sizes, colors, and information that is only seen by the search engines when they crawl your site.

The webmaster can write the content directly into NVU or another tool such as word processor programs like Open Office, Microsoft Works, or Note Tab Light can be used then just copy and paste the content into NVU and instantly get your source code. Which ever way the webmaster feels more comfortable using in their work from home online business will work just fine.

Once the webmaster has finished creating the page for his website then the free tool called FileZilla Client is used to transfer the data to the file manager of the website on the sites server to make it live on the web. Tools like FileZilla are imperative to a webmaster in a work from home online business since that is the only way to transfer data from one’s PC to the sites file manager on the server.

For the articles that are written this way they are now ready to be submitted to the article directories by using the copy and paste method. The same method can be used to insert articles or messages into the webmasters auto-responder as well. At anytime that a page from your website needs changes made just use FileZilla to down load that page from your servers file manger to your PC, make the changes in NVU and then use FileZilla to upload the page back to your site.

The auto-responder is one of the most important tools that a webmaster will use in a work from home online business. Auto-responders do have a monthly fee, however you can find them at a variety of monthly fees depending on just how involved you need it to be. Most auto-responder suppliers base their prices on the size of your list, the number of messages you can send each month and the number of special broadcasts that you want to send out each month. All of which will depend on how new your work from home online business is.

The auto-responder is the webmasters work-horse since it works twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. In other words it never stops working. No matter how many different places that you have your lead capture page being exposed on the web it will always send the prospects sign-up information back to your auto-responder and your preloaded messages will be sent to them, which is building your list while you work on other things, sleep, or even take a day off. This one tool is the webmasters totally auto pilot work force once you load your messages. Most work from home online business owners try to set-up at least six months to a year of follow-up messages spaced about three to four days apart. This way they only need to do behind the scenes work for any special broadcasts they wish to send out like special deals or new training that they come up with.

In closing one can see how important just these few tools are to a webmaster that is operating a work from home online business. The great thing about these few are they are all free to down load and use except for the auto-responder which if a webmaster shops around they can find them at very reasonable prices. Just be sure to do your research of the company offering the auto-responder to be sure they deliver what they promise and that they have happy satisfied clients.

Copyright © 2008 Roy J. Keller (All Rights Reserved)

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