Marketing Your Website

Posted by Admin on October 24th, 2007 — Posted in Internet Marketing

by Obinna Heche

If you have an online business, chances are your customers are going to be online users and focusing your marketing efforts online is the most logical move. However, while the bulk of your marketing efforts may go to online resources, do not forget the offline customers as well. Many may not react to online marketing but finding your website in a print or broadcast media advertisement may have more integrity with some users.

As people continue to be bombarded with online advertising through pop-up windows, email ads and advertisements playing on the internet whenever they open a new page, they tend to become immune to seeing them. Even news videos offered free of charge are often preceded by a commercial and most people tune them out and watch the play clock until the news footage they requested begins to play.

Research is beginning to show what most web users have known for years that graphic intense pages that take a long time to open, usually never see the light of day. Even with broadband connections some pages can take up to 20 or 30 seconds to load, exceeding the patience level of most want-it-now internet users. It does not matter how great the page looks once it opens, if no one hangs around long enough to see it, it was a waste of time and money to build it.

Flash presentations became the big thing a few years ago and many webmasters were quick to jump on the bandwagon, but with the length of time needed for these pages to load made most web users reluctant to sit and watch a page unfold. Low graphic content and heavy text with a simple message open quicker, increasing the chance a person may actually look at the page.

Keeping the message on your landing page simple will also help people decide if they have any interest in going any further. The first thing people see must relate to their interest and clearly explain what they are going to find on your website. If the page opens instantly and there is nothing grabbing the users attention, the page will close just as fast.

One of the most used means of internet marketing is the use of affiliate programs. With most forms of advertising you pay for a certain number of exposures and hope someone finds the advertisement interesting enough to visit your site. Then you hope they buy something. With affiliate marketing, you only pay for ad placement if a sale is made, usually a small percentage paid as a commission on the amount of the sale.

Numerous websites will host advertising as an affiliate, placing an ad you had designed and when visitors to that site click on your ad and make a purchase, the website owner is paid a commission. You get the advertising free until a sale is made. Additionally, the site becomes a link back to your site, improving your sites position on search engines, drawing more traffic to your site as well.

About the AuthorObinna Heche. Los Angeles – California

Delivering the best home based business ideas and opportunities so you can work at home successfully.. http://www.home-incomeportal.com

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A Beginners Guide about the importance of In-bound Links to your website!

Posted by Admin on October 23rd, 2007 — Posted in Link Building

by David Clarke

A simple explanation aimed at beginners regarding the importance of In-bound links to your website for the purpose of assisting the website in search engine rankings, provided by a UK Internet Marketing Guru. This guide shows quite simply how & why a LINK works for your website.

A common complaint I hear from businesses is that their website does not appear in the first page of search engine results for the most basic but vital phrase such as “Dentist Manchester”.

To a large degree your success in search engine results will depend on your inbound linking strategy.

Before you glaze over let me explain.

You have probably seen links in the pages of a web site. Links can take you to another page in the same web site or to a totally different web site. Links are the “blue bits” on a web page and usually look like this:

http://www.dbs-uk.co.uk/

If you click on the link above it would count as an inbound link for DBS.

Search engines know that it takes human effort to place a link on a website and so they see links as a vote of popularity. Someone actually has to take the time to put a special piece of code on a site so that when you click a link you are whooshed to another site. In very broad terms the more links you have the more popular you’re perceived by search engines.

Search engines all have “spiders” (sometimes called “robots”) whose job it is to crawl the web going from site to site to read or “index” every page they come across. That way when you ask a search engine a question it knows where to get the answer from.

The way spiders get from one site to another is via links. If you have no links into your site then search engines will find it very hard to know your site exists. How would they get to your site if you had no links? It would be like building a town with no roads to it. That’s one good reason for developing inbound links.

Another good reason to develop inbound links is that they can be used to tell the search engines what your site is all about. If the clickable text in our link example above read:

Internet Marketing Consultant

then the search engine would have a good idea what the DBS site is all about. Now multiply that by tens and hundreds of links with the clickable text all mentioning “Marketing Consultant”, “Internet Marketing”, “Internet Marketing Consultant”. The search engine would be in no doubt of which site to bring up in its results if someone were to search for “Internet Marketing Consultant”.

That is the power of inbound linking explained in the simplest and most general terms.

This article is free to republish provided this resource box remains intact.
About the AuthorDavid Clarke ia a partner of DBS and an Internet Marketing Consultant. Visit his website at http://www.dbs-uk.co.uk/ for more information regarding Telcom’s 0800 0845, SEO, Website Design, Optimisation, Printed Advertising and more. David has over 20 years experience in marketing both in America & UK.

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