Building eCommerce

By Rahman Mehraby

Having a quick look at the benefits of search engine optimization (SEO), you will see that several benefits are obtained when you implement this online marketing method. Among several important advantages of this method, you receive targeted website traffic. This happens as you target certain keywords and optimize your site for them.

How Search Engines Send You Targeted Traffic

Search Engines crawl the web constantly to find new pages, updates and changes. When they see any of them, they refresh their indexes and record the new versions. They are not going to be shown up alphabetically, chronologically, etc. What people see in the result pages, are the sites according to their algorithms.

Now, what does it mean? Search engines have got their own rules that are set within their softwares. Such softwares decide which pages to be shown up first, second, etc. The criteria set for such rankings for the algorithm of these giant engines. Otherwise, a huge number of human teams will be required to do this manually. Considering the free services provided as such, this will not be cost-effective.

One of the main criteria is to rate each page for that particular keyword typed in the search box. If that particular keyword exists in the title tag and within the textual content of the page, search engines consider rating the page and ranking it. Depending on the quality and level of the optimization work conducted on that page and the number of powerful relevant inbound links such a page has gotten, it receives a search engine ranking. So, optimize a page for certain purpose and get targeted traffic to it.

The Steps Required to Get Targeted Traffic

You should develop a search engine friendly site/blog. The content at all pages of your site should be relevant. The keywords your site targets should be all related to the same topic. The more pages you optimize for their unique keywords and content, the better for attracting qualified traffic. If I want to continue such a list, it can go on and on. The major steps you need to take are:

1) Conduct a keyword research for you’re your site first.

2) Build a site/blog that can be easily crawled by search engines.

3) Create a lot of keyword-rich content for it that is useful for its readers.

4) Optimize the content for the particular keyphrases in mind.

5) Build the link popularity of your website and include your links in them.

As your keywords are used both inside the key positions of your site and the links other websites build to your particular pages, your search engine rankings for that keyword increases. As a result, you get targeted website traffic form search engines when people type your keywords in the search boxes of those engines.

About The Author

Site Booster helps you get targeted website traffic through its affordable SEO services. Learn more at: http://www.site-booster.com.

By Anna Johnson

Viral marketing is surely the ultimate form of marketing: you create something once, and then, with no effort on your part, word about your article, game, movie, product or website (or whatever it is) gets spread to others, who spread it to others, who in turn spread it to more people, and the result is non-stop, ever-growing traffic and sales.

Sounds like a dream… and, unfortunately, for most Internet marketers who create viral campaigns, such results are only the stuff of dreams. The reality is that (a) Internet marketers engaged in viral marketing have to put a considerable amount of work - and sometimes lots of money - into developing such campaigns and (b) most of them don’t become viral at all.

In fact, calling something a viral marketing campaign is a bit of a misnomer since it’s only viral if it has, indeed, exhibited viral characteristics i.e. growth in the pass-along consumption of the content has been exponentially self-perpetuating. So you can’t really ‘develop’ a viral campaign; you can really only hope that a particular marketing campaign will become viral. Still, we’ll describe such campaigns as ‘viral’ for the sake of convenience.

So what’s the reality concerning viral marketing? Well, recent research shows that while 24 percent of Internet marketers attempt viral initiatives, only 15 percent of such campaigns actually induce the spread of the relevant marketing message. Meanwhile, far from being a cheap form of marketing, many attempted viral or word of mouth marketing campaigns involve expensive development e.g. the development of ingenious or cool games and costly seeding i.e. planting news of the campaign on social media sites and elsewhere.

The hit and miss nature of viral marketing means that no-one can really ensure a successful campaign. Still we can look at the campaigns that have been successful and identify some common factors that may be indicative of why they were so successful.

Some of these common factors are: offering free content of high perceived value, utilizing a fairly effortless way for people to pass along the content, and, in terms of seeding the campaign, making it highly rewarding for people to promote the content in the first place.

These are fairly generic factors but, in the absence of a sure-fire recipe for viral success, we can’t really go beyond describing the fairly general factors for success. While the pay-off from a viral marketing campaign can be enormous, it is far from certain.

For that reason, while I would definitely encourage Internet marketers to try viral marketing and to implement viral elements in your marketing - e.g. buttons at the bottom of blog articles to allow people to bookmark or ‘retweet’ your articles - I would never advise you to rest your entire business on viral initiatives. Base your online marketing, instead, on tried and true approaches; use viral campaigns to supplement or complement but never to replace such approaches.

About The Author

Anna Johnson publishes Internet marketing newsletter, Kikabink News. Go here to get a FREE subscription to Kikabink News as well as a FREE copy of Anna’s ebook, Killer Internet Marketing Tips, plus four FREE killer 60+ minute audio interviews with top Internet marketers: Killer Internet marketing tips