Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Introduction To SEO & Internet Marketing For Beginners

By Paul Graham

Internet marketing is not always easy to understand if you are a beginner. There are a lot of things to learn about online marketing to the point that sometimes you might feel overwhelmed or confused. This article will look at some of the early processes required for you to start marketing either your own or someone else's products or services online. Once you know the basics, everything really does become much clearer.

The first step with your online marketing business is to set-up a website or blog using squarespace.com for example where you can sell both your own products and services or someone else's (commonly known as affiliate marketing). This will be your starting point and the central point of your business. Your website should contain all relevant information about your business as well as your products and services. If you can, set up the website so you can capture customer data such as name and email address by using an auto responder such as Get Response.

The second step is to start optimising your website for the search engines. This strategy is called SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation. Practising SEO means your website will get a higher ranking with the search engines allowing people who are looking for your products or services to find them. You will find that there are many strategies out there for SEO that can make it seem complicated. However broken down, SEO really only depends on three things, link building, keywords, and quality content.

To optimise your keywords, think of the important words that people use to search for something that you sell. The keyword tool from Google is a useful tool to help you find the keywords that people use to search for what you want to sell online. You should then place those keywords in strategic places such as titles, headers, subtitles, and the first paragraph of an article.

You have to fill your website with high quality and relevant content for the search engines to rank you effectively. To do this you can write your own content and articles or you can hire freelancers to write them for you using fiverr.com for example. Make sure that the articles are useful with the right keyword placement. Avoid keyword stuffing or using too many keywords in an article or page or Google will penalise you.

SEO is a continuous process. Anyone who is involved in internet marketing should always work on their SEO strategies over time to improve them. If you are not able to do that on your own, you could consider hiring professionals, again if you look around this doesn't have to be expensive.

The next step is setting up an advertising campaign. Your advertising campaign is important for you to reach potential customers. With so many other products and websites online, your products and services need to stand out. There are plenty of places to look at when setting up your ads like Ad Land for example. You just need to determine who your target audience is and set up a basic budget for it.

Some people find social networking sites very helpful to promote their business. These sites are also free to use, unless you place ads on their sites. You do need to invest time and money to make any strategy work, but with a little patience a significant income can be earned online.

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