When looking for online marketing tools it is important to determine what type of marketing you are intending to use them for. There are several different types of online marketing.
For instance, email marketing is an entire strategy in itself that involves collecting lists of email addresses for specific demographics and then emailing those people with offers aimed at that audience, combined with a follow up strategy to maximize the chance of a sale. This sounds simple, but there are entire books written about it.
But probably the most common form of online marketing is based around the website. The website itself is an online marketing tool in that it provides an online face for a company or business that can provide information about the business around the clock. A website can be set up for the cost of the hosting and the domain name, whilst the site itself can be downloaded for free. But on its own it does little to increase sales as only the traffic you actually send to it will visit the site. Therefore if you want your site to attract visitors other than those you send, it is important to employ a strategy that will improve its online popularity.
There are two main strategies to acheive this. The first is organic SEO and the second is paid advertising. Paid advertising includes either paying a flat fee to the owner of a popular site to display an ad on there site that points back to your site, or pay per click advertising. This is where you pay a nominal fee whenever a visitor clicks an ad on another website that takes them to your site. This fee can range from as little as $0.05 to $20 per click depending on how much a potential lead is worth. The most common form of pay per click advertising is Google Adsense.
Online Marketing Tools for Organic SEO
Organic SEO is all about increasing traffic to your site by increasing it’s popularity with the big search engines. The most important one of course is Google followed by Yahoo, Bing and a few others. The strategy is that when someone searches on Google using a particular phrase or keyword, your site will appear at the top of the list. This is the area of online marketing tools that I will be concentrating on and involves “on page SEO” and more importantly “off page SEO”.
On Page SEO
This covers how well a particular site page targets a keyword so that when the keyword is searched, the page appears on page one of the search results. This involves the number of times the keyword or some derivative occurs on the page, how well the surrounding information relates to the keyword, where the keyword appears on the page e.g. does it include first and last paragraphs, does the page title or paragraph headings contain the keyword and does the metadata contain the keyword. There are several free online marketing tools that can help you optimise your on page SEO – just Google “on page SEO tools”.
Off Page SEO
This involves having other sites link to your site. The more sites that link to your site, the more Google believes that others think you are an authority in that particular area and so will push your site up the search engine results. The perfect link from another site looks like this with number 1 being the most important
- The link contains the keyword in its anchor text.
- The link is part of an article related to the keyword
- The information around the link is relevant to the keyword.
- The article is on a site related to the keyword
- The link appears in the first paragraph of the article
- The page the link is on has a high Page Rank
- The site the link is on has a high Page Rank
As you can see this type of link is impossible but as long as number 1 is achieved it will be a useful link.
The most common methods by which we can build these links include:
- Post an article with links to an article directory e.g. Ezine Articles
- Join a site or blog network where we can post articles to those blogs
- Join a article distribution site where we submit an article that gets distributed to several sites e.g. UAW
- Create free sites of our own where we can post articles e.g. Blogger
- Contact other site owners regarding linking to each others sites.
To Be Continued…
