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[A297]Affiliate Engine Marketing Search Submission

by Jennie Williams, Jen

?Search engine marketing represents only 3% of all funds spent, yet generates 70% of all leads?. A catchy headline such as this in your newspaper or on a website is enough to spark you into action. As a proactive entrepreneur, you are likely to waste no time in enquiring about advertising design agencies or web marketing firms in your local yellow pages or over the net, compare rates and pick one to handle your internet marketing.

However, soon you find out that your website is up and running but as far as bringing in business is concerned, you have nothing to write home about. Now you start wondering about the whether the figures quoted in the report were cooked or you did something wrong.
So what went wrong, where?

Only one in 10 websites do it right

Research associated with web marketing reveals there are more than 10 million websites of which approximately 60% are commercial. Yet, less than 10% of these follow the right steps to make the web work for them.

As an entrepreneur you can draw two important inferences from these statistics. First, despite there being millions of websites, you need to worry only about a few of your competitors.

Second, when most of the web marketers still groping in dark you have the fair chances to carving a niche for your products or services by taking smart web marketing steps.

A strategic plan to launch your product or service on the web is the backbone of your web marketing efforts. To set up a website was your immediate goal and you did it on time. But the key to its success lies in the question, how you have done that and what next? If you want to grow and use internet to generate business for you then you need to harness the potentiality of this e-platform smartly.

Need for targeted traffic

Attractive design, crisp and compelling copies, easy navigation, well planned graphical illustration and most importantly creating strong brand image are some of the most important aspects that goes behind architecting a successful website.

But the task doesn't ends here. What next? Think why people are ready to pay exorbitant rates for buying an office space or shop in busy commercial area. The same rule applies here. You need to have traffic on your website to make it work. Now ?traffic? again is a little vague unless I prefix the word ?target? to it. You need ?targeted traffic? on your website.

Internet advertising revenues exceeded $5.2 billion for the third quarter of 2007, representing a 25.3% increase and $1.1 billion increase over Q3 2006.

The figures simply suggest advertisers and marketers have started realizing web as a powerful medium of advertising. If your web is not working for you then you need to find an interactive advertising agency that provides full array of web development services along with marketing solutions. This can help you to:
?Increase online traffic
?Increase conversion
?Dominate your competition
?Lower client acquisition cost
?Earn fast measurable ROI
?Broaden market share

Five vital checkpoints for choosing an advertising and marketing firm

Can't finish this piece without a word of caution! Choosing an interactive advertising agency is not something to be done in haste.

** Study their work expertise to find out what kind of specialized services they offer ? it is always preferable to opt for an agency that offers end to end web development and marketing services.

** Check out the portfolio of the agency or firm (most have their work on display online).

** Find out whether they give guaranteed search engine rankings for targeted keywords or not.

** Browse the About Us pages to know the people behind the company, their experience and expertise.

** Cross check testimonials to ensure whether the company enjoys a satisfied client base.

Search engine marketing is exploding and so are the incomes from it. If your equations right, there will be no looking back for you!

Internet marketing has rapidly grown over the years. Businesses big and small are trying to reap the benefits that an online presence offers. And an online presence for an existing business, regardless of what it may be, does often mean increased return on investment. And given increasing competition, with everyone having logged on, in a manner of speaking, just having a website is not enough.

Also known as e-commerce, internet marketing covers everything from information management to sales. Specialized areas such as public relations and customer service and many others have also joined into this complex world. Along with the common business models (business-to-business and business-to-consumer) a third peer-to-peer has manifested in the internet marketing arena where individuals exchange goods with each other.

The growth of internet marketing gave rise to search engine marketing. SEM aims at improving the visibility of a website on the results pages of major search engines. There are three main methods of carrying out SEM,
a) search engine optimization (SEO)
b) pay per click
c) paid inclusion.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) fine tunes the content and structure of a website to achieve the closest possible match to what visitors on search engines are looking for. Also known as Search Engine Advertising, Pay Per Click advertising, is the method wherein advertisers bid on ?keywords? that they are sure their target user will type into the search bar. These ?sponsored ads?, as they are called, appear above the search results and an advertiser pays when the user clicks on the ad. The third method of SEM, Paid Inclusion, is rather straightforward as suggested by the name. Website owners pay search engines, typically an annual fee, in order to be listed on their search pages.

Clearly PPC and Paid Inclusion seem like the fastest methods of search engine marketing. Yet, many website owners prefer to adopt the more time consuming Search Engine Optimization method for better marketing of their website on search engines.

The name SEO is misleading because the idea is in fact to optimize the web page to attract visitors on leading search engines. Search engines work on the basis of specific algorithms, and the idea behind SEO is to keep keywords on websites in sync with these algorithms.

Once again, as your SEO service provider will tell you, the focus is not on a precise understanding of the algorithms. Here it becomes important to know your target audience, preempt the keywords they will type, and to make sure your website is laden with these keywords. The idea was to emphasis on keyword density. Keyword density, as the name suggests, is quite simply how often a predefined set of keywords is repeated on a web site. Over the years, unethical practices such as keyword stuffing has made search engines like Google wary of giving important to keyword density. Given this scenario website owners are now advised to write content meant for visitors, rather than ?stuff? their website with keywords just to attract high ranking. Yet another common unethical practice is the insertion of highly searched keywords that have nothing whatsoever to do with the content on the page. This again may temporarily attract high ranking, but is bound to end with the site being caught and banned.

Affecting the keyword density and/or content rewriting is just one part of the SEO process. In order to make websites more search engine friendly navigation patterns of a website are also modified. The sole purpose of having a navigation system is for the site to be more user-friendly. Unfortunately in an attempt at being unique, web site owners and designers get carried away and end up devising complex navigation systems. Yet another element that may be changed during the SEO process is the internal link structure of a website. Website owners in their bid to have higher rankings on search engine result pages obtain a long list of irrelevant links to their sites. Modern day search engines are equipped to identify such sites, and would mostly ban them.

It is always advisable to adopt SEO starting with the initial development and design stage of a website. In other words rather than using SEO as an afterthought, it needs to be thought of as a stage in the lifecycle of website creation. This would assure a good beginning in the ranking of the results pages of various search engines. And once this groundwork is done, improving the rankings would become a less challenging task.

Global companies are now looking at partnering with Indian firms that offer SEO services. There are many Indian companies in the field that offer high-quality, cost-effective SEO services. Working with these firms you can monitor the progress made on projects, and be assured of dedicated work towards meeting desired goals.

Article Source : Pg. 25

About Author

Both Jennie Williams & Munish Dev Rathee are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Jennie Williams has sinced written about articles on various topics from Advertising Guide, Search Engine Marketing and Corporate Identity and Branding. Jennie Williams is an consultant based in Sydney, Australia. She writes articles on. Jennie Williams's top article generates over 60500 views. to your Favourites.

Munish Dev Rathee has sinced written about articles on various topics from Search Engine Marketing, Fishing and Child Custody. Munish Dev Rathee is a SEO cum content writer associated with a .. Munish Dev Rathee's top article generates over 3600 views. to your Favourites.