Almost everyone from interactive advertising agencies to any web advertising agency worth its salt to business owners who are looking to turn their online presence into a revenue-generating business venture has heard of "search engine optimization", although they all may have half baked ideas about what exactly it entails.



The earlier practice was to select some keywords, place them (or stuff them, as was the norm earlier) in the web content, throw in some meta tags (again stuffed with keywords), submit the website in directories and exchange of few links with other sites.

But that practice has for long been on its way out. Neither is it enough to make your website search friendly enough, not is it looked upon favorably by either the search engines or your customers.

Typical search engine optimization is not enough any more to established your online presence or your brand. With Web 2.0 firmly in and Web 3.0 peeping on the horizon, these are times to let people, the end users take the decision, take your message forward in so many shapes as Web-video, web-audio, web discussions, articles, blogs, forums, postings in social networking sites (SNS) and what not.

SEO in these times is about delivering the marketing message to the targeted audience, not just make it SE friendly. If latter is your choice, or you are still stuck in the old method of SEO, you will end up corrupting or distorting the message by techniques aimed at attracting search engine robots. This way you will drive away real people who may actually be potential customers.

8 Milestones To Success

With Web 2.0, audio and video content have become very effective method of delivering marketing messages over the Web. But before you as a web

marketer jump on to the bandwagon, do go over following points to ponder:

(a)These multi media messages should not be cost prohibitive so that even small and medium-sized companies could afford professional Web-audio and Web-video. They are the real revenue earner for you.

(b)Remember the website design is about delivering the marketing message effectively and unequivocally and not just search engine optimization. This point is particularly important for web design firms who double as web advertising agencies.

(c)Professionally done Web-audio and Web-video requires more than just the ability to use a video camera. So avoid a rush job as professional multimedia story-telling requires a unique set of creative skills and technical ability.

(d)Make sure that all messages whether on the web or offline confirm to each other whether you have been developer of all these messages or not.

(e)Evaluate business opportunities in the broader sense of marketing. Build viable partnerships by sitting down and taking a hard look at how various factors might complement your message.

(f)Don't ever forget that the web is used by 87% of Internet users today to research goods and services and that extra knowledge is not available anywhere else. So do give the visitor something worthwhile. Ask yourself while designing a website or any marketing campaign, what as a user am I getting and will it add value to my life, career, business, etc.

(g)Spend considerable time to analyze what the competitors are doing. If they are successful you would know why, and if they are not you would know what to avoid.

(h)Do spend time to make a beautiful web site that is attractive and add value to the visitor, but it will all be wasted effort if it does not make it easy for people to contact your client. Take time to build a site that lets people communicate with the client. Very fundamental, but equally necessary and ignored many a times.

All this sounds great but how and who can implement the strategies. Pay attention to what those old marketing warhorses are saying. Web or not, the fundamentals of marketing remains right there, and companies with experience in marketing and advertising along with providing web development services are best equipped to show you the right and time tested way to do things.

These guys may not flaunt the latest PDA or be rather old fashioned in their sense of fashion but they have years of experience building successful campaigns behind them.