Internet Marketing Myths

Let us do the monkeying around for you!

One of the biggest misconceptions about internet marketing and websites in general is that “geeks” can do it all. After running an internet marketing company for 14 years I have learned that the most successful web projects are done by teams of highly specialized people. As a business owner, when you are looking to get online, rebuild your website, drive more leads or partake in social media, you need to make sure you don’t fall into the trap of thinking that one person, which many would call a “webmaster”, can handle each part of the process properly.

Now that Print is in trouble, TV ads can be skipped and the printed yellow pages are a relic of the past, the world is quickly learning that Internet Marketing is real, advanced and can’t be done well on a shoestring with people that don’t focus on it fulltime. In fact, as every day passes, millions of savvy people are clamoring to secure market share in the ranks of the search engines by populating sites with massive volumes of engaging content, widgets, videos and social interactivity. While some people are wondering weather to build better websites and add more than a handful of boring brochure ware pages, others are stringing together hundreds or thousands of pages around niche topics and growing databases of millions of users.

Make sure you are at least doing some of these three top tactics and that whoever is responsible for these tasks, has significant experience in each category:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is the process of making a site and its content highly-relevant for both search engines and searchers. Optimization may involve design/layout changes, new text for the title-tags, meta-tags, alt- attributes, headings, and changes to the sites text. Link campaigns are also a part of SEO. They can be highly effective at both bringing in traffic from the links and by helping your rankings. If you have numerous links from relevant communities/authorities, the search engines see them as votes of confidence. This area has a number of different names, including Organic-, Natural- and Algorithm-based.

Paid Search

This form of advertising is done by auction and some of the bid listing providers are Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search. Most search engine results pages (SERPs) have these paid forms of search marked by such designators as “sponsored listings” and are usually found at the top of a results page above the “natural” search results and/or to the right of the natural results. This area has a number of different names, including pay-per-click (PPC), pay-for-performance (PFP), and paid-for-search.

What is Social Media Marketing

Social media is content created by people using tools making it easy to share and vote on information. It has become extremely popular because it allows people to form personal and business relationships. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM). Social Media is transforming the web’s monologue into a true dialog. Social sites are broken into several categories such as social networking, social news and multimedia. These sites can have a direct effect on organic search optimization and overall site traffic.