Getting Started In Internet Marketing

By Author: Wade Knoxville
Total Articles: 43
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Introduction

Internet marketing is a relatively new facet of the marketing umbrella. Since the mid 1990s, internet marketing has grown to a point where it consumes most businesses marketing budgets. One of the biggest mistakes that online marketers make is that they don't incorporate traditional marketing concepts in their online approach. The key to a successful online marketing program is to employ fundamental marketing concepts. One could say that these marketers should go back and take their Marketing 101 class over again.

Website Set Up

The first important step when launching an online marketing program is to set up your website to be search engine friendly. There are a lot of technical details that need to be looked after to make sure a website is search engine friendly. Some examples of search engine friendly characteristics are keyword rich URLs (without extraneous characters like @#$%) and non flash interfaces. Once the website is configured to be search friendly (an approved by a professional search marketer), the next step is to submit the website to the three major internet search engines.

Submitting ...
... To Search Engines

At this point your website should have plenty of textual content describing what your site is about. Go through and make sure all your titles and headings a spelled correctly. Also, use a link checking service to see if there are any broken links within the site. Broken links can cause the search engines to miss important sections of your site, which in turn will not be displayed on the search engine results pages. This can cause a loss of substantial traffic.

Next go to Google.com, Yahoo.com and MSN.com and submit your website to their indexes. For Google and MSN you will be promoted to enter a strange looking code which is intended to stop spam. For Yahoo you will need to have a Yahoo account or you will have to create one on the spot. After your website has been submitted to the three major search engines allow a couple of months for their bots and spiders to crawl through your site. After they are done crawling, they will begin to populate their search results pages with links to your site.

Submitting For Geo Targeted Purposes

There are a few more internet services available to take into account local businesses. One of these sites is Superpages.com. Superpages.com is like an online Yellow Pages. The good thing about Superpages.com is that it allows you to list your business telephone number and address.

Google also has a local site submission. An entry in their local site submission will also place your business on Google Maps which is becoming extremely popular with mobile telephone users.

Finally, Yahoo has the Yahoo Business Directory. It allows you to include the vital contact information related to your business like phone numbers and the business address. It also places your business search result at the top of the Yahoo results pages. This service by Yahoo is an annual fee.

Measuring, Tracking and Testing

These basic online marketing tasks are just the beginning to your online marketing journey. The important step now is to implement tracking and measuring to see what forms of marketing produce a return on your investment. Measuring and tracking are marketing fundamentals that every business should be conscious of on a daily occurrence.
Wade Knoxville

Orange County Internet Marketing