Seo And Internet Marketing It's All About Transparency

By Author: Mel Joelle
Total Articles: 4328
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The Internet, if nothing else, is a huge tool of measurement. Fundamentally, everything that occurs can be recorded and measured. This fact, in and of itself, makes Internet Marketing including all of its components and sub-specialties compelling for any serious marketer in the 21st century.

All pre-Internet and many current marketers surely are aware that if, for instance, you purchase a mailing list and then send out a mailer to an audience i.e. direct mail, the only thing you surely will know is how many responses you have to the first mailer; that is, if you track it which it often times isn't. So, what you have here is a defined cost of marketing with relatively little visibility as to the results, the history , the ability to forecast leads, sales, profits. Consider the questions you absolutely cannot answer:

1. How many actually received and read the mail?
2. How many just threw it out?
3. How many just received it when they were too pre-occupied and dumped it?
4. How many inquiries did you receive by phone or other means?
5. What kind of interaction did the recipient ...
... have with the mailer?

The fact is that once the mailer goes into the mailbox you have limited visibility or transparency as to what will happen to it. Instead you calculate based on history or based upon guesstimates what you can expect in terms of leads, sales and profits. Clearly inefficient and clearly unclear.

Now let's consider just some of what you can do and measure online:

1. Website - a specific online location.

2. Analytics - software installed on the website to measure all human behavior.

3. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - a part of internet marketing that determines the search characteristics for targeted potential visitors to the site SEO determines those terms or keyword phrases that are popular, relevant and profitable. In other words it determines the potential of success before it even starts because it already knows the size of the potential audience i.e. the numbers and stats for those searching for the targeted information. SEO goes much further than this of course:

a. SEO optimizes the onsite visibility of the entire website to make sure that the search engines fully understand the content of each page and the relationship of each page to each other.

b. SEO generates Backlinks (one way links into your website) by syndicating relevant content, gaining acceptance of that content by other site owners and indexing your content on their website.

4. Social Media - a subset of SEO because it is a part of off-site optimization. Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are all willing and able recipients of your content, your information, your views and opinions to gain human value. While much of traditional SEO focuses on the search engines directly, the Social Media, provides a new and rapidly growing way for your target market to find you. The interactions can range from product information, tips and tricks, to independent assessments and reviews and just plain conversation.

However, the point is that all Website Marketing is inherently MEASURABLE. There is almost no question that goes unanswered. You can know everything how many people searched for any keyword, where you are ranked for that keyword, why those ranking higher are ranking higher, what you have to do to rank higher how many people have landed on your website, how long they stayed, where they stayed, which pages did they interact with the best and the worst, where did they exit and lose interest altogether how many converted or did exactly what you establish as the goal of the website visit. This can not only be done through your website but with the social media as well as each of the social media are installing analytical interfaces that will allow you to measure the same types of interactions with the contact indexed or linked to and through your social media presences.

Your website, your social media activities and even email marketing are all infinitely more transparent than anything that has come before. Your Internet Marketing Strategy must take advantage of all of these elements: SEO, Social Media and constantly measuring all of the data / stats to make continual adjustments and improvements, based on the data, to, in the true sense of the word, OPTIMIZE THROUGH TRANSPARENCY.
Click here to read the rest of SEO and Internet Marketing. If you enjoyed this article, you also might like our other stories about Search Engine Optimization.