1. Get Noticed: go in with a bang by launching your new site, or new content on social bookmarking sites. Many social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Reddit and Netscape are read on a daily basis and a perfect place to start your traffic generation debut.

2. Take advantage of free ads: GumTree is a great place to get your new website noticed. Gum Tree is a free advertisement space where you can make an ad for your website, for free! It doesn’t get any better than that!

3. Get Accounted: start creating as many social networking accounts as possible. Social networking is a great way to get your product or service noticed. Set up a MySpace Page, a Facebook Page, a Yahoo Page and much more. Ask your friends to add your page as “fans” and watch your traffic jam up.

4. Use StumbleUpon: Submit your site to Stumble Upon and then get your friends to stumble on it as well.

5. Create a Yahoo Group: join or create a Yahoo group in your area of interest. Most likely others in that group will be interested in knowing about your website and checking out what you have to offer.

6. Tweet with Twitter: Tweet Tweet, you have mail. Twitter is a new social media revolution that combines text messages with the Internet. It may seem a little confronting, but it’s a great way to advertise your website. Get a following and send them a tweet.

7. Contribute to Forums: one of the best ways to use social media in your favor is to make a brief contribution to Forums in your topic of interest. Include a link to your website after offering incredibly advice. However, make sure you use sparingly- don’t spam.

8. Search for relevant sites: there are literally social networking sites for everyone and everything. For baby boomers, for music lovers, for avid photographers, for video gamers, for George Lucas fans, for Twilight lovers, and for every single other fetish in the world. Take advantage of this by joining social networking sites that relate to your website. This is where your prospects will be.

9. Show you care: by participating in other social media outlets, you are showing to others that you are genuinely interested in the subject. The more comments you share, the more you will be respected and revered as an active member in your niche market community.

10. Add the “tell a friend” function: on your website, add the ‘tell a friend’ function. This is a simple little button that allows people to easily connect to your website and inform others about it. In the cyber world, word of click is just as important as word of mouth. So make the most of this with social media.

To save time and effort we’ll create a list of SEO tips to help you in the future.

1. Keep your Website Structure Clean: Your home page should display the product categories; while all the inner pages should follow a common webpage structure.

2. Use a Unique Title/Description/Keyword Tag: Every product page should have a unique title/description/keyword. An Ecommerce site can contain any number of web pages. You can ask the programmer to code the title/description/keywords from the page content and product name. This makes your SEO more dynamic.

3. Use Breadcrumbs for All Inner Pages: The breadcrumbs are like a secondary navigation structure. It helps the visitor to navigate back to the main product category page. A breadcrumb also helps in the internal linking of the website. Overall, including a breadcrumb makes the website SEO friendly.

4. Use a Heading Tag: Searchbots assign a lot of importance to the heading tag. The heading tag is SEO friendly and can be used to format the title of the web page content.

5. Don’t use Flash: Avoid using flash on every web page of your Ecommerce website. This will expand the site loading time. If the use of flash is inevitable, include textual content in the flash. Search engines are capable of reading the text in the flash file.

6. Optimize Images: Add the Alt tag to all the images of your website. Search engines cannot read images. The Alt tag is a means of ensuring that the search engines read the alternate text for images.

7. Optimize Anchor Text: Anchor text appears between the anchor opening and closing tag. It is good practice to use keywords as the anchor text.

8. Create an SEO Friendly URL Structure: The default URL structure of a dynamic website contains parameters. Search engines are not capable of understanding these parameters. A good URL structure must contain words separated by hyphens.

9. Generate a XML Sitemap: A XML sitemap contains all the URLs present in the website and makes it easy for searchbots to find and index all web pages. If the number of web pages on a site is large, you can create a number of XML sitemaps and then submit these sitemaps to Google via Webmaster Tools. E.g. sitemap1.xml, sitemap2.xml.

10. Limit the Number of Outbound Links: Always link to a safe and secure website. If you are not sure about the quality of the website you are linking out to, use the no follow attribute.

11. Submit to Search Directories: Forward your website URL to good quality search directories. Most of the search directories take a few weeks to link back to a site. Fill in the details of the submission form carefully, so that the administrator accepts the submission.

12. Submit to Article Directories and Social Bookmarking Sites: Article submission is the quickest way of obtaining high quality backlinks. You need to select the do follow bookmarking sites and submit the URL to them. Growth in traffic is a plus point of submitting to social bookmarking sites.

13. Integrate a Secure Payment Gateway: A secure payment gateway is the heart of an Ecommerce website. Get a trust seal from Verisign, TrustE, etc. Visitors will be more likely to trust your site and to make an online payment.

14. Track User Behavior with a Good Analytics Tool: You can track and analyze visitor behavior with a good analytics tool. You need to select an analytics tool based on your requirements. If your Ecommerce website operates on a large scale, you can opt for a paid analytics tool. Otherwise you can use a variety of free tools to obtain the best results.

It is very easy to rank well and get quality traffic with these tips. The trick is to maintain the balance of the site being SEO and user friendly.

1. Social media is the preferred way for people in younger demographics to communicate with each other. Nothing else comes close.
2. Social media is based on the concept of friends, but that term today is very loosely applied. Similarly, profiles are loosely defined and can be used in a variety of ways by people, companies, brands, and so on.
3. The more active a consumer is on the Internet, the more likely they participate in multiple social networks. Oftentimes, these people are influencers within a circle of friends and have a tremendous impact on the opinions of others.
4. Once information is shared on a social network, it is out there and can’t easily be contained. Everything is out in the open and largely visible for other people to see.
5. Social media is best applied in addition to existing Internet marketing programs and alongside other Web assets. When building a strategy, you must think comprehensively.
6. The rules are still being made. Social media “etiquette” is still relatively immature. Tread carefully.
7. Everyone on social networks is motivated by some combination of the following human needs:

• Love Finding love, keeping up with loved ones, and so forth
• Self-expression/emotion Sharing life’s details with friends
• Sharing opinions/influencing friends Using social media as a platform for influencing opinions, usually about politics, religion, or other things we don’t typically debate in person
• Showing off Sharing life’s successes and/or achievements with others
• Fun/escapism/humor Using social media to get a good laugh
• Memories and nostalgia Catching up with old friends and sharing old stories
• Making money Using social networks primarily to support professional pursuits

As you can probably tell, the motivation for using Facebook varies significantly depending on your customer. Most companies with mature marketing departments spend a lot of time on customer personas to understand who customers are and how they behave. While this can, at times, trap a business into oversimplifying its customer base, this is one case where I think developing personas can be especially effective even for a smaller business.
Let’s think of this in practical terms. For instance, single people will typically be far more interested in finding a love interest than a happily married person in their 40s. The happily married person may want to use Facebook to keep up with relatives and loved ones. A grandmother will be more interested in sharing pictures and stories about loved ones than her grandchildren will be. If you are going to create a successful marketing campaign, you’re going to have to identify the people you are trying to reach and exactly how you can reach them more effectively. Figure out who your customer(s) are and what their motivation is for using Facebook. That exercise will help you craft a much better campaign for your target market, and it will also inform your ad copy and/or creative.

The number one activity online is e-mail. This is why e-mail can be used as a great online marketing tool. Many Internet users say that they would rather get marketing messages in their e-mail than be bothered by sales phone calls at home.

Permission Based E-mail

One important key to an effective e-mail marketing strategy is to only focus on permission based mail. This means that customers need to choose to receive mail from you. This is known as “opt in”.

You should never rent or buy an e-mail list since this is considered to be spam. No matter what the owner of the e-mail list will tell you, the majority of the addresses on the list did not opt in to receive e-mail or to have their personal information sold to you. When you send e-mail to people who don’t want it you’re sending spam. Spam will give your company image a cheap look and take away any trust that customers have in you. You want leads that are quality and not quantity and this means building your own e-mail list. You’ll find that the final results will be tremendous to you and your business.

E-mail marketing should be considered an extension of the customer service that you provide. You want to be able to communicate with your customers at every point in the sales process. When you give your customers what they ask for, without abusing any permission, you establish the base for a relationship that is founded on respect and leads to long term customer loyalty.

Pinpoint Marketing: Pinpoint marketing is the process of sending the right message at the right time so that it produces actual results. For example, if you’re at a ball game and are eating a bag of popcorn. Just when you take a handful of popcorn the Coca-Cola logo appears on the big screen. The next you thing you know you’re looking for the first vendor who can sell you a can of Coke. However, if an advertisement for a new car appears on the big screen while you’re watching the game and eating popcorn, you’re less likely to be interested since it’s not something you’re looking for at that moment. Interruptive marketing isn’t really targeted because it’s not something that you are actively looking for. People who use the Internet are usually looking for a solution to a problem. When you put your product in front of them at the right time you’ve reached a potential customer.

Day-part Marketing: The placement and timing of ads on the Internet has become so important to online marketing that some companies, such as Yahoo!, are selling advertisements in “day-part”. Day-part is something that has always been done in television advertising. Day-part marketing works like this – specifying at which time of the day certain ads are viewed so that you can effectively target your customers.

Embedded Marketing Messages: These days, more people than ever are using the Internet to research a product before they buy. As well, most Internet users are becoming more serious about the amount of time that they spend online. Studies show that users are spending less time on the web and that the time they do spend surfing is focused and deliberate. Many users bookmark their favorite websites so that they can access information fast and easily. When people want a solution to a certain problem, such as a health issue or taking a vacation, they often look online for the answers. This is why it’s important for you to put your product or service right in front of them whenever you can.

The Internet is one of the best places for consumers to find out about new products and services. This places the net above television, radio, magazines, and newspapers. When you use the Internet to promote your product or service you have the opportunity to reach a multitude of potential customers anywhere at any time. The web is one of the most powerful mediums for reaching and influencing people and the decisions they make about business.

Components of Good Content

One of the key ingredients to success on the Internet is creating website content that Internet users want to read. When you have content that is (1) interesting, (2) factual, and (3) well written, you have some of the main tools that you need to get the desired traffic to your online website.

Writing Decisions: When you first start writing content for your website you’ll find yourself facing many decisions before you even sit down at the keyboard or pick up a pen. As you begin to develop the content on your website pages you’ll find that you’re often changing many of your first instinct decisions. This is all part of the process of writing. But how can you most efficiently sort out all you need to think about so that you develop website content that users want to read?

It’s important that you find out what it is that Internet users are looking for on the Internet so that you can focus your website content on these issues. Take some time to study at the top hits in the search engines for products or services that are similar to what you’re selling. Even though these top ranked websites are most likely using Search Engine Optimization techniques you can still read what it is that they’re using to draw in the crowd. Take some of these concepts and include them in the flow of your web content….but ONLY if these concepts enhance what you’re writing and are entirely relevant to the products or services that you’re selling. Keep in mind that although one website may be at the top of the search engine rankings today, it won’t take them long to fall back into the ranks of “mediocre websites”. Websites that rely on SEO techniques don’t give people the information that they’re looking for to keep them coming back. How many times have you yourself searched a topic in a search engine only to find that the top hit is filled with articles and web content that has nothing to do with what the website is all about?

• What age group are you trying to sell to?
• Are you selling to a specific ethnic group or gender?
• Will most of your customers be married or single?
• How fast will most Internet connections be?
• Will you target customers who have children?
• What level of education will most of your customers have?
• Where will most of your customers live?
• Will your customers have any specific hobbies?

The more you know about your customers the easier it will be to come up with a marketing plan. You’ll also be able to design a website that is the most appealing to these customers. The biggest advantage of marketing on the Internet is that it allows you to become very targeted towards your desired customers.

Targeting Different Types of Customers

Marketing online is the same as marketing anywhere else. There are certain products, colors, themes, and lingo that will appeal more to some customers than to others. When you know what type of customers you’re targeting you can meet their needs so that you grab their attention. When you use certain features that pull customers to your website you have the ability to gain their attention, loyalty, and trust. For example, studies show that most female shoppers like to save money and time. Over 80% of purchases in the home are influenced in some way by women. As well, these same studies show that women like to able to compare costs fast and easily without getting any kind of sales pressure. If you’re trying to target women customers some things that you should keep in mind include (1) giving them a feeling of comfort and community, (2) let your website deal with everyday problems, and (3) focus on education, health, and family.

Get the Word Out

Doing something innovative and creative online, as well as using the latest technology, will always get attention. For example, adding animation, flash, or a photo can create a buzz about the product or service that you’re selling. Just as e-mail, which contains jokes and strange pictures, gets forwarded all around the planet so too can your marketing message make the rounds. Come up with a marketing message and then forward it to family, friends, and anyone else you know.

Any time that you can get someone else to forward your e-mail to others you get the information out there about your website and the product or service you’re selling. One key to great online marketing is remembering that quality, not quantity, counts. Avoid buying e-mail lists and focus instead on building your own with people who are actually interested in what you’re selling. Today online marketing isn’t about how many people you get to your website or how many people are on your e-mail list. Today online marketing is all about how people react to your website and what it is that you’re selling.

For more information about this part of Reaching Your Target Audience, please comment to this post and you’ll receive the Internet Marketing guide for free.

Online Marketing Defined

The definition of online marketing is: Placing your business or product on the Internet for millions of users to access so that you can turn your website into a strong tool to maximize your sales and business potential.

But online marketing is much more than putting your advertising online. Marketing online includes such areas as communicating with your customers, promoting your business or product online, and making sure that your website content is useful and up to date. The great thing about online marketing is that you don’t need to have a huge budget to put together a marketing campaign that is effective. There are tools that you can use to make your marketing techniques easy and profitable such website templates, shopping cart templates, and online marketing templates.

What You Need for Online Marketing to be Successful

There are some important points to consider before you get into the strategies and intricacies of online marketing:

• Communication. An important part of online marketing is how you respond to your customer’s e-mail. You don’t want to lose potential customers after you’ve made the effort to have them visit your website and then contact you for more information. E-mail is a very effective and cost efficient way for you to generate more sales. The key to this effectiveness is “consistency”. You need to be consistent in your response to your customers. You’ll also want to make sure that the tone of your e-mail corresponds with the tone you’ve set in your website content.

• Human Resources. If you’re going to succeed online you need to have enough people working with you. Efficient websites incorporate a personal touch with a fast response time to customers. Your goal is to turn the visitors to your website into customers. The standard time for a return e-mail is from 48 to 72 hours. If you wait any longer to e-mail back you risk losing the customer. This means that if you don’t have the man power to return e-mail in two to three days you need to take another look at your marketing strategy.

• Products people want to buy online. Before you start marketing online you need to be sure that you have a product or service that people want to buy. Customers need to find a value in what you’re selling. There are two motivating factors when it comes to selling online: cost and convenience. Ask yourself if customers will find it easier to buy online than finding a local store. Is it cheaper for them to buy this from you online?

As follows we have created a list of the more prevalent myths we heard about in SEO articles, at SEO conferences, in SEO blogs and on SEO forums:

#1: Requirement of Special Search Engine Pages.

One of the most curious things is that many companies are contacting us to develop “landing pages”. This landing pages have no SEO relevancy, the only use is for paid search campaigns such as Google AdWords. We won’t say that they are unnecessary, but in order to work well, this pages should already exist in the website. If this pages don’t bring much traffic, it doesn’t mean that we have to create new ones; better optimize what exists already.

#2: Optimize Page for Just One Keyword Phrase.

Many SEO strategist believe that optimizing a page for just one keyword phrase is the way to go. The reason behind this strategy is to keep the focus on just one keyword phrase. However, this strategy is incorrect because it’s impossible to write a page in a natural manner while you focus on just one keyword phrase.

We consider that is better to optimize the page for 3-4 keyword phrases. The more you optimize, the more targeted traffic you receive. In conclusion, optimizing a page for more than one keyword is the best way for search engine success.

#3: Don’t use Tables in Your Page.

This one make us smile. Since the apparition of search engines the HTML tables have been easily spidered. We agree that the HTML code in tableless pages looks neat and easy to follow, but the pages that use tables won’t choke the search engines. Your page would rank same, no matter what type of page you have if is optimized properly.

#4:Don’t use Image Link, Use Text Link

Like in the case of tables, the search engines are able to follow and index image links. If you want to use image links because you don’t want to ruin your design just be careful to have same anchor text and attribute text (alt tag). However, with CSS now we have the option to create links using image (for better look in design) and text links.

#5: Don’t use Flash.

We don’t recommend developing the whole website in Flash (however, the Flash technology is moving fast and are options to create Flash websites that use deep linking and they even are indexable by search engines), using bits of Flash for some cool effects will not disturb the search engines. Your website won’t get penalized because using Flash.

#6: PageRank.

Most of the website owners that use the Google Toolbar have noticed the little green bar that shows the PR of their website. This shows the importance of the website in Google. The truth is that is not an accurate representation of the page importance.

Most important is how the website performs in search engines for the chosen keyword phrases and the received traffic.

#7: SEO Certification

Many companies out there are posting on their websites the SEO Google Certification. No organization currently exists that can certify that any company is qualified to perform search engine optimization services. There are no tests that an individual or SEO company can take to prove that they are qualified. Also they are courses that, when passed, will prove that a company can do SEO.

When chose a company to do your SEO, don’t be impressed by big labels like “#1 SEO company” or Google Certified or whatever any other search engine. There’s a possibility for them to be good, as such as they are not up to your needs.

Thanks to the birth of professional search engine marketers the top ranks are saturated with the pages of companies that can pay for such insight. That said, it’s certainly possible to employ high ranking tactics in your own website. Actually, the most basic tactics can move you up from an 800 position to a 300. However, it’s the top of the scale where efforts seem almost inversely exponential or logarithmic, you put a ton in to see a tiny change in rank.

How do you meld the ambitious overhauls required to attain significant ranking and NOT compromise the design of your site?

DESIGN CAN’T BE IGNORED

If you have an existing site, you’ve probably tied it into your existing promotional content. Even if you’ve allowed your website to cater to the more free form of the net, it should still be designed as a recognizable extension of your business.

The reasons for doing so are valid, and can’t simply be ignored for the sake of achieving a first age position, can they? If your research into search optimization leaves you shuffling around thoughts of content, keyword saturated copy and varying link text, you are correctly understanding some of the basic pillars of search engine optimization.

And, you aren’t alone if you have this disheartening thought — If I do all this SEO stuff and reach number one across the board, who would stay at my site because it’s so stale and boring I’m even embarrassed to send people there!

There are two ways to successfully combine design and SEO. The first is to be a blue chip and/or Fortune 500 company with multi million dollar advertising and branding budgets to deliver your website address via television, radio, billboards, PR parties and giveaways with your logo.

Since chances are that’s not you, and certainly not me, lets look at the second option. It begins with some research into your market, some thoughtful and creative planning, and a designer who is a search engine optimizer, and understands at least basic CSS and HTML programming techniques. Or a combination of people with these skills that can work very well together.

DESIGN IS FOR BROCHURES, INSTANT RESULTS ARE FOR THE WEB

That’s not the whole truth, but it will help compare and contrast design and SEO. In reality, SEO needs the quantity and detail of supporting text that a brochure has, but good web design has to catch a viewer’s attention in 5 seconds. It’s pretty difficult to read and absorb the content of an entire brochure in less than 5 seconds.

Search engines need rich, related, appropriate, changing and poignant content. And for them to rank you, all of that must be on your pages. But if it’s not well organized and broken down into bite size chunks, no one is going to bother learning about what you’re offering.

CONSTRUCTION 101- ATTRACTIVE DESIGN AND SEO

Sadly, it’s very difficult to optimize a site without completely overhauling it. You’ll soon understand why. Design and SEO must be strongly rooted into every aspect of each other, possessing a true, symbiotic relationship. Lets look at a simplified example of this. Lets say you are optimizing a page for the keyword phrase, “pumpkin bread recipe.”

From a design standpoint “Pumpkin Bread Recipe” would be the heading for the page, in a nice, readable font with the words perhaps an orange-brown color. And lets add a fine, green rule around it.

There are many ways to create that simple, colored heading. However, there is only one way that is best for both design and SEO. That is to use Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. In addition, that line of code containing “Pumpkin Bread Recipe” needs to be as close to the top of the page as possible (which CSS also allows).

To a viewer, the recipe text might be read more if it were located to the right of a photo of a buttered piece of pumpkin bread on a small plate next to a lightly steaming cup of coffee.

SEO needs to read that ingredient list and baking instructions. Search engines now understand on a rudimentary level that the ingredients are indeed related to the optimized words- pumpkin bread recipe.

Additionally, it would take many extra lines of code to make a table in this example if you didn’t use CSS. Search engines don’t like extra code. In fact, given enough times, that “extra” code will make the keyword phrases seem less important and hurt rank.

Note: In the page code, a few thousand characters more than you need to get all of that content organized would normally just add to your page load time, and might be acceptable. But to a search engine, that time can really add up. It wont read through page after page, site after site, billionth after billionth character of unimportant code to find the relevant text. Therefore, the less code, the better your chances. Moral- Less code, more content.

SEO USUALLY MEANS REDO

In the previous pumpkin example, CSS will eliminate the need for almost any extra code at all, and provide the means to place the text to the right of the photo.

Now, imagine that someone had already created this page, but done so using other programming methods. The page could very well be W3C compliant, well programmed and got the job done. However, without designing and programming for optimization as in the above illustration, the end result would have no significant rank compared to others that do.

You can be sure that there exist at least 30 web sites built to rank for the keywords “pumpkin bread recipe”. Note – why did I use the number 30? It’s safe to assume if you’re not on the first three results pages of a search, you’re not being seen.

While this is a simple example, hopefully you understand that it would be impossible to optimize this simple page without redoing it. This isn’t always the case, but extrapolate this into detailed, multiple pages in an entire website and the issue is greatly magnified.

AESTHETIC IMPORTANCE VS. TRAFFIC

Everyone has an idea of what they want their site to look like. The pretty factor – splash pages, cool flash and graphics must now be justified as to their importance to the bottom line. If you want/need to establish an online presence, you will have to make some compromises in these areas.

Understand exactly the role your site should play in your company marketing.

Ask – What is the goal of your website and who is its audience? Is it for existing clients to see? Is it to reach new clients? To venture into yet untapped market segments?

Ask- How strongly do your other marketing efforts promote your site?

Ask – Is your website an extension of your existing collateral that must reflect the same graphical look?

Ask – Is your website meant to assist to your sales force or is it your sales force?

Chances are you wont have any single answers. That’s ok. It will give you some meat for your designer/SEO to digest and develop a solution for you.

REAL CASE OF DESIGN BALANCED WITH SEO AND SALABILITY

If you sell jewelry solely online, you must have a catalog of exceptional photography and detailed, high-resolution close up images. But, you must be optimized and rank well if you want to sell any of that jewelry.

If such a company approached me with this project, my recommendation would be this: If you sell a product, people have to see that product. Lots of good images. The site should be slick and sheik and easy to navigate. The home page has to capture the buyer’s attention. If it’s very expensive jewelry, the site should have a lot of class and elegance. If it’s home made jewelry, the site shouldn’t look home made.

However, as you have no store front, if the online community can’t find you, you’re business will fail. So I’d have a very optimized home page with some discussion of the quality of your product, the history of your company, etc. This is also great sales copy. Ad a few special catalog pieces with descriptions below some smartly placed gifs, jpegs and readable type graphics built out of CSS and you’ve got a cool to look at, content rich, well optimized layout.

I’d make the link to your catalog very obvious and prominent. Note the catalog is not the homepage. I’d also include subsequent well written, in depth pages about the history of some specific pieces. Load them with targeted keywords and a few images. Again, make your catalog link very prominent. In doing so you’re creating relevant content for search engines AND providing additional pages that can rank.

The catalog can be database driven, simple and changeable, and you have the foundation to build your search rank.

PLANNING YOUR SITE

If your designer is not a search engine optimizer, hire one to work with your designer from the initial development stage of your site. If you would like a visible presence that is not dependant on traditional marketing efforts to get your name around, then you will have to optimize.

However, with advances in html and css, text itself can be a very flexible and attractive design element with endless possibilities. Site optimization consists of some rigid, unbendable rules. It can be intertwined successfully with very creative and attractive design. If your Designer and SEO aren’t the same person or company, make sure they have the same, close working relationship.