Back in the days BI (Before Internet) companies trying to reach customers were pretty much tied to television, radio and newspaper advertising with a few sending out advertising mailers to keep their customers informed about what they were doing and what they were selling. Networking meant going to meetings and mixers and swapping business cards with all of the other business folks, regardless of their industry.

With the dawning of the internet age, all this has changed. Sure, some die-hards still attend industry meetings and hand out business cards, but when it comes to reaching out to their customers they have turned to the internet to get their marketing message, as well as advertising, to their potential customers.

It took a few years for business owners to recognize that the internet was becoming popular and when customers started asking if they had a website, they started thinking that maybe this internet things wasn’t just a fad like the hoola-hoop. Now, nearly every business, small, medium and large has a website. Social media has allowed them to expand their interaction with their customers and find some new ones to boot. Not too bad for something that’s only been around for about 20 years.

When the internet was first plugged in it was basically a storage area for information. Today it is a means for people to interact with the world and businesses have realized the importance of having an online presence. Businesses have also learned new options of improving their relationship with their customers, such as engagement and how to provide customer service while never really coming face-to-face with them.

It took some of the older business owners a while to understand that the internet was changing the way their business will operate in the future. However, once they got a handle on the reality of electronic communications and how they could reach out to more customers, or at least potential customers, for far less money than their old advertising ways, the use of the internet by businesses took off.

Social media also presented a new opportunity to take their marketing plans to the next level. No longer are their marketing efforts limited to business mixers with industry peers and even leaders, but they now have access to the customers themselves. They understand that it is not enough to have a website explaining the company’s history and goals. To improve their reputation on a global scale they have to have a presence in the social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

They can now put out a message, as well as advertising, to hundreds of thousands of customers with a few mouse clicks at a fraction of the cost as traditional advertising. It may have taken a few short years, but more businesses are recognizing that the internet changed the way to do business, like it or not.

One of the main stumbling blocks when starting a new online business is marketing your site without a lot of money in your pocket. Face it. Without advertising or some means of marketing, your site can go for months without anyone finding it. Unlike the famous movie, if you build it they won’t come if they don’t know it is there.

Consider the scenario: you build a great brick-and-mortar business on a small country road. It has the best possible appearance and its setting is exceptionally inviting to visitors. Further more you stock some of the best products available at unbelievably low process and then open your door. Since you don’t have a lot of money you have to choose between newspaper advertising and a billboard. You opt for the billboard, thinking it will draw more attention to your business that is off the beaten path.

Unfortunately, the only billboard you could afford was on another country road that has maybe six cars a day drive by. You spent the last of your resources and have no customers to show for it. This happens frequently with new websites and until money starts coming in, advertising is just a dream.

On the internet there are alternatives such as affiliate marketing to help drive business to your site with the help of other, hopefully more established websites. Affiliate marketing can help drive traffic to your site without having to pay for advertising. Other sites place an ad on their site for something you sell, hopefully it is a site that is relevant to yours, and you pay them a percentage of any sales that come from visitors from that site. If they don’t buy anything, you don’t pay.

You can establish your own in-house affiliate program complete with all the tracking software or you can connect with an online site that will do all the work for you. This method can be a more cost-effective method of gaining visitors. Affiliate marketing sites typically allow you to develop your own ads, textual or graphic, and then announce on their business that you are accepting affiliates.

You have the choice of allowing them to automatically become one of your affiliates or wait until you approve their site before making it official. Depending on the type of business you operate, this may be a good choice to make sure your ad isn’t showing up on sites whose content makes you uncomfortable. You may not want visitors coming to your site from XXX rated sites, which could allow people to draw the conclusion that you condone those sites, even if you don’t.

Additionally, most websites look at how many links from relevant sites you have linking to your site and the more relevant websites that carry your ads as affiliates can count as a link back. If you accept a site as an affiliate you may want to see about placing an ad from them on your site, although you are going to pay them for any sales they send your way, the outbound link may also help your search engine rankings.

Here are a few words to the wise: never overlook the critical importance of website development for search engine optimization success.

When you properly develop your website with SEO in mind, you boost the site’s potential in the search engine rankings. For those curious as to how they can enhance their website in such a manner, here are a few basic tips to follow to make your website more search engine friendly:

Properly research into keywords to be used on the site is a must. Most people realize that keywords are vital for visitors finding the site. Most people also understand that excessive keyword stuffing is a “no-no” because the search engines frown on such an approach. Where people falter, however, is when they make determinations as to what keywords to use without performing effective research. You need to use the right keywords and that means you need to use keywords that are most commonly searched for. There are keyword research tools that can provide you with the right selection of keywords. Using these tools is a must when trying to properly integrate keywords into your website’s text.

And speaking of the text of the website…..

Most understand a website needs to have a decent amount of valuable and informative text. However, the text also needs to be fresh and frequently updated. When the text on a website stays the same month after month or, worse, year after year, the search engine robots will rank other sites that are frequently updated over it. The assumption – whether fair or not – is that a site that is never update may not even be one that the publisher of the site is interested in. Hence, it will be dropped in the rankings. Rather than find your site in such a position, be sure to update it at frequent intervals.

Properly devising a site map on the home page of the website is necessary as well. This way, the search engine robots can index all the subpages of your site. This can certainly boost the amount of traffic you receive from the search engines since all your pages will be properly indexed. Without a site map in place, it would be much, much longer for such complete indexing to take place.

Adding a social media widget to the site is a new concept that is drawing rave reviews. Basically, the way this process works is that a widget can add a scaled down social network that operates within the framework of your site. To say this can have enormous potential on SEO as well as the overall successful operation of the site would be an understatement. That is why looking towards installing a simple social networking widget is a wise idea. Such widgets are generally automated and user-friendly. So, don’t assume you need to be a programming expert to integrate and manage them on your site.

Do some of these website SEO development plans sound rather simple? Honestly, most of them are simple. They are also effective. As such, it would certainly be wise to look towards employing these concepts in the development of your website. Your internet marketing success will depend on it.

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