The world of Internet marketing is a constantly changing one. Keeping in touch with the latest trends is essential for any business that seeks to establish a serious online presence. Gone are the times when you could simply launch a website and do a little bit of search engine marketing to increase your ranking and traffic to your website. For most businesses these days, a website is more than just a basic online informational resource for your existing and potential customers. Nowadays, you need to pay attention to the various core elements of successful online marketing including website content, social media marketing and, of course, search engine marketing. If you pay close attention to these three critical elements, you will be well on your way to making a success in the highly competitive world of Internet business.
1. The Website
One thing that has never changed in the world of Internet marketing is the fact that your website is the central focus of your online presence. What has changed, however, is that launching a website for your business is far easier and cheaper than it used to be. Back in the late nineties when the Dot Com boom was in full swing and many companies were jumping on the bandwagon to get themselves known in the rapidly growing online world, starting a website was often a costly endeavour. Domain name registration and web hosting were more expensive than now but the most significant expense was that of hiring a web designer. Fortunately, times have changed and some things have become easier. Launching a website is one of those things.
Designing a website nowadays rarely requires much, if any, knowledge of coding and web design. With various free and open source content management systems such as WordPress at your disposal, designing and launching an interactive website has never been so easy. Unless you need to build a particularly complex website for a larger business with such features as an online store, you may not need to hire the services of a web designer.
Remember that your website is the main thing that represents your company online. While hiring the services of a web designer is not usually necessary these days, you should still ensure that your website looks professional and is easily navigable and user friendly. Providing unique and high quality content is absolutely essential as is keeping your site updated as regularly as possible. Providing suitable content offers something of interest to your visitors and helps you to rank higher in the search results. This takes us onto the next key element of creating an effective presence for your business online.
2. Search Engine Marketing
The search engines, Google in particular, form the beating heart of the Internet. Almost everyone who uses the Web uses a search engine on a frequent basis. When you look at the traffic statistics for the vast majority of the world’s millions of websites, you will see that most first-time visitors ultimately come to a website having started from the search engines.
Search engine marketing, although not particularly complicated, is challenging due to the fact that a great deal of time, patience and perseverance is required. There is simply so much competition out there that getting a higher rank in the search engine listings is certainly not something that you can expect overnight. What you should be aiming for, however, and regardless of how long it takes, is to get your website into the first page of results when people search for relevant terms. Remember that few people ever bother looking beyond the first page in the search results unless they are looking for something very specific.
This is where the importance of key words and phrases come in. When designing your website and writing content for it, choose some relevant key words and phrases first and integrate these into the titles, tags and content of your website so that the search engines can more effectively index and categorise your website. A useful free tool for keyword research is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This will give you a good idea of which key words and phrases are most popular, which ones are the most competitive and how many searches per month (both locally and internationally) they receive.
3. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is constantly talked about in the world of online commerce and marketing. Relatively new on the scene compared to search engine marketing which has been around since the beginning of the Web, social media marketing has become something far too important to ignore. Social media refers to websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many others. These websites are used for connecting people, businesses and organizations together. They are used for sharing information, providing updates and interacting with different communities. With most of the world’s Web users involved on a daily basis in the world of social media, it becomes easy to see why this is something that businesses cannot ignore.
Using social media helps to establish an interactive online presence as well as drive more traffic to your website. However, to ensure success, there are two critical things to remember about social media marketing: Choose appropriate social networking sites for your business and ensuing that you keep an active presence on your chosen sites.
Many businesses maintain a Facebook page while others use a Twitter account for providing regular updates on products, services and other things. Many businesses use multiple social networking resources. Facebook is more for people-orientated businesses, Twitter is for pretty much anyone and anything and LinkedIn is better geared towards professionals. There are many other resources, however. Do your research carefully to choose the best ones for your needs. Don’t forget that most of these sites are completely free to use as well.
To find out more about the services offered by Digital Pacific including domain names and web hosting, visit www.digitalpacific.com.au or give our friendly team a call on 1300 MY HOST.
