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Adrift for a Few Years, Internet Marketing is Beginning to Show Signs of Clear Sailing Ahead !

By Chris Tucker

In recent years, getting your website noticed has been a pothole riddled path up a slippery slope. It was an expensive hit or miss test for most website owners. Especially when 9 out of 10 "traffic builder" type programs were/are designed to do one thing; separate you from your money.

Unlike offline marketing, where a clear cut path for creating a presence works time and time again, online strategies that actually worked were few and far between. Banner advertising was just the tip of the iceberg in the dot com fallout. Multimillion dollar Superbowl ads couldn't float dead dot coms either.

Fortunately, a natural evolution and maturity has begun to take hold. Much as offline marketing plans include specific business building strategies, online marketing's path is becoming much more clear now. Lets take a look at a couple of basic building blocks proven to bring you fresh visitors every week.

Yahoo!, the grand gathering palace of the web, is still very popular today, garnering around 30% marketshare of search traffic. Search traffic is important because consumers search for things. If you have things they want and present yourself during their search, you have a good chance of connecting with them. In the old days,Yahoo! was a total crap shoot for even getting your site listed. It took weeks and months in most instances. Today, you pay a $299 annual fee to be listed and your site appears in the directory in about a week after paying. Even if you only get 100 visitors a month from Yahoo! like many other sites, ( some get thousands ) your per visitor cost is about 25¢. Certainly a reasonable price.

But Yahoo! is only one search portal. What about the other 70% of the search traffic ? A good portion of that percentage can be covered by entering the pay-per-click side of search engines through a company called Overture. They operate a "keyword auction", where people bid for position. The top 3-6 bidders are shown across a wide swath of search portals like MSN, AltaVista, Netscape and others. Buying into the Overture pay-per-click program is the same type of strategy as setting up a YellowPages campaign offline; an important aspect of any marketing plan. Pay-per-click advertising on the search engines can very well comprise 50% or more of a small business online marketing budget. But deployed correctly, a pay-per-click campaign will produce highly targeted traffick at a reasonable visitor acquisition price.

Google also offers a program similar to Overture's. This buy in adds your presence to Google and America Online as well as a few others. However, as much as Google is like Overture, it is also very different and takes time to learn, understand and be effective with.

Inktomi is a powerful spider whose results power a large swath of search portal results. They offer a direct feed program through a number of vendors. We use PositionTech and have found their service to be very good. For about $100 yearly, the Inktomi spider will come by and crawl about 4 pages of your site on a weekly basis. This is money well spent, if you first employ the skills of a search engine optimization company who prepares your site for visits from the spiders. In most instances, paying to have a spider visit is not worth anything if the pages are not prepared for the visit.

The Open directory is one of the last remaining free places to submit that is of major importance to launching a web presence. It powers many of the directories found on the net, including Google's. However, it is run by volunteers. so, expect a minimum of two months before you will be listed here

One of the important aspects of paying for Yahoo!, Inktomi and submitting to the Open Directory is that many of the search engines, like Google, look at who links into your site. If these three major sites link to yours you will rank better than sites you compete with who do not have links in from them. It is always better to have links in from them before submitting to all the others. Combined with the Google and Overture pay-per-click programs you will have an initial supply of visitors to begin gauging how well you can convert them to sales. This is a good period of time to be constantly evaluating your content, the message, the online sales process and refine it to convert more of those visitors into sales.

Search engine optimization is an important task to be completed on all new or non-performing sites. A professional SEO company will set your website up so that it can receive a good position across a wide swath of search portals, large and small. By employing an SEO company to provide the services mentioned here, it frees you up to spend more time analyzing how to create and convert more sales, provide better customer service and a host of other challenges businesses face every day.

These five steps provide both immediate and long term visitor growth through the way most people find what they are looking for; on search engines. It is a much more assured process than during the days gone by.

There are other fee based programs trying to get a foot hold on the path but for now, the concensus of SEO professionals is that this list will provide a good basis with proven companies offering sensical and legitimate traffic building programs online.

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Chris Tucker is the Director of RightNow Communications, based in Colorado. The company has specialized in creating and deploying internet marketing plans since 1998. For more information visit http://netrafic.com

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