Affordable Search Engine
Optimization
by Jim Pretin
If you have a struggling internet
business, you are probably facing the difficult task of how to attract
visitors to your website at a price you can afford. Indeed, internet
marketing is a challenge, and it takes years of persistence. There are
many affordable ways to get traffic to your site. For now, we will
outline the most practical ways for you to market your online business
without having to spend a great deal of money.
The most important task is search
engine submission and optimization. There are many different search
engines and directories on the internet where you can submit your web
site. You need to sign up for a monthly submission plan with a credible
search engine submission service. There are hundreds of these
submission services on the internet; you can find them by doing a
search on Google.
However, be wary of submission
services that claim to be able to submit your site to 75,000 search
engines. These unscrupulous submitters will submit your website to FFA
pages and bogus link pages that can actually get you banned permanently
from the search engines. You should only do business with submission
services that submit only to the major search engines and directories.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is
even more important. To optimize a site, you need to maximize your
keyword density and optimize the positioning for the words or phrases
for which you want to be listed. And, you need to use proper Meta tags
so that the search engines can interpret your web pages.
If you do not know how to optimize
your web site, you should search for an optimization consultant on
Google. Avoid SEO experts who want to charge you $1,000 per month or
more. Their goal is to bleed you dry before you figure out that they
really can not help improve your ranking. Stick to providers who will
optimize your site for a reasonable fee.
More important than SEO is link
popularity. Link popularity is the number of web sites that currently
link to your site. The more inbound links you acquire, the higher your
search engine ranking will be.
There are several ways you can
increase your number of inbound links. You can submit your site to free
directories, or join a link exchange and trade links with other sites,
or, you can author articles and press releases and submit them to
article directories. When webmasters looking for free content place
your article on their site, they must link back to your website.
If you are not patient enough to
wait for your search engine ranking to improve, you can attract
visitors to your web site right away by using pay-per-click (PPC). With
PPC, you pay a certain cost per click to have an ad for your web page
run at or near the top of the search engines. This can be extremely
costly and ineffective. It is not uncommon for webmasters to blow
thousands of dollars on PPC advertising and make only a few sales.
The best way to promote your site,
if you are actually selling something, is through an affiliate program.
You need to provide an affiliate code to other online merchants so that
they will place your banner on their site; every time you make a sale
that resulted from an affiliate referral, the affiliate gets a
commission. You will have to consult with an experienced programmer who
can set up the program so that the affiliate codes can be tracked
properly.
Some internet companies have
thousands of affiliates, and get all the business they would ever need
or want this way; and it costs you nothing. To recruit affiliates, you
should submit your affiliate program to directories where you can list
your affiliate program for free or for a small price. The best way to
find affiliates is by listing your program on forums or message boards
frequented by webmasters who are looking to generate additional revenue
for their online business.
I hope this information will help
you with your internet marketing efforts. No website can become an
overnight sensation; it takes time and effort. But, if you work
diligently and follow each of the procedures outlined in the article,
you should do fine.
About the Author
Jim Pretin is the owner of
http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make an HTML form
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