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How to Increase Traffic to your Site
The process of advertising and marketing products and
services online is commonly referred to as Internet marketing. Popular modes of
online marketing include Search Engine Marketing (SEM), affiliate advertising,
email marketing, banners, blogs, interactive advertising, and information
articles.
SEM is the largest subsection of the marketing strategy
pool. It seeks to boost the visibility of a website on a search engine and thus
garner more traffic onto the site. The tools of SEM are search engine
optimization (SEO), pay per click marketing and paid listing.
SEO allows marketers to improve the quantity and quality of
the search engine rankings or ‘hits’ by optimizing the site structure and
content for easy identification by relevant searches performed by search
engines and people. The idea is to be able to reach your website’s target
market by using the correct set of optimization tools to be listed on the
appropriate searches and on the right search engines. Some common ways to
achieve SEO:
- Keyword
basics – Selecting relevant, widely used keyword sets and making certain
that the number of times these keywords appear in the content ensures a
good search engine ranking. This is known as keyword density or saturation
SEO, and the belief is that when search engines ‘spider’ or scan through
content on a site, they look for a certain percentage of keyword density
(say 2-5%). - Website
architecture – A clear, understandable structure and a site map may
encourage search engines and people to spider or scan the site effectively
and easily. - Link
Strategies – A marketer can create links that point towards the page, also
known as ‘inbound links’ that should be relevant, keyword-oriented and
plentiful to direct traffic towards the web page and improve its search
engine rank. - Optimized
content – Well-organized and grouped content and reduced graphics for
quick loading time is said to be another subset of criteria for SEO. - Though
algorithms used for search engine rankings vary, are kept secret and are
said to keep changing, an SEO consultant can apply some to your site based
on experience and analysis.
Pay per click (PPC) advertising or sponsored searches are
sites or pages that are displayed in search engine results pages, which the
advertiser pays to have displayed. Some of the major search engines such as
Google will display these separately from the ‘organic’ or SEO-based pages. The
marketer only pays when the link is clicked on, hence the name ‘pay per click’.
A hybrid of SEO and PPC is paid listings. The advertiser
pays a fee that ensures the website is listed in the organic search results but
does not promise the ranking or placement.
Email advertising is an instant, low cost way to reach your
customer and build awareness of your product or services. It can also result in
conversion in the form of requests for information or customer
acquisition. According to the Direct
Marketing Association, businesses in the
marketing in 2006. It entails advertising to past, present and potential
customers via email and experts claim that it ranks next only to SEM in
efficacy.
Banner ads, blogs and informative articles are a part of
Internet marketing that help to create awareness and link to related services
or products. Websites sell ad space for this purpose.
Affiliate advertising works like the finder’s fee concept –
the affiliate is paid for every visitor or customer. Certain sectors are
expected to benefit more than other by affiliate marketing – finance, retail,
travel and gambling. There exist networks or intermediaries that offer this
service.
Interactive marketing is a sophisticated use of technology
to set up a dialogue with potential customers in an effort to persuade them to
buy the product or service. Viral marketing is one of the most popular
instances, and it implies the use of links, video clips etc sent out via email
to be forwarded on from one person to another. There are specialized companies
that undertake interactive advertising, other than major advertisers.
Overall, there are a number of ways to increase traffic to
your website and you simply need to select the best fit for you. Create an
effective, relevant marketing strategy involving these methods to aggressively
push your product.
