Internet Marketing

If you build it they will come!... Right?

Unlike traditional advertising in printed media, yellow pages, bill boards, radio and TV, Internet marketing provides the ability to track advertising performance right away by looking at traffic statistics to your website. If you do not have a statistical tracking script on your website then you are missing on something fascinating. You can monitor how many people visited your sight, which pages they viewed, how long they stayed on your sight, where they came from and what search phrases or keywords they used to find you to name a few. With this information, you can make changes to your sight to optimize its marketing performance almost overnight. Try doing that with a several hundred dollars print ad, or several thousand dollars radio or TV production. This page explains the various Internet marketing resources available to you.

There are basically two on-line ways to get your prospect to visit your website: Paid Ad Campaigns and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

1. AD CAMPAIGNS, PAY PER CLICK AND SPONSORED RESULTS

An ad campaign is done through the major search engines such as Google® and Yahoo® otherwise known as "pay per click" or "sponsored matches". This is accomplished by creating an ad for your site, depositing funds into an account and bidding a certain amount per click. When someone clicks on your ad to visit your website, your account is reduced by the amount of your bid. Your ad will continue to run until your account is exhausted at which point the ad will go off-line. Once you refill your account and reactivate your campaign, the ad will then come back on-line.

Generally the position of your ad in relation to the top of a search engine result page (SERP) depends whether you are the highest bidder, the second highest, third.. and so on. To really be considered effective, your position should be one of the top three. In cases where the desired keywords are highly competitive such as "real estate new york" the bid amounts could be very high, possibly over $10 per click. In other cases, where the keywords are not very competitive such as in "miniature pneumatic pumps" the bid amount could be very low. Perhaps even in the .10 cent range (usually the minimum bid).

Ad campaigns can be very effective in exposing your website to your target audience and should be a consideration in your marketing budget. However, proper selection and combination of keywords into the proper phrases is crucial in setting up an effective campaign. Cape Fear Technologies has the experience and tools needed to assist you in your key phrase selections and in setting up your campaigns in Google® and Yahoo®.

Another form of Ad Campaign is LocalAdLink, the easiest and most affordable way to advertise online. With LocalAdLink there are no bidding wars. They have three offerings which are all extremely affordable. Click here for more information.

2. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

SEO is the process of maximizing the content of your website to meet the guidelines of the search engine spiders and human reviewers. These guidelines also known as "algorithms" are sets of standards created by the search engines to maximize the relevancy of search results and to minimize irrelevant search results. For years, many inadequate tactics have been utilized by website owners in an attempt to beat the competition resulting in a tremendous amount of irrelevant search results. Today, these search engine algorithms are very sophisticated, precise and effective. Websites that attempt to use inadequate tactics are being penalized and dropped from the search engines, period.

There are many factors involved in proper SEO but the bottom line is that your website must contain good relevant content to what your business provides. The rest is following proper protocol in setting up behind the scene coding that includes:

• TITLE
• META TAG DESCRIPTION
• META TAG KEYWORDS
• ALT TAGS
• TITLED LINKS
• PROPER PLACING OF HEADINGS
• PROPER KEYWORD DENSITY
• ELIMINATE REDUNDANT OR UNEEDED CODE
• WEBSITE POPULARITY
• FRESH CONTENT
• KEYWORDS IN THE URL
• HOW LONG YOUR SITE HAS BEEN ONLINE

There is much more to it than that but it should suffice to say that SEO is an ever changing field because the search engines keep producing better and better algorithms and as a result, the guidelines change as well.

Cape Fear Technologies provides SEO services ranging from free reviews to weekly or monthly monitoring and updates as needed of our clients' websites. SEO fees are based volume. We will be happy to provide you with a complimentary report on your website. Simply contact us and we will send you the report. You might by surprised at what you'll learn. Most website owners are. Let our SEO technical experts take a look at your site: