SEO Best Practices

SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay per click), and the various other means of increasing the visibility of your business online; At the end of the day, your online marketing is actually a combination of all of these.

The internet has already taken over so many offline activities; we are almost doing everything online. There is hardly any business that does not have an online presence. It is no longer something that a business considers but by default builds the online marketing activity into its marketing campaign.

Out of all of these activities, SEO is certainly an activity which is ongoing. The initial effort towards optimizing a website for search engines and visitors is immense, but once the major effort has been put in, it does not require the same kind of mammoth effort; what is required is the ongoing work so that you can keep up and ahead of your competition.

PPC can be used to quickly get relevant visitors, once the SEO work starts to show results, PPC can be tapered off. This of course depends upon the marketing strategy that a business employs.

So what do marketers do on an ongoing basis to ensure that their websites keep ranking well, and the traffic to their web site keeps growing?

One thing is to keep a close watch at the web analytics report, that tells marketers almost everything , and much more about the health of the website. They can find information that can be used to better the user’s experience during their visit. This is one of the ongoing things that every webmaster needs to do.

Besides this, in my earlier article we discussed how a newly launched website can get more relevant traffic and sales by tying up with online coupon sites.

These coupon sites already enjoy a good numbers of visitors because of the attractive discounts they offer. Getting into a contract with such sites will help any business new or existing in many ways:-

1. This is your chance to showcase your service and product; you have a customer walking into your store for a product or service. By providing your best service to the customer, the customer might end up buying more products or even secure another appointment with you.

2. A satisfied customer will go back and spread the good word. The best part is, the amount of goodwill this will create for you, not only will you gain a customer; you will now have a satisfied customer talking about your services!

3. Some customers might write good reviews about your service/products; even better for you.

The idea after is to get relevant visitors to your store, to try out your products and services and then to make them your loyal customer.

The basic strategy should be to combine SEO and some more online marketing strategy in such a way that they work together to bring in the desired results.

Once you get an idea of which services are the most popular, you can introduce a new section in your website regarding that particular product/service. This will be a fresh content for your website; thus helping your SEO efforts.

You can run a short term PPC campaign on the selected products and services in order to maximize traffic.

Make a noise about it in your home page, link this section from every page and get as many visitors as possible engaged in that section.

Get a Press Release done on your products and services and get it published across all new sites.

All these combined activities will not only help in getting your SEO rankings up, it will fulfill your ultimate aim, higher conversions.

Now isn’t this a wonderful amalgamation of the various online marketing strategies?

Definition of Affiliate Marketing

Simply put Affiliate marketing definition would be : Selling products and services belonging to someone else from their own websites. Affiliates earn a commission from the merchants for  selling their products and services.Affiliate marketing is one of the key components of  Internet marketing

Best practices for Affiliate marketing would be almost the same as any website trying to sell their products and services online. The difference here is, they will be competing with not only the merchant’s site but also other affiliates. The key is to be original (content wise) and to have attractive Ad campaigns.

Merchant sites that sell products and services globally, may have affiliates who display  products  on their site. Customers  who click on the products are taken to the merchant’s site, and if  any of those clicks  result in conversion, the affiliate earns a commission  on that sale.

Sometimes Affiliates can enroll partners under them, who in  turn help them self the products/ services. There are  various levels of affiliate programs and varies from  merchant to merchant.

Mostly websites that are already established and are  selling products and services from their website can do  well as an affiliate. By being an affiliate such websites increase their chances of earning more money . This is not to say that new sites will  not do well, but it would require much more effort and a  lot of advertising effort as well. Affiliates usually use  Search Engine Marketing: SEO and Pay Per Click advertising to advertise their sites. Usually Pay Per Click brings instant results, but this involves spending marketing dollars.

The models that Affiliates usually work with are essentially,   “Cost per action”, “Contextual advertising”, and “Revenue  sharing” models.

Affiliate marketing is another means through which  merchants can sell their products and services online. Especially, if the products need to be promoted globally.  By establishing an affiliate partnership with an already  established local site, merchants can boost the sale of  products and services. It is a win-win situation for the merchants and Affiliates since this becomes a passive income source for affiliates and the merchants in turn gain by increased sale of their products and services.

If you wish to try out Affiliate marketing to promote your products and services, check out Commission Junction, they offer various options to start off your Affiliate program.

For more on Affiliate marketing, visit  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing