Internet marketing has changed the way the way people find your business!

There was a time when everything people wanted to find within a city was in a big yellow book and all you had to do as a business was make sure you were in it and you were pretty much covered. That big book still exists but not too many people are too looking for you there. Rather the dynamic new standard for gathering information is the Internet marketing.

Powered by engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, information seekers are able to find the websites of the businesses offering the services they need in seconds. That being said, while there’s clearly an advantage to having a website or online presence, but it is not much of an advantage when everybody else has a website too.

First is Still the Best:

In the big yellow book days there was a huge benefit to be had from being on the first few pages in a given category. Back then the companies with names starting with the beginning of the alphabet were listed first. In fact many businesses used to choose their name solely based on optimizing it for these directories.

You might be happy to learn that not much has changed in this regard. There’s still a huge benefit today to be derived from your business showing up on the first few search result pages within a search engine. But what’s different is getting your site/keywords ranked highly on the first pages isn’t as easy as “ABC, 123” naming anymore. This is where SEO and Internet marketing come into play.

Appealing to the Invisible Robots and Spiders:

So then how do search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing determine which company sites get to be displayed first for a specific “category”?

The short answer is that they use extremely complex algorithms in combination with computerized invisible worker agents called “Robots” or “Spiders” to determine and display the websites that best satisfy what the searcher was looking for based on the specific search phrase they entered (What the industry refers to as referred to as Keywords or keyword phrases).

So intuitively we can see that it would be beneficial to rank highly for the keyword phrases that define your business and its services or products. Often the exact same phrases that people would use to find your business. Unfortunately, it is likely that you’re competitors will want to rank well for the exact same keywords which raises the following two questions.

First, how exactly do you go about making sure the Robots and Spiders understand what you’re site is about so that you rank well for those keywords? And secondly, how do you influence these algorithms in determining that your site is among the best options to display for those keywords over your competitors?

The answer to both of these is SEO and Internet marketing.

King of the Search Mountain:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) does exactly what it says; it optimizes your website to rank well for relevant keyword phrases that searchers are using to find the services your business is offering. Search engine optimized sites are easily readable by Robots and Spiders and incorporate all the necessary information needed to help promote your website in the search rankings. But what exactly is involved in conducting SEO or more simply, how do you go about optimizing your website for search engines?

The way in which search engines determine which site ranks best for specific keywords is broadly speaking based on two set of criteria; on-site relevance and off-site relevance.

Generally speaking, onsite SEO deals with displaying content contained within your website in a way that optimizes the site for specific keywords.

On-site SEO elements include things such as:

• Proper HTML tagging including Title tags, Meta-descriptions, H1 tags etc.
• Search Engine Friendly URLs
• Image Alt tags
• Schema markup
• Internal linking
• Keyword choice and placement

The second half of the formula is off-site SEO:

Offsite SEO refers to the “credibility” given to your site from outside sources for the keywords you want to rank well for. However, not all links are treated equally. As an example if you were involved in some kind of business pertaining to basketball, a link to your site from WWW.NBA.COM would in theory give your site a significant search ranking boost. Conversely, a link from your friend’s basketball hobby site would only give you a slight boost. Once again this is a small piece of the whole off-site SEO process.

Other Off-site SEO processes include factors such as:

• Anchor text of inbound links
• Origin of inbound links
• Links from similar sites
• Number of backlinks from various sources

Essentially, the take away point from all this here is that when conducting proper SEO/Internet marketing it is important to optimize both on-site and off-site elements in order to ensure peak performance.