5 Key Points for a Successful Internet Marketing Plan

To market a website on the internet successfully, proper planning is very necessary. You should always prepare the strategy before starting optimization and promotion of any website. I believe that search engine optimization and web promotion are two different concepts and we should not mix the two. Search Engine Optimization is the technique by which you prepare and optimize your website according to the guidelines provided by the Search Engines. Apart from this, SEO also includes other methods and techniques like building link popularity, enhancing website usability etc. I will be discussing all the steps and procedures for marketing of any website individually.

A. Multiple Marketing Strategies

Don't put all your eggs into one basket and employ only one marketing strategy. The strategies and plans differ based on the industry, the product or simply the company policy. So, ultimately you have to decide the factors to be considered and techniques to be adopted. Many website owners, who once had top rankings for their commercial sites in Google, were dropped from the results during latest Google updates, thus instantly losing sales.

By creating multiple or more than one online marketing strategy for your website, you can analyse and decide which one works the best for you by attracting the most visitors.

B. Be Consistent

Maintaining a balance between the techniques is very important. Also, consistency is the key to success. So whatever plans you make, stick to it and keep working on it. Always set a clear daily, weekly, monthly and yearly marketing plan for your website and stick to it.

C. Cross Checking and Test Marketing

Keep on checking and testing your web site marketing strategies continuously to see which one works best for you. Eliminate those that are not profitable.

D. Adopt New Techniques

Online marketing is a field which is continuously growing. Daily new things are evolving and a new methodology is invented. So be dynamic. Keep on adopting new methods as per the requirement and eliminate the outdated ones.

E. Stick to The Basics

Adopting new techniques and eliminating outdated ones does not mean forgetting the basics. Of course, the trends keep on changing but there are certain basic thumb rules which you should never forget. Use the new methods as enhancements of your marketing plan. Always stick to the basics.

The steps involved in online marketing of any website are:

1. Market research and analysis
2. Competitors’ analysis
3. Keyword research
4. Usability study
5. Content development with the help of SEO copywriting
6. Developing a Search Engine friendly website
7. Search Engine Optimization
1. On Page Optimization
2. Off Page Optimization
8. Site submission
9. Website enhancement
10. Marketing and branding

In my future posts, I will discuss one by one about all these techniques in detail.

25 Free Link Building Tips

25 Great Ways to Get Free One Way Backlinks for Your Website

1. Write articles and submit in niche article directories with a link back to your website in the resource section.
2. Write informative articles so that other sites reprint and publish it on their sites with your link in the resource.
3. Participate in forums and create a signature link that points to your website.
4. Comments on other blogs with a link back to your website.
5. Do viral marketing for your website.
6. Participate in yahoo answers and put a link to your website in the signature.
7. Participate in Google Groups.
8. Write news worthy press releases and publish in Online PR sites.
9. Submit your site to free web directories.
10. Create a blog and do the postings regularly. The most important thing is post great content which attracts visitors and gets you link.
11. Review a product or company and if your remarks are positive, email the company and ask to feature your remark in their press section.
12. Add a link for “bookmark this site” on your site.
13. Create a freebie product like ebooks, whitepapers, free and original tools etc. to give away.
14. Hold a competition or opinion poll for the Top 10, 50 or 100 (you can decide the number) websites in your niche. Post the result and watch lots of the sites giving you a link back to say what their position was.
15. Submit relevant and informative videos to video sharing sites like YouTube and Metacafe with lot of substance. Don’t forget to include a link in the description and within the actual video.
16. Create pages on places like Squidoo, Hubpages etc. and put links to your website.
17. Place free classified ads on relevant online classified sites.
18. Conduct an open survey and publish the results. Also make sure you let people know about it.
19. Try to get listed in Google’s News search but make sure that your site contains unique and quality content.
20. If your company is fairly good and reputed one, create a page about it in the Wikipedia.
21. Submit a story to Digg or del.icio.us that links back to an article on your website.
22. Publish RSS feeds for your content.
23. Review related websites on Alexa.
24. Swap some links (but make sure don’t over do it) with relevant partners.
25. Start networking and creating a positive buzz to attract traffic.

Guidelines to Create search Engine Friendly Websites

The big question today is “What is Internet Marketing and why do we need that?” Have you ever wondered why everybody now-a-days is talking about Internet Marketing or Search Engine Optimization and stuff like that? Well, I think that is because it is the need of the time and to remain in the market or increase publicity, one must consider this aspect of the web. Today, everybody who wants an online presence is having a website. This helps them to reach their target audience who are physically very far away from them but with the help of Internet can reach them with just one mouse click. Now what can be a better option to reach your target audience but a website or blog of yours? Internet Marketing does not only mean SEO or getting higher rankings in the SERPs. It’s much more than just SEO and I will be talking about all these aspects of Internet Marketing in my Blog. But, the first thing first. If you want to market your product, services, brand or simply yourself on the Net, the very first thing you need is a Search Engine friendly website and to create such site you need to follow certain guidelines. I have prepared a list of the guidelines, to be followed to create a Search Engine friendly site. This list has been prepared with the help of Google webmaster guidelines and you can visit Google Webmaster Help Center for more help and guidance.

A. Design Guidelines

1. Websites should be made with a clear hierarchy and text links. All the page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
2. Java script and CSS should be defined in a separate file.
3. Toggle should be avoided.
4. No inline css should be present.
5. No unnecessary spaces should be present.
6. Linking level should not exceed more than 3 levels.
7. Nested tables/Div should be avoided, DIV based website is best as per SEO point of view because Search engines crawlers can easily crawl DIV based website.
8. No hidden text or hidden links should be present on the page. (Sometimes this happens by mistake due to CSS).
9. No broken links or 404 error links should be present.
10. Text should be used instead of images to display important names, content or links. The Google crawler does not read or recognize the text that is contained in images.
11. Pop ups should be avoided.
12. Uniformity should be maintained throughout the website.
13. All the pages should be W3C validated.
14. The pages should not be more than 100KB.
15. Image to text ratio should be maintained and over usage of images should be avoided.
16. Maintain code to text ratio.
17. Usage of frames to create the websites should be avoided.
18. Minimum use of flash.
19. There should be no doorway pages.
20. Multiple copies of a page with different URLs should not be created. Many sites contain text-only or printer-friendly versions of same pages which contain the same content as the corresponding graphic-rich pages. If the need arises to create such pages, then to make ensure that your preferred page is included in Google search results, block duplicates from the spiders using a robots.txt file.

B. Development & Technical Guidelines:

1. Java script should be defined in separate file.
2. Try to reduce code by using functions and include files.
3. Database should be optimized. (To load pages faster, response time can be decreased).
4. Search bots should be allowed to crawl the websites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of the sites, as Search Engine bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
5. Make use of robots.txt file on the web server. This file tells the crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. You may visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can also test your robots.txt file with the robots.txt analysis tool which is available in Google Webmaster Tools.
6. Don’t try or attempt to "cloak" pages, or put up "crawler only" pages.

C. Content Guidelines:

1. Content should be original and unique.
2. SEO copywriting should be practiced while developing the content for the websites.
3. Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords or phrases.
4. Don’t create pages with duplicate content.
5. Don't stuff the pages with lists of keywords.

D. Server Administration:

D.1 Technical Server Side Factors:

1. The web server should support the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows the web server to tell Google whether website content has changed since the crawler last crawled the website. Supporting this feature also saves the bandwidth and overhead.
2. URL Canoncalization should be removed by using 301 permanent redirections. (http://example.com/ and http://www.example.com/) both are different URL’s in the eye of the Search Engines.

D.2 Steps for Switching Hosting or Changing IP:

1. Bring a copy of the site up at the new IP address.
2. Update the name server to point to the new IP address.
3. Once the pages from the new IP address are fetched by the Search Engine spiders (typically within 24-48 hours), it's safe to take down the copy of the site at the old IP address.

Welcome

This Blog has been created to discuss about all the latest happenings in the world of Internet Marketing and also the strategies that may be followed to make a web presence and to create an online brand for an entity. It does not matter whether the brand we want to create is for a person, a product, a service or simply a website. What matters most is the prominent existence of the entity in the virtual world of Internet. In today’s world, with the increasing importance of WEB, making the presence felt or increasing the online presence is very important and is the need of the time. I will be discussing about all the latest trends and techniques and my own strategies to achieve the goal and also the latest happenings in this field.

Welcome to e-marketing-strategies.