Almost all of us at one time or another has been on a computer and used the Internet.  No doubt a lot of that time was spent using a search engine to look for something we needed.  How easy was it to use?  Was it easy to locate whatever you looked for?  In many cases the answer to the first question is ‘pretty hard’ and the answer to the second question is ‘no, not at all’ or ‘I didn’t find what I was looking for’.  Most likely the reason for this is improper keywords.  If a consumer uses the wrong keywords it directs them to sites definitely not what they wanted.
When the Internet Marketer does it, it sends the consumer looking in the wrong spot.  Confusing huh? You never seem to be able to track down who used the wrong keyword.  Remember these tips and there will be less consumer confusion and quite probably more business for you:

Correct Spelling:  Be sure all your keywords are spelled correctly. This is essential so that consumers can find your items quickly and purchase what they want.  A mis-spelled word can lead to trouble in more ways than one.

Correct Department:  Be sure that all your items are listed under the correct department they are supposed to go in.  For example, you wouldn’t list a lawn mower in the pharmacy section would you?  If you would I predict your business chance of success at zero.

Stay On Topic:  When writing your ads, be sure to describe your item fully so that when a potential customer clicks on your link they get the information they want and need by reading your ad.  A good rule here to follow is to be brief and to the point.

Test It Out:  Get somebody to test out a search engine looking for your product using both broad terms and specific terms.  If they find it with little to no difficulty then no change should be necessary.  If the difficulty is moderate, a few changes can be made to tweak your site. If they have extreme difficulty then an entire site rework may be in order.

If you follow these to the letter - literally, then you should have no problems with your site not being visited due to keyword problems. If you keep everything where it’s easily within reach of the search engine, then you will see a lot of business coming your way.

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The most important page of any website is the landing page because that’s the first page that a visitor will see. The landing page will tell the visitor what the website is all about, what your company is all about, and what you are offering the visitor. The landing page will initiate a response from the visitor, which could be any of the actions mentioned below:

1.    Get the visitor to click to move to another page in your website like services, portfolio etc
2.    Get the visitor to subscribe to your services or buy products
3.    Get the visitor to provide you with the permission to send them newsletters or e-mailers
4.    Get the visitor to promote your website on their blogs or tell-a-friend
5.    Get the visitor to provide a feedback

All of the above actions are positive but there is also the probability that a visitor might not visit any other page on your website and choose to move away from your website. Hence from an SEO point of view, a landing page needs to be optimized and from the business point of view, it needs to have necessary information to attract the visitor’s attention.

Most internet marketing strategies include a strategy for the landing page. Apart from search engine optimization, landing pages can be used for tracking or analyzing various types of visitor actions and you can even modify the page depending on the analysis. In a nutshell, the landing page is like the door to your business, which a visitor has to open to get to know more about your business. So how can landing pages enhance optimization of your website?

A landing page will take care of the following:

•    It can increase the overall efficiency so that you will be able to target primary keywords
•    It will increase your ability to capture “Longtails” related to your business
•    It will be able to increase the ability of your website to convert visitors to prospective clients
•    It will also be able to track ROI in a SEO campaign

The two most important aspects of landing page SEO is content and linking. Content if well optimized will enhance page ranking and also provide the visitor with relevant information about your business. Good linking will take a visitor from the landing page to any other page on the website without creating confusion. So if you are thinking of getting a website then you need to start from the landing page!

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One of the best ways of getting targeted traffic to your website is through affiliate programs. This basically means that you sell third party products using an affiliate program. There are several programs like that available over the internet like Amazon’s affiliate program, Commission Junction, Orbitz, legalzoom.com and many more.

The normal process involves an affiliate link on almost all the pages of your website but this might be a waste of Page Rank for your website. So what is the best option? The best option is dynamic affiliate linking! Dynamic affiliate linking is considered to be a win-win situation for the website owner as well as the company whose products you are marketing. But before we move forward, you need to understand how to track internet traffic.

There are two technical processes involved in this; one is called the cookies and the other is sessions. Sessions is used rarely and the one company that uses it is Amazon. What sessions really do is encode the tracking information within a query string that is visible on any browsers location bar. But the majority of affiliate linking program use cookies, which are small text strings sent by a server to the browsers. The browser on the other hand will save them in the user’s computer. Next time when the user will visit the website, the same cookie will be sent back to the server and this is how tracking is done.

So now that you know how to track visitors on your website, it is time to test the dynamic links. This is important and you should ideally do it before launching your website because you wouldn’t want to have a broken affiliate link, which can be a serious problem later on. Here is an example of a dynamic affiliate link:

a href=”http://wwwqksrv.net/click-1180946-546790″ target=”_blank”
onmouseover=”window.status=’http://00laptops.com’;return true;”
onmouseout=”window.status=’ ‘;return true;”
20% OFF on all Laptop brands at laptops.com

img src=”http://wwwqksrv.net/click-1180946-546790″ width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″

The first code is the affiliate referral code and the second one is the impression tracking code.

Once you have the dynamic affiliate linking code in place, you need to set the browser so that it can prompt you for accepting any cookies. If you are using IE6 then do the following:

Tools>Internet Options Menu>Privacy Tab> Advanced Button>Check override automatic cookie handling>select prompt for both first party and third party cookies> Click okay

Now whenever the server sends any cookie, the browser will prompt. Once you have completed testing of the links, you can reset the browser preferences.

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There was a time when websites relied on small visitor counters at the bottom of the page to know the exact number of people visiting their website everyday but things have changed since then. From those web counters has risen a term called web analytics, which analyzes the complete activity on a website in a comprehensive manner and through an organized process. Web analytics involves collection, collation and understanding of the statistics and behaviors of internet visitors to a particular website. The entire process is the same; the only changes include the monitoring of activity on different websites like content intensive websites, ezines, e-commerce websites etc.

In e-commerce website, web analytics is used for measuring the various aspects of a website that work in-sync and towards fulfilling a specific business or organizational objective. Now these objectives could be anything related to the website like visitors buying a product, reading the forum, saving product SKU’s in their shopping cart for later or simple signing up for a monthly newsletter. But the most important aspect of web analytics is collection of relevant data. The data can be collected by a web analytics tool in two different ways:

Through the log files that contain information of all the activity on the website and is normally stored on the server. The log files store different degree and type of information like how many visitors came to the website, how many people returned to the website in a single day or week, which website pages were viewed the most number of times, the time in which there was maximum visitor activity, etc.

The second method is called page tagging and it is a more complex process as compared to the previous one. To enable page tagging, you will need to insert a code in JavaScript on each of the website pages that you intend to track. When you insert the code or script, it will send all the analytics or information or data to the server handling analytics and more often than not place a cookie on the user computer.

Now both these methods can effectively measure web analytics for a particular website although the page tagging method is considered to be more accurate. This is also the starting point to understanding consumer and online visitor behavior, which is a far more complex aspect but one that can make or break an online business!

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Over the last couple of years, the internet has evolved and opened some new avenues for online businesses ensuring that both large and start-up companies can co-exist. The potential to earn online for new businesses has also increased multi-fold in the recent times. The result is competition and the one factor that will keep you ahead of the completion is internet marketing. Internet marketing consists of several key elements, each of which is responsible for driving targeted traffic, increasing brand visibility, and pushing forward the overall growth of your business.

Now you would probably ask the question: how significant is internet marketing to online business growth? In reality, the significance of internet marketing varies from one business, product or service to another. Let us look at some examples: EasyJet is a European Airline that is popular for their low cost tickets and they have actually seen a 90% sale of tickets online. Even a mega-corporate brand like Cisco has been able to earn 90% of their revenue online.

Most of the industries like IT, Telecom, Web Design, real estate, non-government organizations, pets, pet supplies, event tickets etc can be bought online. This has been made possible due to the higher reach of internet. This is also the reason why you can sit in California and sell your products or services in Tokyo. But again the fact of the matter is that your website and brand needs to be visible enough and should be able to reach out to your target audience. And this is where internet marketing plays a significant role.

Internet marketing comprises of two main segments:

1. Several specialist marketing functions: These functions apply to certain businesses
2. Philosophy or concept: This is applicable to all businesses

Within the above segments lie different strategies and tools with the help of which you will be able to market your brand over the internet and reach out to your target audiences irrespective of the geographical boundaries. There are eight top internet marketing options that you can use as a standalone strategy or in an effective configuration of some or all. These are:

1. Search Engine Optimization
2. Paid Advertising
3. Viral Strategy
4. Linking Strategy
5. Public Relations
6. E-Mail Publishing
7. Traditional Media
8. Networking

We will discuss these and many more fundamentals of Internet marketing as well as understand their pros and cons as we progress… so keep reading!

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