As we discussed previously there are 3 golden rules to internet marketing that if you follow will increase your chance of success when you promote your website on-line, if you do not follow these golden rules you will fail, I am sorry but that is just the way it is, these are rules and they need to be followed.

The 3 golden rules

Are the keywords you are trying to rank for being searched for by customers?

Are people the people doing these searches people who are going to buy?

Can you compete in this market?

So it is time for you to become a psychic and see if you can tell what people are going to buy from your website, sounds almost impossible how do you know what people are thinking?

There are a few ways you can tell if a person is considering buying a product or if they are just checking for information, the easiest way is to look at the keywords they are using to conduct their searches.

If you search for “Jokes” in the search engines you will find lots of competing sites but very few of them are selling anything they are jus fun pages for people to visit, there are also very few advertisements on the search engines for this term, that shows that people are unwilling to pay to get traffic to to the joke sites as they do not make a return from these visitors.

If you search for “Insurance quotes” you will see lots of sites and lots of advertisements for you to click on as the insurance companies know you are looking for an expensive product that they can sell you.

So just by checking the number of advertisers for a term you can see how much money there is in a given market.

You need to have money in a market to make it worth competing in or your efforts will result n you breaking golden rule number 2 and ending up with no profits from your marketing efforts.

The three golden rules of internet marketing are

Are the keywords you are trying to rank for being searched for by customers?

Are people the people doing these searches people who are going to buy?

Can you compete in this market?

So the first question to ask is are the keywords you are hoping to rank for attracting the right number of visitors.

Visitors are different from searches as it has been estimated that 50% of the searches made by people do not result in a click to a website, think about how you search for a company, you might use a broad term such as search engine optimisation, when you get back 25 million results you may think that is too many to sort through and decide that you wish to discuss your SEO and on-line marketing with someone in your area so you add the word Salisbury to the search to research for the term search engine optimisation Salisbury, this brings up a smaller more focused list.

So if you are using a keyword tool and looking at the number of searches you should half that number and consider that if you hold the top position in Google for that term you should expect to get just 40% of the total number of searches.

Once you know this you can use this figure to predict your visitor numbers to your site, using the other two golden rules of Internet marketing along side this one will increase your chances of success dramatically.

What are customer reviews? – Reviews and ratings of products or services by customers, so that other people interested in that product or service can use the information as part of their buying decision. You can see examples of this on Ebay or Amazon where the sellers get reviewed.

Using Customer Reviews to promote your business – Customer reviews allow people to leave comments about the quality of a product or service, this can build confidence in the customer and can lead to more sales. Positive comments are likely to persuade potential customers to buy and may also provide further information about a product that wasn’t previously included on the page.

Be careful – It can swing the other way. If you’re products or services are poor then you may be caught out by this. Competitors or disgruntled former employees may post bad comments to damage the business, so you need to have a system where you can regularly check the comments and feedback left, any that are unfair or rude will need to be removed, although if the comment is fair but not a good review you may like to leave it on as a site with just positive reviews may look like they have faked the feedback.

It has been said many times that there are 3 fundamental rules to Internet marketing you ignore these at your peril if you get just one of these wrong then you are almost sure to fail, and if you do not fail you will have put in much more effort than you ever needed to.

In Internet marketing as in most things in life time and effort expended are costly, the old saying time is money has never been truer.

The three golden rules of Internet marketing are

I am sorry if you were expecting something more complicated or earth shattering but as with most things in marketing it is the simple things done well that make the big differences.

There is a lot more information on this site on internet marketing and SEO.

If you have a website and you need help with the internet marketing complete the form on the right hand side for a free SEO report and for one of our team to discuss how we can ge more customers to your site.

Search engine optimisation Salisbury is the natural search if you are looking for a company that is in Salisbury or Wiltshire that does SEO or search engine optimisation. However not all search terms are so obvious so you need to conduct the appropriate keyword research to ensure your site is found for the proper keywords. If you have a website then search engine optimisation will help get your site found for the most suitable terms.

So if you are selling jewellery or promoting charity Christmas cards then the terms you need to be found for must include jewellery or charity Christmas cards, there are several things a Search engine optimisation company can help you with and one of the most fundamental is keyword research & competition analysis.

If you know what your competition are doing to get to the position they are at in the search engines then you can ensure you do the same and just a little more to get in to a better position.

You need to ensure you are spending your time and effort where it counts and where it will do you the most good, search engine optimisation is extremely powerful when done properly and it can see you shooting up the search engine rankings but if too much time and effort is spent ranking for inappropriate or little searched for terms then you will find it hard to get the visitors you need to make your on-line business a success.

What is a Blog? – Blogs are built from the words Web logs, like a journal or news page showing posts in reverse chronological order. Most are user friendly and easy to set up and use. They have proved to be extremely popular and it is possible to read a blog on almost any subject you have an interest in, some are more informative than others and the information you read on a blog should be checked in a few other places to ensure its accuracy. Blogs can use a range of media.

How do I get a Blog? – getting a Blog is simple and free, you can add on to existing website, install on a domain as a stand alone website or you can sign up as part of a free blog website like Blogger, WordPress etc.

Using a Blog to promote your business – Blogs can be used to show that you are an expert in your field if you are focused on a particular subject. This helps build credibility and brand loyalty.

Search engines love blogs and provided they are set up properly, search engines will visit them when you submit a new post. This increases your chance of ranking for long key phrases that can be used to drive more traffic into your main website.

What is Social Bookmarking? – Social Bookmarking is similar to social networking in the sense that you have a profile but with less social interaction. Main focus is for users to store, organise, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet Websites – Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit & More.

The idea being that if you like a website then you can bookmark it and write a description of the content, feel or just why you like it, this is then available to others who can see what has been written about the site and they may then choose to visit it themselves and can in turn add their own comments on the site to the ever growing list.

Using Social Bookmarking to promote your business – Social Bookmarking can be used in one of two ways depending on the features of the social bookmarking website. You can either bookmark your website as a whole, where you can write a short review of your website or promote specific pages such as news articles and blog posts about your business, in the hope that others interested in the same things will visit your site and leave a positive review about it.

How Does This Benefit Me? – Most popular news stories are placed on the main pages of the website for all to see and in RSS feeds. You can benefit from the viral marketing effect, where a news story grows online before eventually making it to the normal media outlets.

Social Bookmarking users put web pages in different categories by tagging them. Users can then browse these categories and share bookmarks with friends, both of which increase traffic to your website. Web pages that haven’t been found by the search engines can be added to social bookmarking networks and start receiving traffic immediately.

What is Social networking? – This is the term that covers online communities like facebook, myspace, bebo where people network with friends and businesses, or just with people who share a similar interest to you.

How you can use social networking to promote your business – You can create a profile for your business and begin using Events, Fan Pages and Groups to promote your business, let people know about things you have planned, sales that are on, sponsorships and charity fundraising that you have been involved with. Yoy can send out news updates about events, new products etc to draw more people into your website.

You can build more of a relationship with your customers by speaking to them, answering questions and finding out what they like and dislike, interacting in this way with your customers makes them feel appreciated and they feel that there opinions matter. You are able to perform market research that leads to brand loyalty by giving your customers exactly what they want.

Paid For Advertising – Many social networking sites offer paid for advertising. Advertising is focused on user demographics rather than search phrases. Allowing a businesses to target users based on a number of criteria such as age, sex, education and interests.

Web 2.0 is a buzz phrase for user interactivity on the Internet, this is a marketing term as much as a technical design or programming term and is short hand for allowing feedback and other forms of interactivity on a website.

You may be familiar with many forms of web 2.0 with out realising it, if you have used Ebay or Amazon then the feedback or review pages are basically web 2.0 content. 

New applications and technology that allow users with little technical knowledge to create their own webpages or submit content to existing websites, good examples of this include blogs, you can create a blog and update it as often as you like with little or no technical knowledge, you do not need to worry about such things as hosting or FTP, if you can use a word processing package, such as word then you can have your own blog.

Social Networking, Social Bookmarking, Customer Reviews, Blogs, Wikis, RSS feeds are all common uses for web 2.0 and all allow interactivity between the user of the website and the website itself, this can be great for content generation and sharing ideas or for leaving feedback and conducting customer research.

Search engine optimisation is the art of getting your site ranked for the most appropriate terms in the search engines.

If your site is in a frame set it can cause problems for the search engines, they may not be able to read the page as a whole, this is because the page in a frame set is not one whole page but rather 2 or more depending on the design.

If you have your site set so that the top of the page and the navigation is in a frame and does not change then that is counted as one page and when the text and body of the page is displayed then this is another page.

So when the search engine tries to load your page all it sees is the outer navigation page that does not contain any body text and there are no keywords for the search engines to rank your site for.

You can get a similar feel to your site by using CSS to build the site rather than a frame and this will stop the problems of your site not getting indexed in the search engines.