In the movie Field of Dreams, the most memorable line is "You build it and they will come". I remember that line vividly because ever since I started building websites for people, I have been amazed that they actually think that is the way the Internet works. If you even have the slightest doubt whether that is a foolish thought, consider this; According to a recent study by Inktomi and NEC, there are over 2 billion websites on the internet and growing by about 20,000 per day. The point is that for someone to just find your site, they would have to wade through 2 billion-plus websites. Do you still think they will be beating down your door anytime soon?

Let's put this in perspective. I live in a community of about 100,000 people. Let's say I decide to open a shoe store in my community. Due diligence uncovers 6 shoe stores in my area, a visit to each gives me a list of brands and how well they are marketing them.
Being the new kid on the block, I have to make some choices; do I carry a brand that they are not and market this as a niche market, or do I try to out-advertise them for one of the more popular brands they carry. Either way, I am not going to get enough traffic to survive just by opening the store and waiting for people to discover me.

Taking it a step farther, let's say we have been successful at our brick-and-mortar shoe store, and now we want to expand by setting up an Internet store. Once again due diligence give me some raw data. Searching the generic term "shoe store" I find that there are 1,820,000 shoe stores advertised on the Internet - lots of competition. Narrowing it down to my brand I find that there are 1,100,000 stores offering Dansko shoes (just for clarity I tried 5 brands of shoes with similar results). Do you see the problem?

What I am trying to point out is that although building and stocking an Internet store is easier and cheaper than starting a brick-and-mortar store, it has its inherent problems - marketing. How do you compete with a million Internet stores marketing the same product? The answer: time, money and a lot of daily tweaking.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO has become the buzz word of internet marketing with thousands of SEO "specialists" Just waiting to drive you to the top of all the search engines. Isn't that wonderful? All those companies who have sweated over the years to gain a commanding position on Google and these "specialists" are going to zoom you right past them and give you their time-earned spot! NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!

These SEO guru's would have you believe that for $49 or $149 or even $249 they are going to alter a few key things on your home page, add some keywords to your metatag, and then do some inside manipulating of Google and you are going to wake up in the morning on the first page of a Google search engine. What about the other million stores who have paid their Gurus to be in the same position? What about the stores who have, over the years, earned their way to the top? Don't get me wrong, sometimes with some shady moves (which I will get into in a later article) they can get you there for a day or two, but not as a permanent, earned position.

Here is what Google has to say about itGoogle

So why SEO?

SEO has its place, and there are a lot of good SEO experts who do their job without blowing smoke up your skirt. When done right, SEO helps a Search Engine like Google understand your site so it can be indexed correctly. A SEO specialist works with the pages on your site to try and get content placed that does not interfere with your sales pitch and product display, but is rich in keyword placement. They will adjust your titles on each page, ad keywords to the Metatag, and make sure the links are visible and available to the search engines. If your site is built with dynamic links, links generated on the fly, they will duplicate the links at the bottom of each page so the search engines can navigate your site. The more honest information you provide in text form, the better the search engines can index you. Keep in mind that you have to get properly indexed in the first place before Google, MSN, and Yahoo can start placing you among the others selling the same product or service. Finally your SEO specialist will set up an account on Google and tell Google where to find you and what to look for. Google will request a small recognition script be installed on your pages to steer the search.

METATAGS

Metatags are Used to identify the creator of a Web page, what HTML specs the page follows, and the keywords, title and description of the page. You will still read a lot of hype about getting hundreds of keywords in the metatag so the search engines will index you higher. In the old days (5-10 years ago) this was somewhat true. Search engines were not as sophisticated and were getting scammed a lot by metatags. At that time, the crawlers were not developed enough to scrap your site and discover what you really do, they took the metatags at face value. Porno sites, for instance, could put a lot of mainstream keywords, and even key words that attract children, and search engines would index them under those categories. Imagine, and I have actually witnessed this, someone typing in Harry Potter and without warning being exposed to vivid scenes of hardcore porn.

Although there are still some minor search engines that pay attention to keywords in metatags, Google and the other top search engines rely on sophisticated scrubbing methods to decide what you are really offering. They check each page for keywords. They watch for invisible text; that is text that is in the same color as the background (white text, white background) so the visitor can't see them but the search engine can. When they find this kind of trickery, they give you minus points, and often blackball your site.

Marketing Your Site

Now that I have totally blown away any thoughts you may have had about getting traffic to your site, lets look at real possibilities. First and foremost, you have to identify your target audience. Are you marketing your product strictly to a local market? Are you regional? National? World wide? The answer to that question determines how you market your site.

Local Marketing

If you are selling a product that can't or shouldn't be marketed to people beyond your reach, then the marketing strategy changes. Let's say you are a residential roofing company. It doesn't make sense to waste energy and money advertising nationwide or worldwide. You can't service the leads when they come in, so why try.

In local marketing strategies, Internet marketing and SEO don't do a lot of good. Yes, you can direct Google to only display your listing when someone from your local searches, but they will be few and far between. Think about it. How do you find a business or service you need, such as carpet installation or car repair? Almost always, you and everyone else resorts to the Yellow Pages or the newspaper. It is on a very rare occasion that I search for a local business on the Internet, and when I do, I'm missing a good portion of them because many don't have websites.

Local Marketing is done in partnership with a website. To be effective, do all the things you would normally do to bring in traffic: newspaper ads, radio, television, trade shows, etc., but in a much smaller manner. You can pay for much smaller ads because you can direct interested consumers to you website where you have much more ability to present your business, display pictures, and sell them. Don't ever discount the power of your website if it is used correctly. Make sure that your URL is listed on everything your customer sees - your business cards, invoices, signs, vehicles and all advertising. Then give them reasons for coming back to your website by offering specials, discounts and other perks that are not available through your real-world advertising.

National and worldwide

Making a splash nationally or worldwide is completely different than attracting consumers locally and regionally. Here is where SEO techniques, done correctly, make a difference. Using SEO to get indexed initially is the first step. From here, the work begins. Keep in mind that as good as you or your SEO specialist is, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of your competitors doing the same thing at the same time. In our scenario with the local shoe store, I only had six competitors to deal with, so gaining a market share was easy to plan.

Once you have done everything right to get indexed initially, it's time to talk marketing. There are three things that a Google, hence other top search engines look for in deciding who gets placed in what position. Content, Incoming links that are respected, and relative, and traffic. We'll talk about each one individually.

Incoming Links

Incoming links, especially one way from respected websites that are relative to your business shows the search engines that you are popular and the linking site finds your product and content worthy of being associated with them. These links are hard to come by and take a lot of contact effort on your part. A word of caution: Do not buy links, do not join link farms, and don't exchange links with anyone who is not relative to your business and a respectful business. Google will discover any or all of these and sandbox you. Work hard at getting sites relative to your industry and create a network of friends.

One of the best ways to get some incoming links is by writing Ezine articles and getting them published in as many Ezines as possible. Write only informative and interesting articles. Don't try to sell your product or hype your company. Make each article around 500 words and put a link to your site in the bio block. Say something like "To find out more about widgets click on: http://www.abc-company.com". The search engines crawl the Ezine sites daily and follow every link in the articles. This does two things - it gets your site crawled more often and it gives you some minor credit for link-backs. There are many good article writing services available including us.

Directory Listings

Next, research directory sites and get your URL listed on directories. Don't confuse legitimate directories with link farms. Link farms will get you black-balled. One of the best directories but the hardest to get into is ODP, The Open Directory Project. They are very careful about who they list

Blogs

Never underestimate the power of blogs. Well designed blogs with a lot of rich content spread faster than... well almost anything you can do besides yelling free!

Social Sites

Another good way to drive traffic is signing up for social sites, Myspace, Utube, and any others that are popular. The trick is in presenting unique and unusual content. If you are creative and have a lot of wild ideas, try some short film clips or articles on these sites.

Adwords

We've covered the relatively inexpensive methods to drive national and international traffic to your site, now let's discuss and advertising campaign. Google invented and coined the term "Adwords", but it also applies to other search engines who employ a keywords advertising scheme.

Adwords advertising is a rather simple concept that employs a lot of tricky methods that an advertiser needs to learn. The basic premise is that you list a bunch (a bunch being ten to hundreds) of keywords you think a potential customer might use to search your product. It is not limited to single words but takes in phrases too. Sounds simple, huh? Let me complicate it a little bit.

First, you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. The amount you pay depends on how much competition there is for that key word, how much your competition is willing to pay to be on the first page of the search, and how relevant your keyword and the wording in your ad is to your sites content. Google uses a formula that can have you paying more than your competition if they feel that you are using keywords or ad content that doesn't exactly match your product line. Now you see why first getting content correct on your site has a lot to do with search engines?

Be very careful about using generic keywords. Consider the shoe store I talked about. If we use generic or general words like "shoes" then I will be paying for hits from people who are searching for horse shoes, the game of horse shoes, and at least a dozen songs with the name shoes in it. If I use the phrase "Dansko shoes" I will get rid of most of the non-targeted hits, but I will be paying top dollar for my hits because every body (one million plus) sites that carry Dansko shoes will be bidding on the same potential customer. I remind you that in my brick-and-mortar shoe store, I had to buy half or full page ads to outdo my established competitors who have already got repeat traffic to their store. How about a less generic phrase like "men's dress shoes". You will also need to learn when and why to use quotes and brackets around your keywords when using them in Adwords.

Underhanded Tricks from unscrupulous SEO spammers

I mentioned earlier that I would discuss some of the tricks these unscrupulous companies use to make it look like they did something for you. Two points though; first, there are more good SEO specialists out there than the bad ones, but the bad ones are always in-your-face, so it just seems like more of them. Secondly, I am not going to be to thorough in explaining their methods, I don't want this to be a primer. The more successful of these con-artists will have multiple servers they control and have the ability to spam keywords without repeating the same IP address each time. They can either deliver you hits to your website and make it look like a lot of traffic, or deliver hits to your competition's adwords to break their bank. Many set up doorway sites that they can point and re-point. By creating fake ads and fake traffic they can direct that traffic where ever they want, creating the elusion of lots of interested consumers.

Conclusion

I hope that I have been of some help in sorting out the web business. I have not intended to overwhelm you or scare you away from doing internet business, I'm just trying to prepare you for what's ahead. The internet market place can be a wonderful and lucrative place to do business, but you need to wade through the swamp first - we all have to pay our dues.

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Lee Siemon - author

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