Small Business Internet Marketing

Too many people think that online marketing is about building a nice site and sitting back waiting for the cash to roll in. Not so! It requires a lot of work and patience to generate results and that means working on your website on a regular basis.

Here are some things you can do:  
     
1. Your internet site must feature keyword and phrases. But if you sell shoes, you've got to understand that if someone puts the word shoes into a browser, millions of results will come up.

This is where longtail keywords come in. Longtail keywords are essentially phrases that someone will put into a browser, for example "leather shoes".

So if you have leather shoes as a keyword, you're going to be somewhere in the results. Longtail keywords are very important in getting found on the internet and Google offers a keyword tool you can use for free to find these often-used phrases.

By entering the phrase "leather shoes" Google will tell you how many searches there were in the past month for that phrase, both globally and in the US. If you want to conduct much more in-depth key phrase research there are a number of other programs you can purchase. Whichever tool you choose, you will have to pay very close attention to the results it returns and decide which keywords you will be targeting for your articles.

If a keyword returns around five thousand searches a month locally, that's an ideal number. Whether you use local or world search numbers relies upon the product you are promoting. You must be on page 1 of the search engines and it will take a large amount of persistence and hard work to get there but that's where the money is. 
       
2. Google likes websites that are continually updated and contain relevant content. So get into the habit of writing at least a five hundred word, keyword=rich article every day or so.

Use your keywords within the first few words of your initial paragraph and again in the closing paragraph. Dependent on the length of the article, use the phrase a couple of times more. If you're employing advertising through Google Adwords, this may also help Google to serve tighter targeted advertising to your website.

3. Backlinks Getting backlinks is a pain. Most website owners outsource this task as quickly as they can. The only possible way is to get into the practice of finding important DoFollow blogs and adding nicely-written, informative comments to ten of them daily. Google knows about link farms and penalizes for their use. Don't bother with them. They're a waste of money and will do no good.

The easiest way to get backlinks is thru marketing articles. This is because of the fact that many article directory sites will need authors to have at least a single link to his / her site. People will be required to submit articles to article marketing sites or to other sites using a 'hub'. This is generally cheap and saves time. The best article directory, in my opinion, is EZine Articles.       

There are many other strategies involved in small business internet marketing. The above points are crucial if you want to be successful. These techniques are the least expensive but effective and can be used by anyone that is just getting started.