Effective Online Marketing Strategies Part 1

Looking to implement an online marketing strategy to attract more traffic, and business to your website? Is your current online marketing strategy not working as well as you had hoped? Use these effective strategies in your website and you will start to notice the difference!

Social Media Networking Social media is all about interaction. It’s vital to effective online marketing, as interaction creates relationships between yourself and your prospective customers. These relationships then offer you the opportunity to share your products and services with people who may be interested in them.

• Start a blog, either as a part of your website or through a third-party hosting site. If you use a third-party site, be sure to link to your business website on occasion. This online marketing strategy will help to portray you as an expert in your field and customers will come to trust your opinion.
• Join a social networking website or bookmarking community. The most popular and effective social networking websites for online marketing are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, whilst the most popular and effective bookmarking communities are Digg, Delicious and Stumble Upon.
• Promote your website in online forums, but be sure to steer clear from ones that are obviously full of spam. Don’t overtly promote your business or your products – offer helpful hints and advice and use your forum membership signature to provide links to your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) SEO is one of the most important online marketing strategies that you can implement into your website. Correct use of SEO can help to achieve an ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ search engine ranking, as opposed to gaining one through paid advertisements, which will grant you a better position.

• Write descriptive titles for each page of your website and include your targeted keywords. This will allow visitors to know exactly what they’re about to read about; ambiguity is one of the biggest deterrents for visitors. Including keywords is also highly helpful for the search engine spiders that scour your pages.
• Use keywords in any links you provide to other pages of your website. Again, this is helpful for search engine spiders, but it also increases the chances that visitors will click your links; people are less likely to click on a link if they don’t know where it will take them.
• Make sure your navigation is search engine and user friendly. Including site maps and other similar elements is very helpful to achieving this and will mean that visitors can find their way around your website no matter how they manage to come across it.

In part two of effective online marketing strategies, we look at two more techniques that can be highly effective in getting your business noticed. A careful balance of these online marketing strategies will attract traffic, and sales, to your website.