In this series we will take a look at how Article Marketing is bringing traffic to websites through keyword links, expert dialog and just plain old interest.

Why should you write articles?

They make you the expert:  you become the expert in your field.  It gives you and your website credibility.  People will see you name and your website name and begin to associate it with your product or services.  Say you sell widgets and you write and post 50 articles about widgets, they get posted around the internet on article sites, picked up on blogs and maybe even put into print.  Soon people will associate you ad your website as the experts on widgets and go to your website for advise and to purchase.

Drive Traffic to your Website: adding keyword links in your articles will drive traffic to your website.

What to look for in a reputable SEO program and company:

1. Honesty – do they make promises that seem too good to be true?  No one can promise you that your website will be found on the first page of Google’s Natural Listings in one week.  At best most SEO campaigns may increase your natural listings by 3-4 positions.  Example: Your websites top keyword is “widgets”.  Your website comes up on the second page of the Google search for that keyword search, a good SEO campaign can promise you that your site will now move up 3-5 positions or maybe to the first page.

By Antoinette Wakefield

What is all the fuss about links to your website?  Why such a push on link building services?  What in the world is link building?  In this article I will discuss what link building is, the importance of it and how to incorporate it into your Internet Marketing Plan.

Link building is the process of getting links to your website from other sites, especially high traffic, industry specific sites.  Getting links to your web site used to be an easy task, just get as many incoming links to your site as possible, quality and nature or the links was unimportant.  Then link relevance came along; search engines now take into account the quality and relevance of your site’s incoming links.  This makes the process of link building a much more complicated program.  With all of the other tasks that business owners have, link building may not be high on the priority list.  It may be best to hire a professional Internet marketing firm to help.Some concepts to know when embarking on a link building campaign:

Page Rank: is the value that the search engines give to a web page.  It is usually on a scale of 1 to 10.

Link Popularity: is the number of links pointing to your site from other sites on the Internet.  The search engines consider your site more important and rank it higher the more “incoming” links that your site has.

Building link popularity helps to gain higher page rank for your web site.  The higher the page rank, the higher your site will appear on the search engines with competitive keywords.  The major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN use link popularity to determine how important your site is in order to give it a rank in search results.  The more incoming links a site has, the more important or valuable it must be.

In the process of link building, quality is more important than quantity.  It is important to choose quality sites to link to yours.  Find web sites that have some relevance to your site, business or products.  For example if you sell insurance, a link from an insurance information site would benefit your business more than just a link on a general “catch all” link site.

Probably the most important benefit of having a high number of quality links to your site is the effect it has on the search engine rankings.  Most of the major search engines use “link popularity” as a main factor in determining where your site should rank.  If your site has a lot of high quality sites linking to it, the search engines will think it is a popular site and give it a high page rank.  Building quality and relevant links has two advantages; you gain visitors from the linking site and you also boost your page rank with the search engines.

A complete link-building program involves generating links to your site from a variety of sources.  This includes directories, social networking sites, blogs, even writing articles.  Directories are one of the most comprehensive ways to generate incoming links.  They are designed to promote links and are sometimes fee based.  Social networks and blogs have become a great way to generate incoming links to your web site.  It does take patients and skill, however, to utilize blogs and social networks to generate links; it may be best to leave this to a professional SEO company to do for you.

Besides social networks, blogs and directories, article sites are another way to create incoming links to your site.  Article sites usually only allow links in the resource box of your articles, not in the text of the article itself.  The links generated here are permanent links, unlike directories and blogs where links might be deleted.  Article sites rarely delete articles.  Article writing also makes you the “expert” on the subject you are writing about, making it more likely that people will want to visit your site.  Article submission can be a tedious process, best left to the professional SEO company.

A complete link building program will benefit your page rank with the search engines, establish you as the expert in your field and increase your page visitors and thus your chances of increased revenues.

For more information on Link Building contact eMarketMe at (714) 514-3195 or visit www.emarketme.com.

What the Tweet is it all about?

by Fran Prisco

Everyone is talking about it.  Everyone is signing up for it.  Just what is this Twitter thing all about?  Twitter is quickly becoming the number one spot on the Internet for people to connect.  It is a part of the new Social Media revolution.  Social media is a new way that people discover, share and read news and information on the Internet through social networks or micro blogs such as Twitter.  It is transforming people into content providers, not just content readers.  So how does Twitter fit into this profile?

Jack Dorsey founded Twitter in 2006 and its headquarters is in San Francisco, California.  It has quickly become on of the most popular site on the Internet with an Alexa popularity rating of 48 (the 48^th most popular website on the internet).  Twitter is a free social networking service that allows users to share information through 140 character posts.  Links to images, videos and just about anything on the Internet can be shared in these posts.  These 140 character blasts of information are called Tweets.  Next time you hear the expression “have you Tweeted today” you will know exactly what is being talked about.

So what is the value of all of these Tweets to businesses?

Businesses are finding that Twitter is a great place to share information on their companies, converse with prospects and customers and offers a whole new way of advertising.  A good way to see if Twitter is good for your business is to analyze your objectives by asking “how would Twitter help achieve my business objectives?”

• Would you like to connect and network with others in your industry?
• Would you like instant access to what is being said about your business, industry, products or brands?
• Would you like to be able to send out advice, press releases, article links or other ideas to your prospects at a moment’s notice?
• Would you like to monitor what is being said about your customers to get a better idea of how to serve them?

If you answered yes to any of these questions than it might be time to give Twitter a try.  It is easy to set up an account.  Once you have your account set up you can easily customize your Twitter page to match your business personality.  The next step is to start following people or companies that have an interest in your industry.  For example, if you sell gardening tools you might search for “gardening” and follow those who have an interest in gardening.  Once you are following others, they will know you exist and hopefully follow you.

It is now time to start Tweeting.  Tweet about your business, industry, specials or answers to your follower’s questions.  It is a great way to make yourself the expert in your field.  Pass on information and know-how to those that are following you and they will want to learn more about you.  Twitter and social networks as a whole are quickly becoming a valuable marketing tool for businesses of all sizes.  It just might be time to jump on board.

Need help setting up your Social Media Marketing program?  Call eMarketMe at (714) 514-3196 or by email service@emarketme.com.

The New Era of The Internet

Social Media is the latest buzz online.  With sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and others, we can gather with people all over the world and discuss just about anything.  We can find people from our past, catch up with old friends and make new ones.  We can discuss our jobs, families, hobbies and most important to business owners, the products we buy or are thinking of buying.  We are no longer forced to believe the “In Your Face Advertising” of the past; now we just log into Facebook and find out who likes or dislikes a product we are thinking of buying.  So what does this mean to business owners?  It is a whole new arena for marketing our products and services.

Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks”. Social Media is a shorter top-level term that describes the space overall, and covers the activities around social interaction, content, videos, images and audio exposure.

Social media marketing can help you increase the activity around these top goals:

• Website traffic and user behavior
• Conversion and sales tracking
• Page views, ad exposure
• Growing brand awareness
• Creating a positive brand association and keeping it there
• Business development and a broader customer reach

Social media marketing is an engagement with online communities to generate exposure, opportunity and sales. The number-one advantage is generating exposure for the business, followed by increasing traffic and building new business partnerships  In the context of Internet marketing, social media refers to a collective group of web properties whose content is primarily published by users, not direct employees of the property (e.g. the vast majority of video on YouTube is published by non-YouTube employees).

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites.

Social media marketing has two important aspects:

1. Adding links to services such as Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us so that their pages can be easily ‘saved and submitted’ to and for these services.
2. Building ways that fans of a brand or company can promote it themselves in multiple online social media venues.

Some social media marketers offer to write content (such as white papers) that are unique and newsworthy. This content can then be marketed by popularizing it or even by creating a “viral” video on YouTube and other video sites, including getting involved in blogs, forums, and niche communities. Others in the social media world consider this form of social media marketing Astroturfing or “fake grass roots”.

According to Lloyd Salmons, first chairman of the Internet Advertising Bureau social media council “Social media isn’t just about big networks like Facebook and MySpace, it’s about brands having conversations.”

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

As the number of sites on the Web increased in the mid-to-late 90s, search engines started appearing to help people find information quickly. Search engines developed business models to finance their services, such as pay per click programs offered by Open Text[4] in 1996 and then Goto.com[5] in 1998. Goto.com later changed its name[6] to Overture in 2001, and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, and now offers paid search opportunities for advertisers through Yahoo! Search Marketing. Google also began to offer advertisements on search results pages in 2000 through the Google AdWords program. By 2007, pay-per-click programs proved to be primary money-makers[7] for search engines.

Search engine optimization consultants expanded their offerings to help businesses learn about and use the advertising opportunities offered by search engines, and new agencies focusing primarily upon marketing and advertising through search engines emerged. The term “Search Engine Marketing” was proposed by Danny Sullivan in 2001[8] to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies for businesses, organizations, and individuals.

In 2006, North American advertisers spent US$9.4 billion on search engine marketing, a 62% increase over the prior year and a 750% increase over the 2002 year. The largest SEM vendors are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.[1] As of 2006, SEM was growing much faster than traditional advertising and even other channels of online marketing.[2] Because of the complex technology, a secondary “search marketing agency” market has evolved. Many marketers have difficulty understanding search engine marketing and they rely on third party agencies to manage their search marketing. Some of these agencies have developed technology that automates bidding and other complex functions required for the Pay Per Click model.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Ways To Improve Your ROI Using SEO (lazerpromotions.com)
• Seven Ways to Make Pay-Per-Click Pay (online.wsj.com)

For more information on Search Engine Marketing or for a Search Engine Marketing Specialist contact eMarketMe.