Internet Marketing 101
Blizzard Associate | 20 September 2006 |
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With the fall season here and many students heading back to the classroom, I thought this would be a great opportunity to revisit the basics of Internet Marketing. In the Promotion Department at Blizzard Internet Marketing, we offer many different services that make internet marketing campaigns successful. The world of Search Engine Optimization and online promotion can be confusing, so enjoy this outline for our back-to-school Internet Marketing 101 class. Keep in mind that these are the basics!
How popular is your website?
Even after you have graduated from high school, being popular is still desirable. In the search engine world, the more friends you have, the better. And in cyberspace, “friends” refers to the number of websites linking to yours. In order for a website to perform well in the search engines, it must have a combination of incoming and outgoing links - in the internet marketing world, this is called “link popularity“. These links may come from many different sources, including blogs, hotel directories, newspaper and e-zine sites, travel ranking websites (Trip Advisor), etc.
Blizzard Internet Marketing is constantly researching and updating our recommended list of lodging directories and powerful links in order to increase the link popularity of our clients’ websites. Ideally, your website should have incoming and outgoing links from sites that contain content relevant to your website. A network of linked sites similar in purpose is often referred to as a “neighborhood.” For example, if you have a hotel website, you want a link from www.frommers.com or websites that give hotel reviews. A link from a site that focuses on fantasy football, for example, would not be nearly as valuable, nor is it considered to be in your neighborhood.
Link popularity is one of the important factors search engines utilize to rank sites in their search results. One of the many Blizzard Internet Marketing clients who understands the importance of link popularity is the Thendara Inn located in Canandaigua, New York. The Thendara Inn staff is very active in helping Blizzard increase the link popularity of their website, and they are a member of almost all of our recommended lodging directories. Remember, the more links you have, the better!
What is your website about?
Obviously, targeting relevant links requires that you not only have a solid idea of the purpose of your website, but that internet visitors and search engine spiders have easy access to it. For the search engines, you want to make your on-page text easy to read and relevant to your product or service. As a rule of thumb, the search engines like to see at least 250 - 500 words of text per page; this helps the search engines categorize and rank your site.
You also want to make sure it is easy for a spider to quickly determine what your site is about. For example, we utilize metatags - keyword codes that immediately tell search engines what the site offers, as well as what keywords should be associated with it. Providing this information up front enables the search engine spider to quickly catalogue your site and move on - something all search engines appreciate. For your human visitors, it pays to make sure everything on your site is easily accessible. If you are selling hotel rooms from your website, you want to make sure the reservation button is easy to find - ideally towards the top of the page. This ensures that a visitor won’t become frustrated looking everywhere for specific information and then leave your site because he or she can’t find it. It also helps considerably to make your text keyword-rich and on point. Blizzard Internet Marketing has many copywriting experts who write content for websites everyday; we also research and implement metatags for our upper level clients.
Do you utilize pay-per-click advertising?
This is one of the very few areas of internet marketing where you can often see automatic results. The search engines with the most popular pay-per-click programs are Google (Adwords), Yahoo (Search Marketing), and MSN (adCenter). This type of online advertising is referred to as “pay-per-click” or “sponsored” advertising. Blizzard specializes in setting up and maintaining pay-per-click campaigns. Once your campaign is ready to run, you determine a daily budget and bid on a group of keywords that are relevant to your business. For example, if you are a Vacation Rental Company in Hilton Head, you bid on terms such as “Hilton Head Vacation Rental” and “South Carolina Vacations.” Many of our clients have seen a very high return on investment from their pay-per-click campaigns, such as Beach Properties of Hilton Head. Their website has seen up to a 77% ROI on these campaigns. Linda Moloney from Beach Properties states, “We have been using Blizzard Internet Marketing for all of our internet marketing needs and we are very satisfied.”
Blizzard Internet Marketing utilizes these concepts, and others, for our internet marketing customers:
- Incoming and outgoing links or “Link Popularity”
- Relevant website content
- Pay-per-click advertising
For the best results, apply a tailored combination of each of these services along with the rest of your internet marketing campaign. We understand that search engine marketing can be daunting at times, but we are here to assist you and share some of our knowledge.
Ambere Cunningham - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.
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October 18th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
We have followed Blizzard’s advice with much success. For the past five years we have almost religiously taken their suggestions and today our link pop numbers are solid and we are on the first page of all the organic lists of the major search engines for bed and breakfast in our region.
December 31st, 2006 at 12:12 am
Though I have some experience in Internet Marketing, from time to time, it’s good to take a refresher course so, thanks for Internet Marketing 101! :-)
Vincent