Technology Networking & Internet

Ideas for Online Internet Marketing

By Technology Last updated Wednesday, August/14/2024

Internet marketing encompasses all the activities in which you take part to promote a website or business online. Many different Internet marketing strategy ideas exist--such as banner or even forum marketing--and the main goal of your efforts is to increase website traffic, gain more exposure and seek favor from search engines. As such, multiple Internet marketing ideas need to be considered and implemented for a successful marketing campaign to happen.

Pay Per Click

Pay-per-click programs allow Internet marketers and website owners to promote websites in the sponsored advertisement sections of search engines. The Google AdWords program, Yahoo's Sponsored Search, and the Microsoft adCenter for Bing all have these pay-per-click advertising programs. With this paid Internet marketing tool, webmasters create ad campaigns and set a budget for how much they want to spend on a per-day and per-click basis for each advertisement. Pay-per-click programs even allow for "geo-targeting," meaning you can select the specific country, state, city and zip code for where you want advertisements shown.

On-site search engine optimization (SEO) involves Internet marketing tactics that can be implemented directly on your website. One example of on-site SEO is placing "meta" tags in the HTML portion of your website. Meta tag elements, such as the keyword, description and title meta tags, describe what your site is about and are read by search engines to help classify your site. Other on-site SEO techniques include using specific, relevant keywords in your Web pages, an organized navigation system, as well as clean URLs for site pages. All of these on-site SEO tactics make your site easier to be read and interpreted by search engines, which ultimately helps your site get found in the search engines.

Link building is an off-site Internet marketing and SEO technique that many webmasters use. Each link to your website from another site counts as a "vote" for your site. Each "vote" increases your website's authoritativeness or trustworthiness with search engines such as Google. A link-building Internet marketing strategy influences where your site is found in pages of search engine results and helps maintain this status.

Many businesses and websites use social networking to gain exposure and for marketing purposes. For example, businesses can create Facebook business "Fan pages" for customers and others who are interested, which allows the business to connect with consumers, promote awareness and build relationships with customers. Other social networking opportunities include Twitter, Google Buzz, and even MySpace. This method of Internet marketing allows your website or business exposure to go viral as your message spreads among friends and your entire social network.

Blog marketing is an Internet marketing strategy that benefits marketers and webmasters in two ways: through search engine exposure and repeat Internet traffic. Marketers create blogs to write about topics that the target market finds interesting and to keep customers abreast of current events within a company. This blog turns your visitors into repeat visitors and gives you the chance to market products and services through your blog posts. In addition, search engines such as Google and Yahoo like freshly updated content because it provides value to users. Maintaining a blog gives your site the chance to be "crawled," or reviewed, by search engines on a regular basis, ensuring that your site stays updated or "indexed" in a search engine's database.