I have had success with free shopping carts and reasonably priced web hosts and I have not done much with SEO. Most of my traffic is coming from Google Product base. What do these $10,000 websites packages do that I can’t? Are they worth it?

Internet marketing covers a broad scope of online businesses. Below is a list of internet marketing business models:

* Pay per click advertising

* banner ads

* e-mail marketing

* affiliate marketing

* interactive advertising

* search engine marketing

* Blog marketing

* Article marketing

* forum marketing

* Niche marketing

Marketers would like to get the best ROI possible for their marketing investment. The fact is that marketing ROI is sometimes hard to track the penny.

Over 72% of the Internets search traffic is requested through Google. That being said, Internet marketing starts with Google and their search bots criteria for returning search engine results.

The popularity of your website is one major factor in how successful your marketing campaign will be. Whether you are marketing from other avenues such as Google Adwords or Adsense; when the individual pulls up your website, they will need to be interested in your content.

Pay per click can be tracked by conversion rate and other tracking tools provided by the advertising company.

Many companies specialize in implementing Internet marketing strategies and Search Engine Optimization services, which both are closely related. If you have a budget that will allow you to hire a marketing or SEO firm I suggest you do so because it will allow you to concentrate on your website content.

Since the first goal of marketing is to increase, the visibility of a product how you decide to do so is paramount.

I started with Google Adwords and made no money. Google Adwords for me was a pay per sale Internet marketing strategy in which I soon found I did not have all the information I needed to be successful.

I had an unfocused website with a theme but no valuable content. I researched how important website content was to marketing, and then a light went off. I began to not only focus my content but target my audience.

My Internet marketing research took me to several forums and expert SEO websites. To be a successful online marketer you have to learn how search engines evaluate website content. Search engine marketing plays a major role in website traffic generation.

Another important factor in marketing is generating backlinks to your website. Although backlinks or sometimes-called inlinks or inbound links are a form of Search Engine Optimization, it has a direct effect on marketing. Backlinks are the number of websites that have your URL listed within their content. Search Engines use this information to determine how popular your website is. The more popular your website is the better your chances of higher page rank. Create backlinks only to websites relevant to yours.

A popular high-ranking website will get more traffic, which will draw, in higher revenue from marketing campaigns.

I learned that Keyword and Keyword phrase search volume was not as important as quality themed content. Themed content includes but is not limited to keeping your entire site relevant to one topic. Straying away from your site theme can confuse search engine robots and visitors’ it could also effect how your website will be ranked with search engines’.

Search engine ranking plays an important role in Internet marketing but it is not the only factor to success. Google gives detailed instructions on their website on how to optimize for high page rank.

If your website is created from a broad keyword term or phrase, you will allow yourself the ability to create Niches out of subcategories of that term. The aforementioned will give you the ability to attract several segments of one broad market.

A website about Golf can set up a separate directory within the website that markets Golf clubs, Golf gloves, Golf shoes, etc.

Some people chose only to cover one segment or Niche (also known as Niche marketing).

Attempting to cover every segment of a keyword term or phrase can slowly allow a website authority status on a particular subject (as long as the content is of quality and the link structure is correct).

Email marketing explains is self-explanatory. Although it has been widely used for spam by those who obtain your email address without your consent email marketing is very effective when done properly.

Companies like Aweber communications inc. of Newton, PA allow its customers to set up email campaigns with verified opt-in. For instance; on our home page we offer you the opportunity to sign up to our newsletter, when you sign up you have opted in meaning you give us permission to send you email. Those on the email list have the opportunity to opt-out via a link that is attached to every email they receive. The cool thing about Aweber is that they make it easy for anyone with a website to setup an email campaign.

Through email marketing, you either are able to further your website marketing strategy by marketing products directly or by sending, them back to your website were you then market the product. I personally prefer the later…

Forum marketing is effective but does take some time as does most marketing strategies. With forum marketing you become a member to forums relevant to your website and participate with substantive posts as much as possible keeping your website link in your signature.

Forum marketing does two things; one, it can allow you to attract visitors to your website (if your posts lead them) and two, it creates backlinks when your URL is in your signature.

Viral marketing is exactly what it sounds like; a virus. It combines many types of marketing strategies such as video, banners ads, email, fax, pod cast, word of mouth, etc.

If you market anything long, enough you will become a viral marketer.

Article marketing does two things also, one creates an interest in your website and backlinks. On the other hand, if your articles are “garbage” then it will only create backlinks. Those that market via articles do so by writing about information relevant to their Internet business and submitting each article to as many article directories as possible. Many people search article directories for information of interest. Search engines also crawl article directories. It can take up to six months to see the results of article marketing campaigns.

Article marketing has been made easier with the numerous auto submission software on the market. Although there are many article databases that do not except articles from auto submitters there are still thousands that do.

It would be in every “webmasters’” best interest to ad article marketing to their marketing campaigns.

Although a combination of Internet marketing strategies are important to generate traffic to your website, once the search engines favor your website and your articles attract visitors, you will be able to market almost anything relevant to your website content.

Without a doubt getting high quality backlinks to your site is the backbone to search engine optimization. If you want to rank well in Google or any search engine you need quality websites linking to your website.

It tells the search engines that your site must be good if so many other websites are pointing to your site. Many internet marketers are beginning to understand that there is one type of link that is far better than any other type of backlink.

What type of backlinks you ask? Education backlinks better known as .edu backlinks.

Why do the search engines regard edu backlinks as the best on the internet? Great question. .edu backlinks are the most trusted links on the internet because they are from colleges and universities. In the mind of the search engine spiders an education website does not link to just any website, they only link to websites that really have something to offer.

There is a big problem with most education backlinks though. Most education websites now use the nofollow tag with any external link that goes away from their site. They know that there are people out there that will try and exploit their websites because they know that the links they provide to websites are the most powerful for the obvious reasons discussed above.

The nofollow tag basically tells the search engines not to count the backlink on the education website because they might be trying to exploit the education website. Now because of the nofollow tag that is used for most .edu backlinks most marketers don’t even bother with trying to get them anymore.

Believe it or not there are many edu websites that can give .edu backlinks to a website that do not use the nofollow tag, these are the websites that internet marketers can still use to gain some very big love the Google and the other search engines.

There are actually people on the internet that work with education websites that will help you get dofollow edu backlinks but it typically costs money for these backlinks. However it should be realized that the cost is normally worth it if used with a solid backliking strategy.

If you ever get the chance to get a dofollow edu backlink from an education website jump on it if you can afford it. It could make all the difference to your search engine optimization efforts.

How do web design copyrights work? Are they copyrighted at all? Am I allowed to copy buttons off their website? Or their layout or colour scheme? Obviously I wouldn’t copy it exactly. What about modifying it some what? Thanks in advance guys.

Now that you’ve got your keyword phrases figured out, and you know what pages of your site they belong with, plus have created terrific Title tags and marvelous Meta description tags, you’re ready for the fun phase–writing keyword rich copy.

The most important thing to know about this phase is that copy can’t be written by just anyone. It absolutely must be written by a professional copywriter who knows how to write compelling marketing copy. First and foremost your website is there to sell your products and/or services, so while just about anyone can string words together on a page, very few can do it in such a way that appeals to people’s emotions. Since the decision to purchase or even to just “learn more” is driven in a large part by emotions, this is a critical part of your overall website success.

I always like to say that SEO doesn’t live in a vacuum. This means that everything you do to your website affects it in some way. This is why you can’t simply stuff keyword phrases all over your page and expect it to help your business. While it may temporarily provide you with some high rankings in the search engines, it won’t do you any good if those prospects leave without taking the action you want them to take.

With that in mind, make sure that everything you write, and every keyword phrase you use on any page of your website keeps the site visitor in mind. If you find that adding keyword phrases to your copy makes it sound worse, rather than better, then you’re not doing it correctly.

If your copywriter has no clue about search engines and refuses to learn, you could have them write each page’s copy without keyword phrases in mind, and then you could go back and edit it for keyword phrases. However, I’ve found that it’s very easy to train a good copywriter to also write SEO copy, and honestly, if they’re going to be writing website copy, they really need to learn this skill.

That said, your website may already have great copy contained within it, but it was never optimized for your keyword phrases. If that’s the case, the following steps should help you to transform your prose into something both your visitors and the search engines will eat up!

Step #1: Gather up the keyword lists that you created for each page of your website.

Step #2: Start with one page (usually the home page) and scan the current copy for words that are very general, as opposed to being descriptive. These can be words such as “product” or “service.”

Step #3: In reviewing those general words, decide if it is possible to substitute any of your keyword phrases for them without ruining the flow of the copy or changing the meaning of the sentence. If so, make the substitution. Be careful of substituting the same keyword phrase for every instance of your general words. Doing so will usually end up making the copy sound “spammy” and keyword stuffed.

Step #4: Look for individual words on the page that that are part of any of your longer keyword phrases, and see if the longer phrase can be substituted instead.

Step #5: Check to see if the page copy already has headlines and subheadlines and whether they could be re-written to naturally include keyword phrases. If so, edit them accordingly.

Step #6: If the copy isn’t already using headlines or subheadlines, see if there are places in between paragraphs where some may fit in naturally. Most web copy can benefit from breaking up the paragraphs with subheadlines. If yours needs this, add some in, using keyword phrases where appropriate. (Generally one phrase per headline.)

Step #7: Re-read the entire page (out loud is good) and see if you notice any other places where the chosen keyword phrases could fit in naturally.

Step #8: Re-read the page yet again and make sure that the copy reads as well for humans as it does for search engines. This is the most important step, and the one that many people get wrong. If you have even an inkling that your copy sounds keyword-stuffed, go back and try it again.

The goal with SEO copywriting is to ensure that a typical visitor to the page should have no idea that it was optimized, but a trained SEO should be able to pick out the keyword phrases. Once you have that balance, you’ve done your job perfectly and your website will be golden with the search engines and your site visitors alike!

If you’d like more information and examples of how to write for the search engines, you may want to grab a copy of my Nitty-gritty of Writing for Search Engines.