The Emerging New Face of Internet Business Marketing
What Web 2.0 means basically is that if you rely on "grass roots" (so called FREE search engine listings based on your site's actual content), You need to increase up your web site's presence, visibility, incoming links and credibility as a worthwhile resource or authority in the Internet community at large. Many of the larger search engines no long rely on what your site content is as much as they judge your "rank worthiness" by the predominance of your Internet community presence on other related content authority sites. Do other sites in the internet community find your site worthy of referencing and linking to? Are you present as an authority in social networks, article directories, blogs and other related industry online journals etc. The point is we can no longer rely on only our sites content and what we say about ourselves alone if we want top search engine listings, visitor traffic and online business credibility without actually paying the engines to list us well (a very expensive task). Sites that do, are finding their listings slowly dropping behind the sites that implement the Web 2.0 social networking strategy... or so the theory goes. Well, after doing the acid test on one of my sites, I'm ready to say with a strong degree of confidence that it's true. Over the last few months I've noticed a slow, gradual downward trend in the sites I promote to the engines. I've done everything that traditionally worked to reverse this trend with limited results. By implementing the Web 2.0 strategies I've seen my listings jump from about 260 in Google to over 6000 in less than three months! However the bad news is that Web 2.0 is geared to what they call authority information sites whose purpose is to educate or entertain, and not as much to business sites whose sole purpose is to sell. In the early days of Internet marketing, on "site factors" like Titles, meta tags and page content were all important and competition was scarce. However those days are gone and competition is getting fierce especially due to the fact that the slow movers are finally "getting it" and getting themselves online. So how does a business site implement Web 2.0 Strategies?Let's take MagicalHypnotist.com as an actual example since I've implimented many Web 2.0 strategies into it. The site content is all about Magic, Illusion and Stage Hypnosis. Keep in mind that the real purpose of the site is to establish credibility and bookings. Here are the methods and techniques I've implemented on the site that have made a big difference: 1. I updated the site itself to the new WC3 Xhtml .css web standard 2. I added numerous informative Articles about Magic, Magicians, Hypnosis and NLP. Examples (they open in a new window): 3. I added a blog and setup automated article posts that automatically notify various Social Authority sites My Blog: http://www.magicalhypnotist.com/blog 4. I added a Search Engine Optimized Shopping cart with hundreds of hypnosis and magic products 6. I've made getting one way incoming links (as opposed to link trades) a PRIORITY! Incoming Links According to: Search Engine Listings According to: To see my top 30 listings in the major engines for my TARGETED keywords CLICK HERE (Adobe .pdf document) Daily Unique Targeted Visitors: 150 (average) Find out how many listings and incoming links your site has 7. I've setup accounts for myself on Numerous Social sites including MySpace.com 8. I've added a email newsletter and tell a friend about this site feature 9. If you are an author, expert or authority. Write an article. These are just a few of the things that can and should be done to increase your SOCIAL online presence and credibility and get the engines to boost your rankings based on your Internet pressence on other sites. If you don't, you will have to pay the engines to get good rankings. How many of them are you implimenting? Unfortunately the new Internet marketing strategy takes ongoing work but it is part of the requirements for online success and profitability. Hope this helps. To your continued success. Mark Hamilton aka Internet Outfitter |
Every now and then Internet Marketing goes through a major change which in turn requires a change in approach by online business marketers. While some of these changes turn out to be short term "fads", others take the online marketing game in an entirely new direction. During the early to mid part of 2006 there was a new "buzz" about something being called Web 2.0 which is basically the socialization of the Internet marketing community. I was skeptical at first but decided to keep an eye on it because it kinda made sense. Ultimately, I noticed more and more marketers talking about it so I decided to give it the acid test on one of my sites (