Marketing your business on line is a challenging task. You have to arm yourself with the proper information and tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are competing to optimize their rankings with the search engines and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the black hole of sites that get zero traffic and earn no money. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need. Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in. But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I already mentioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday. So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating. With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let’s just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all. So once again, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site’s existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business. Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimization. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme. You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site’s content applicable and conducive to search engine optimization. You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites. Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding. If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality. Act now and see the benefits garner with search engine optimization. All of these will result in better traffic and more business for your site and company.

STATISTICS AND DEVELOPMENTS INDICATING THE NECESSITY OF SOCIAL NETWORKS FOR BUSINESS AND MARKETING Provided by SE-Optimize During the summer of 2006, we saw several key indicators that business executives and investors were taking keen notice of social networks and their potential impact on the online advertising and marketing arena. Many popular bookmarking and social networking sites have been acquired by larger corporations – the most famous of which was of course Google’s acquisition of social video network, YouTube. However, what is more interesting to business owners and C-level executives are the large investments now being made into advertising models and programs within social networks. In June, Interpublic Group announced it would be developing marketing programs on FaceBook for its agency clients to the tune of $10 million worth of ad space. In early July, WPP Group invested $2 million into corporate social network, LiveWorld. This unique joint venture will help WPP’s agency clients, such as the skincare company Dove, deploy their own social networks. We find it fascinating, as a company that participates in both the social networking and search optimization spaces, that Fortune 1000 companies and large advertising agencies are recognizing the importance and profitability of social networks far faster then they recognized the benefits of search marketing. However, to the benefit of the small business or medium-sized company, these large corporations will take time to implement their large-scale campaigns, while their smaller counterparts are moving quickly to acquire their piece of the social networking pie. For instance, Forrester’s December 2005 survey of marketing executives showed that 13% were marketing via blogs or social networks at the time, but 51% forecasted “total adoption” of such marketing strategies within the next 12 months. BUT JUST HOW LARGE IS THE SOCIAL NETWORKING SPACE? According to comScore Media Metrix, the total US internet audience has grown by roughly 4% in 2006. Yet several social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and Bolt have seen growth percentages in the triple-digits. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the top 10 social networks (MySpace, ClassMates.com, Flickr, FaceBook, YouTube, etc.) received roughly 68.8 million unique visitors by 2005 – reaching 45% of all active web users. That means that nearly 50% of all Internet traffic ran through one or more social networks last year. But think of the explosive growth and public acquisitions in 2006… In June of this year, US web stats company, Compete, released some fascinating data that blows 2005’s growth out of the water: Their Key Findings: 1.In June, 2006, 2 out of every 3 people online visited a social network 2. Social Networking sites are now close to eclipsing traffic to search giants like Yahoo! and Google 3. MySpace received 55 million visitors in June 2006 For those of us who participate in the global markets, it’s interesting to note that Bebo overtook MySpace as the top social network in the UK during most of 2006. WILL THE SOCIAL NETWORKING FAD LAST? Jon Gibs, senior director of Nielsen/NetRatings, said social networking sites are the “reality television of the Internet.” “The content is relatively inexpensive for publishers to produce, and social networking is not a fad that will disappear,” Gibs points out. “If anything, it will become more ingrained in mainstream sites, just as reality TV programming has become ubiquitous in network programming.” This means immense opportunity for any business owner or executive. First of all, online advertising is far more affordable than television or traditional media advertising. But more importantly, there are ways to market yourself in the various social networks without spending money on advertising. These strategies include maintaining your own blog, creating profiles for your company on MySpace and other networks to interact directly with your audience (without spamming, as we’ve seen recently occurring on MySpace), producing engaging and buzz-worthy content that gets circulated among bookmarking websites (as well as Technorati), and producing media content for networks like YouTube and BlogTalkRadio. The key to success in marketing with social networks is to understand that there’s no middle man here. No marketing hoopla. And no wall of corporate messaging to hide behind. Social networks are transparent and to effectively engage their audiences you have to be willing to be transparent as well. Then all you need are some creative strategies for communicating with your audience – which we are happy to provide you. Contact us for a free consultation to discuss.