internet marketing & search engine optimization (seo)

Out of the billions of businesses and websites currently out there, how do you get yours noticed by the people who matter the most? How do you keep ahead of your competition? How do you know how much traffic is coming to your site or who and where this traffic is coming from? How do you market your product or service to the appropriate target audience, and how do you even determine who that target audience is?

SEO vs. PPC

Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click advertising are both used to make your website more visible on the web. But what is the difference between the two? When do you choose one over the other? What happens if you do both?

Well, if you don’t do either one its easy to predict what will happen. Nothing. You might create the greatest website in the world but if no one ever sees it you won’t benefit from it very much. Even websites devoted to super hot topics, like politics, can waste away in obscurity if not marketed correctly. But marketing your website correctly comes at a cost, in either effort or monetary investment, or both.

The most popular and effective way to find something on the World Wide Web is to enter some key words into a search engine and click “go.” Unless you already have the website you are looking for in your bookmarks, you’re going to need Google, Yahoo, Bing or some other search engine to search through the millions and millions of websites out there and provide you with something useful. On a regular basis, Google, for example, “crawls” the web for anything that it thinks is interesting, important, new and authoritative. It indexes the results and keeps that information handy. When you type key words into its little box, it associates your words with all of the websites it has indexed and displays them in a list.

You’ll notice that the list Google displays has three sections. The listings on the top and of the main list and on the right column got there because someone arranged to pay Google a certain amount of money anytime someone clicked on it . A little further down the main list is where the “organic” results are located. The results on the top of that list got there due to how prominent the website (they link to) is in relation to your key words. For example, typing in “American Presidents” is more likely to result in links to Barak Obama than William Howard Taft.

The former method is called Paid Search, or Pay-Per-Click, because they pay Google (or whichever search engine they are using) each time someone click on their ad. The latter technique is called Search Engine Optimization. SEO involves adding content to the website and referring to it from other sites on the web in order to hoist the authority, prominence and popularity of the site in question.

One thing to remember about SEO and PPC is that if your site is devoted to an obscure topic, it will be easier to make it stand out from its competition, although at the same time fewer people will be looking for it. If your site is devoted to a popular topic, more people will be looking for it, but there will be a lot more competition for that traffic.

The hotter the topic the more potential traffic there is, and the more competitive it will be getting.

Tying together the creative and technical aspects of online marketing is one of the most challenging prospects of any growing business, especially in a world of constantly evolving communications. But the interactive nature of internet marketing can provide instant contact between you and your audience if carried out properly. From social networking, e-mail campaigning and local listings to pay-per-click advertising, lead generation, content management solutions, and detailed website reporting, there are many solutions that can be utilized to maximize your profits and business strategies… and at Evolvinc we know and use them all.

• Guerilla & Low-Cost Marketing Solutions
• Search Engine Optimization
• Local Listings, Geo-Targeting
• Blogging, Forums, Podcasts, RSS Feeds
• Email & Surface Mail Marketing
• Social Networking & Bookmarking
• Online Video Marketing
• Blogging, Forums, Podcasts, RSS Feeds
• CMS/Content Management Solutions
• Detailed Website Traffic & Statistics Reporting
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising
• Lead Generation
• Mail List Databases