A Beginner's Guide to Website Promotion and Internet Marketing

With the appropriate knowledge and tools, the vastness of the Internet can be transformed from an arid wasteland into a fertile oasis. At first, the sheer size and abundance of the Internet may seem more like jungle, teeming with life and opportunities. Demand is high, running costs are low, and access to people seems limitless.

The problem is, you're hardly the first to come to this realization. The first critical realization for anyone wishing to establish a platform online is the following; the jungle might as well be a desert unless you specialize. In this article I will detail how to begin to build a solid platform that will allow your venture to grow exponentially, gather interested, targeted traffic and allow you to broaden your oasis until the desert becomes a pasture.

For the remainder of this article, the arid wasteland will be known as competition (or saturation -- take your pick), and the oasis will be summarized by the term niche.

Perhaps -- given enough time. But don't count on it. Popular search engines such as Google drive the majority of most website traffic. Traffic which originates from a search engine query is known as organic traffic, and is absolutely critical in determining the fate of most online ventures.

There are many factors which influence how well a given website ranks in the search engines for any particular query. One of these is time. Thus, old domains have some inherent benefits in terms of search engine ranking.

But in terms of importance, the first issue we need to deal with is telling major search engines the basics about who we are, and what we do.

Keyword Research should be considered the foundation of any online venture, and should be completed before anything tangible is even considered. But what are they, and why are they so important?

Keywords are how search engines decide what your website is about. Google uses a veritable horde of bots (or crawlers), which are small autonomous scripts that browse the Internet and categorize websites based on content. One of the most important data collected are links, which give Google an educated guess about what that particular website is about, and how relevant it is to a particular search query. For instance, by including the following link: internet web site marketing, I am telling Google that the website in question is related to that keyword phrase. If the website in question has content that matches the anchored text in the link (the keyword phrase), then Google will take note and list the website on its index in for that particular search.

Important: Due to the fact that we're just starting up, our back-links will be few and far between and Google may have a hard time finding us at all! Thankfully, the anchored text in a back-link (the keywords!) also tells Google what OUR website is about, not only about the destination. The process by which we ensure that our website contains keywords relevant to our content, and the content of our link destination is a part of what is (I'm sure you've heard of it) known as SEO (Search engine optimization). But more on that later. 

It's time to plan our company. In this case I'm going to start a business that sells Top Hats. So, if we employ what we've learned so far, you would probably advocate adding the following keyword to our links and content. But that's because you've already forgotten the first lesson in this article, which is "specialize". 

You may think that selling top hats is already a fairly specific niche. But a quick Google search (picture to the right) informed me that for that roughly 14 million other pages are competing for that particular keyword phrase. No, that isn't good. 

Attracting any attention at this point may seem difficult at best -- but don't despair. Efficient Keyword research separates the men from the boys (pardon, if you're female), and we're going to go through it step by step.

The first thing we need is a free keyword tool (there are some amazing and highly prolific commercial tools -- but for now, let's stick with a free one), one such tool is Google's very own keyword finder.

The first thing we want to do is enter our broad keyword into the keyword box on the left so we can get some ideas. Bear in mind that researching keywords can become complex, and that this is an introductory look at the process which excludes a lot of valuable data, But that will come with time.

Let's have a look at our results.

The first thing to realize here is that the competition column (a green bar represents high competition) is almost fully green. This means that for those particular keywords there is a lot of competition, far too much for us to challenge at this stage in the game. Because we're just starting out, we're going to have to target less competitive keywords and build around those.

After playing with the search and competition filters I identified a term which has relatively low competition and a moderate amount of searches (to the right). I'm going to plug that particular key phrase into the box at the top and repeat the process again, until I find something I like. For the sake of brevity, I'm going to spare you the endless procession of filtering.

I eventually found a first keyword that I was comfortable with, which is "". What makes this a valuable keyword is the fact that it has high traffic potential, low competition and high value. The term value refers to a separate column (you can add and remove columns from the table) which lists how much advertisers are willing to spend on that particular keyword. Obviously, the higher the value, the more profitable it has been in the past. 

In theory you can build a website revolving around a dozen keywords. When starting, I recommend researching and building around a handful only (if successful, you can branch out gradually and target more competitive keywords). While we've discussed the role that links and anchored text have, they are not the only important tools with regarding clever SEO.

To the right I've posted a couple of articles that will guide you through the specifics. One part of SEO that I did want to mention was that of meta tag analysis, since it contains elements of what we have already discussed.

Meta tags are snippets of code that are invisible to the browsing end-user and are specifically planted for search engine crawlers. They house important information such as keywords, content description and authors, I mention this because most layman webmasters ignore the power of meta tags, simply because they aren't aware they exist.

Bear in mind that these tags, as with your keywords, need to be relevant to the content of your website (or page). 

In order to correctly install the tags you will need writable access to your web site's template. The following code needs to be inserted in the <head> tags at the beginning of the document. Here is a bare-bones example of an HTML document layout and where you should insert your code.

<html>

<head>
<title>Your title</title>
<meta name="description" content="Describe your website here">
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1,keyword2,keyword3">
</head>

<body>
Rest of Page Goes Here
</body>

</html>

Please click the following link to continue to part 2 of the guide, where we will deal with promoting and marketing your new venture!

Web Site Promotion and Internet Marketing Part 2!