Advertising Online for Small Business

For a small business owner advertising online can be confusing and frustrating. Having a website built is easy - having a successful website that will allow you to advertise effectively online, is another matter.

Once you have a website there are two ways to advertise online. One will provide you with almost unlimited free advertising and the other will cost you money.

1. The best advertising you can get is to have your website come up in the "organic" search results when people search for the product or service you are selling. This form of advertising is also FREE.

2. The second method is by using PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. Advertising this way will cost you anything from a few cents to a few dollars every time someone clicks on the advertisement.

In this article I'll explain how organic search results work. The following article will explain PPC advertising.

Organic Search Results - How They Work

When you type a phrase into the search box you'll see two types of results come up. There is a list of pages taking up most of the screen - these are called "organic" results. To the left and sometimes above are PPC advertisements. Most people look at the organic listings that come up before resorting to the advertisements. If you can ensure your website is amongst the first few listings that come up, you'll bring plenty of visitors to your website for free.

Unless you understand SEO (search engine optimization) you are unlikely to be able to get your listing high up in the organic search results without professional assistance. It may seem expensive when you get quotes but it will be money very well spent if the job is done properly.

Getting to the Top of the Organic Listings

There are two important aspects to improving the place of your wesbite in the organic listings.

1. The content of your website
2. Backlinks

The Content

Search engines monitor websites and match the content on those websites to what people are searching for. Search engines are clever but they are not people - if you sell wooden flooring, but your website content goes on and on about your business procedures, environmental policy and quality control, without mentioning the term "wooden flooring" more than once or twice, the search engines won't understand that your business is about wooden flooring. If you mention the words "quality control" six times and "wooden flooring" only once, the search engines may think your site is about quality control.

This is where the term "keywords" comes in. Keywords are the most likely terms and phrases people would enter in the search box when looking for something. Therefore, you need to identify the keywords that relate to what you are selling. You are likely to identify quite a few relevant keywords and knowing which ones to use and exactly where to place them is also a little tricky. You would think that using the most popular keyword as often as you can is the way to go but this is not the case - the competition from other businesses selling the same item is likely to be high and you still may not get a good position in the organic listings. The placement of the keywords is of more importance than the amount of times you use them.

You need to have a good amount of content on your website. Once you have all the website pages a business normally has, you can still add content. You want people to be interested in your website, have a good look around, and feel that you really are an expert in your field. Clever business owners add articles about their industry or trade to the website. For example, a wooden flooring business website could contain articles about maintaining wooden floors; how to choose the type of wood for your home; different types of wood and their advantages and disadvantages; doing it yourself; or skirting boards.

The other method of increasing your content is to have a "blog". This however, should only be done if you have time to regularly add articles to the blog, or you are prepared to pay an article writer or blog writer to do it for you.

Having a large amount of content gives the added advantage that you can use many less popular keywords in the articles and hence bring more visitors (called "traffic") to your website.

Backlinks

A backlink is when another wesbite places a link to your website on theirs. If you have several backlinks it gives the search engines the impression that your website is important, which in turn, helps you wesbite to move up in the organic listings.

There are two main ways to get backlinks. You can contact relevant website owners and ask for one, or you can submit articles about your product and trade to article directories. The articles contain a link to your website. Not only does this give you a backlink, but your article is distributed across the Internet and brings visitors to your site.

As you can see, if you know little about SEO, article writing and Internet marketing in general, you are better off passing these jobs to professionals. Another reason you might prefer to do this is to save time. If you are like most small business owners, you are busy enough attending to matters for which you do have the expertise.

Hire an SEO firm to optimize your website. The SEO firm will probably recommend having articles written by professional content writers as well as having the existing content re-written and optimized.

Here's a tip for finding the right SEO company - type "Search Engine Optimization" or "SEO" into the search box. Given what these companies specialize in, you'd have to suspect that the ones who come up first know best what they are talking about. The proof as they say, is in the pudding.

Once you have your website optimized and have filled it with great content, you're likely to find that advertising online is a tremendously successful tool for your small business.