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The Best Way to Market Your Website

Author - Sarah Freeland
Internet marketing is fast becoming the main source of company awareness for the modern business. Every company now wishes to use websites to their advantage, as either a brochure website to give information, or as a portal for sales and goods for their customers. But a website on its own doesn’t do the job.

All companies with websites must engage in some type of website promotion to get their website into the minds of their prospective clients – it is no different than any other form of advertising. It is important to make your message prominent, memorable, and accessible. There are a number of ways to do this.

One method is to engage in search engine marketing, along the lines of a Pay-Per-Click campaign, such as AdWords or Adsense. This form of advertising is helpful for smaller businesses with tighter advertising budgets, as there is a limit on the cost per click for each campaign. To get noticed by the search engines, it is often wise to engage in URL submission, whereby your website URL is submitted to search engines for inclusion in their pages. This lets the search engine know that your website exists, and then it can send its search-bots to index your site into its search engine pages.

Along with these strategies, it is advisable to use traffic analysis to gauge where your visitors are coming from, and what they are looking for, in order to get a more streamlined targeted approach. This is usually done in conjunction with some sort of website marketing campaign, such as the pay per click methods mentioned above. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, also helps in bringing your website to the public eye, through techniques that help your site to be more prominent when certain keywords are searched for using any search engine.
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A Brief History Of The Internet

Author - Walt Howe's
The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields. J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed the theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of Internet connections. Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected a Massachusetts computer with a California computer in 1965 over dial-up telephone lines. It showed the feasibility of wide area networking, but also showed that the telephone line's circuit switching was inadequate. Kleinrock's packet switching theory was confirmed. Roberts moved over to DARPA in 1966 and developed his plan for ARPANET. These visionaries and many more left unnamed here are the real founders of the Internet.

The Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a contract let by the renamed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah). The contract was carried out by BBN of Cambridge, MA under Bob Kahn and went online in December 1969. By June 1970, MIT, Harvard, BBN, and Systems Development Corp (SDC) in Santa Monica, Cal. were added. By January 1971, Stanford, MIT's Lincoln Labs, Carnegie-Mellon, and Case-Western Reserve U were added. In months to come, NASA/Ames, Mitre, Burroughs, RAND, and the U of Illinois plugged in. After that, there were far too many to keep listing here.

The Internet was designed in part to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the sites were destroyed by nuclear attack. If the most direct route was not available, routers would direct traffic around the network via alternate routes.

The early Internet was used by computer experts, engineers, scientists, and librarians. There was nothing friendly about it. There were no home or office personal computers in those days, and anyone who used it, whether a computer professional or an engineer or scientist or librarian, had to learn to use a very complex system.

E-mail was adapted for ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson of BBN in 1972. He picked the @ symbol from the available symbols on his teletype to link the username and address. The telnet protocol, enabling logging on to a remote computer, was published as a Request for Comments (RFC) in 1972. RFC's are a means of sharing developmental work throughout community. The ftp protocol, enabling file transfers between Internet sites, was published as an RFC in 1973, and from then on RFC's were available electronically to anyone who had use of the ftp protocol.
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Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

Author - Brandon Sheley
So you've decided to create a Web site. The first thing you'll want to think about is search engine optimization. Using proper SEO will ensure your site gets great placement in search engine results. You can hire someone to help you or use SEO yourself.

Here are some tips on improving your search engine rankings:

1. Select and use strong keywords. You'll want your content to be rich with keywords, but don't go overboard. If you use too many keywords search engines will pick up on it and your site won't rise in the rankings. If you use too many keywords, your site could be excluded altogether.

2. Compare to other sites. You'll want to see what those with great placement are doing on their sites. Search for sites that are similar to yours. Take a look at the sites that have received high placement in the search results. While on the web page select "view" and click "source." This will give you the opportunity to analyze the keywords and tags that were used.

3. Use keyword tools. A keyword tool is helpful in determining how visitors search for sites related to yours. By using a keyword tool you'll be able to see how many hits a site would get using certain search terms. You can use the popular search terms you find to get better search engine placement.

4. Have working links. Make sure all the links on your web site work. If you have dead links on your site, it negatively effects your site's placement in search engine results.

5. Submit your site to directories. There are several free directories you where you can submit your site. Others charge a fee. Don't overlook paying this fee though because this increases your changes of having search engines list your site.

6. Create a sitemap. Creating a sitemap and submitting it to search engines will guarantee that all the pages of your site will be included when the search engines crawl the site. You can use a free program to create a sitemap.

7. Create backlinks. It can take awhile for search engines to find your Web site. One way to promote it is by using backlinks. Backlinks are links that point back to your web site from a different web site. Ways you can get backlinks are to write articles related to your site's topic and submit them to free article sources such as Ezine Articles. At the end of the article, write a little bit about yourself as an author and link to your site.

8. Use reciprocal links. Find sites that are related to yours and ask the web site owner to place a link to your site on their site. In return you'll do the same. You can contact sites that are complementary to yours. For example, if you have a site that sells a variety of hats, you can have links placed on sites that sell coats and jackets. You can get in contact with the web site owner by looking for the contact information on the site. Send an email and ask for a reciprocal link.
Brandon Sheley @ http://www.sheley.com & http://forum.vbulletinsetup.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Brandon_Sheley