Here’s what you need to know when you decide to advertise your business via the Internet. There are in fact a number of methods, and just as many platforms upon which to advertise online, but let’s stick to the World Wide Web for now. And to further simplify it, we’ll focus on search engine marketing.

Probably the most important target of online marketing is the search engine. And the ultimate goal is to have your website (therefore, your products / services) appear on the first page of search engine results. When people do a Google search for, say, “houses for rent in Davao”, the search engine returns links to websites, ordered by relevance. In other words, the links you see on the first search engine results page (SERP) are those of websites that are likeliest to be the most relevant to your search.

Appearing at the top of SERPs is desirable to Internet marketers because it’s a fact that most people click only on links from the first result page. So how is this accomplished? How do you get your website to come out on top? The key factor is context, or, how relevant your website’s content is to the search terms used.

You need to know how search engines behave in order to know how best to go about advertising online. Basically, websites are indexed by search engines according to their content. What’s crucial here is what keywords (or search terms) are associated with your site. If you own a website that promotes real estate sales, for instance, you’d want your site to come out in SERPs when people search for “beachfront properties” or “office space rental”, etc.

The major search engines like Google are fully automated. An attendant software program called “spider” constantly crawls the Web, and so helps get websites indexed. Google is very secretive about how their software indexes websites, but it’s clear that site content plays a vital role. Additionally, incoming links to your site are also very influential.

So, before you even consider venturing into Internet advertising, you must make certain that your site’s content is primed for it. If you have a hotel website, pay more attention to your content (as opposed to design). It must contain a healthy amount of keywords such as accommodation, the name of your locality, tourism-related terms, etc.

Further, you’d do well to get other websites to link to yours. But it’s not that simple. The text used to link to your site must be the keywords with which you’d like your site to be associated. For example, if you’d like your site to be searchable by the keyword “Davao hotel”, then text links to your site should be so, and not the name of your hotel.

If a good number of other sites link to yours via relevant keywords, your SERP ranking will certainly increase. Here’s an open secret: links are fast becoming a commodity on the Web. Some even say it’s a form of currency now.

If you find all this rather confusing, don’t despair. In the world of magic it’s said that, if you know the name of an object, you can control it. Well, the name of this activity I’ve been describing is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

More on this in future posts!

The day of hearts is just around the corner. Before you know it, it’s going to be time to send her flowers and memorable gifts this Valentine’s Day. Or him, for that matter! We are in the new millennium after all.

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