Pay per click advertising is an excellent way to get the word about your local small business to a wide audience. The process involves spotting an ad on various web sites that will forward an interested party back to your web site.

Part of the attraction of pay per click advertising is that the ad owner only pays when someone clicks on the ad and actually follows through to the web site.

When it comes to PPC advertising, never forget the importance of keywords. Essentially, keywords are words and phrases that are considered to be common modes of searching the Internet to find desired content.

As an advertiser, your job is to come up with keywords that you believe are likely to take you to web sites that are relevant to the type of business site you currently operate. The rationale is that persons who visit those sites would most likely be interested in the content of your site.

If you manage to find the right web sites for your ads, then the chances of generating clicks to your site are much greater.

While the keyword mode of pay per click advertising is very common, there is also a second method. Known as content match PPC, the principle is still the same.

The main difference is that rather than basing the search on keywords, the results are based on the content of the site. As an example, if you run a site that is dedicated to gardening supplies, then it would be a natural for you to want to place ads on sites dedicated to gardening.

Content matching can be used right along with keywords to create a well rounded pay per click component in your overall publicity campaign.

Finding online resources to help you with the process of placing pay per click ads is relatively easy. One of the most popular approaches is to make use of the Google Adwords program. You can get started by identifying a list of relevant keywords. You can also get help in designing the appearance of your ad, using online tools.

Adwords also includes a number of online tools, so you can keep track of how many hits get to your web site through those hits. This allows you to stay on top of how much pay per click is advertising is costing you each month. By comparing the sales that result from the hits with the cost of your pay per click campaign, you can determine if the program is making money for you.

Another target for your pay per click campaign is online comparison shopping engines. These types of engines often are willing to provide feeds through the placement of ads on their searches.

Just as with the ads on informational web sites, persons can click through to your web site and see what you have to offer. Some of these sites provide you with the ability to see the number of hits, while others do not. Payment for placing the ad on the shopping comparison site may be in the form of a fixed monthly amount or based on a fixed rate per click.

Keep in mind that there is no such thing as exclusionary pay per click arrangement. This means you can sign up with as many keyword and shopping ad services as you like. In fact, you may do very well to try out several different services, to see which ones seem to provide you with the best matches and coverage.

If funds for advertising are limited, go with a well known service, and then add more services as your revenue stream builds to the point you can afford to do so. Remember that your goal is to build a solid foundation for your web site, so it may take some time before you begin to see results.

Disregard stories about overnight success. Chances are you will go about six months to a year before you see significant traffic that results in sales.

Pay per click advertising is often an affordable way to launch your advertising campaign. The cost per click is often a fraction of a cent, so it certainly will not cost a great deal, unless you happen to get a huge number of visitors clicking through to your site.

The law of averages would dictate that of that huge number, enough sales would result to make your investment in the pay per click program well worth your time and the expense.

To learn more ways to drive traffic to your company using local business marketing go to: http://www.streetsmartsalesandmarketing.com/LocalBusinessMarketing.htm

Internet Marketing Strategies Using Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
By Festus Taferi

Internet marketing means the use of the internet to advertise and sell goods and services. It includes banner and text advertising, email marketing, interactive advertising, affiliate marketing and search engine marketing (including search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising). The aim of using search engine optimization in internet marketing is to increase targeted traffic to one’s website via search engine rankings, paid listings and advertisements.

So, what is SEO?

It is the art and science of making your Web pages as relevant as possible. Here, relevance is a measure of how close your Web page is aligned to what the user is looking for. Simply, the more relevant your page is, the higher your rankings are by search engines like Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista etc.

This means that if your web page is ranked high by the likes of Yahoo or Google, and a user searches for information that contains specific keywords/terms associated with your web page; your web page is most likely to be among the top 10 search results that will be presented to the user.

The act/art of adding keywords to ones web page for maximum relevance is what is known as search engine optimization (SEO).

Humans and search engines treat Web pages in different ways. Where people look at design and read text, search engines will scan and detect relevant keywords that it would use to rate your web page as having the relevant information that a user needs.

Such “key words” are strategically placed within the web page for search engines to “see” them. Also noteworthy is the relevance of your link popularity and theme. That is, who is linking to your page? Are they related to your site’s theme?

So how do search engines evaluate your Web pages?

They determine relevance of your page by breaking it into areas. Each area consists of elements, namely HTML tags. this engines emphasize some of these tags and scan them for your keyword. If found, your page is considered more relevant.

To optimize your pages, you need to learn these three main terms: Frequency, Prominence, and Weight.

A. Frequency:

Frequency is how often your keyword appears on the page or in its elements (Title, META Description and Keywords, visible text, H1, ALT, etc.).

B. Prominence:

Prominence is how close to the start of the tag your keyword appears. In general, a keyword that appears closer to the beginning of a page element (Title, META Description and Keywords, visible text, ALT, etc.) will make your Web page more relevant.

C. Weight / Density:

Keyword weight shows the number of times a keyword appears in an area as a percentage to all words in the page:

Keyword weight is calculated as the number of words in the key phrase multiplied by frequency and divided by the total number of words (including the keyword). Mathematically, it is:

Weight = (Words in keyword/All words) x 100%

Logically then, the higher the weight of a particular keyword in a page, the higher the ranking of the page for that keyword. However, repeating a keyword too often to increase its weight can cause the page to be penalized by the search engines.

Keyword weight is sometimes referred to as ‘Density’ which stands for the same notion – overall percentage of some definite word relative to all words in the text.

It is very important to balance your site’s optimization so that it is neither under-optimized nor over-optimized.

Under-optimization may get your site lost among hundreds of thousands of other sites. While over-optimization would get your site penalized or worse – banned from the search engines

Festus Taferi is an IT professional with over 9 years experience in online business development and marketing. Get more mind blowing SEO techniques at: http://linksman-seoplace.blogspot.com/.

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

This article is going to focus on one of the easiest to implement and one that’s free! I will be showing you how to make use of a tell-a-friend script to make your website become more viral. Viral marketing makes use of the tendency of a person to share something to find informative, entertaining or amazing.

A tell a friend script is a simple programming script that you can literally “cut and paste” into your website. Tell a friend scripts can be placed anywhere on your site. I place it in my navigation bar so that it appears on every page. You just want to be sure that it is easy to see so that a person can easily click on it to send the information they find interesting to any of his friends or his family members.

To see an real life example of 2 types of tell-a friend scripts go to www.StreetSmartSalesAndMarketing.com. Check out the side and bottom navigation bars and click on the Tell a Friend/Share This button.

The basic concept of a tell a friend script is a script wherein a person may input his name, e-mail address, the recipient’s e-mail address and send the media to the intended recipient much like an e-mail with an attachment. As the recipient receives the e-mail he wouldn’t think of the mail a spam mail because he would see the sender’s name as someone he or she knows and trust.

Tell a friend script eliminates greatly the chances of being blocked because they use the information inputted by the sender. This allows for wider spreading of this marketing method. It can be quite sneaky but it is very effective.

With the e-mail sent and opened the sent media will either be read, viewed or played. Also along with the mail would be a brief description of the company or site that sponsors the media sent. This allows for the introduction of either the site, company name or its products. The along with it is another tell a friend script.

Then the process begins again. As more people use the tell a friend script, more and more people will know of the existence of the sponsoring company or site. People who read the ads inside the mail who liked what they see would go and click on the link and visit the site. This drives traffic into the site resulting to great number of potential customers.

A tell a friend script is very simple and does not require a complicated method of programming. In fact, you can copy paste a script and simply put it on an intended page. Finding one is even simpler. All you have to do is go to a search engine and type in the search box “tell a friend script” then press enter or click go.

In the search results page you will see many links that will direct you to a site where you can get a tell a friend script. It would just be a simple matter of looking and searching for the script and copying it to your intended web page.

To get you started you can check out SocialTwist.com or ShareThis.com. The cool thing about these 2 services is they also let the website visitor share your website though social bookmarking websites like Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon just to name a few.

With a tell a friend script viral marketing strategy you can drive traffic into your site which could potentially spell profits. This is a simple harmless script that offers great benefits for low cost paired with great creativity and foresight.

To learn more secrets on how to drive more traffic, convert more visitors to paying customers and get found faster by the search engines pick up a free copy of “7 Steps to Website Success” Just go to www.WebsiteMakeoverASAP.com