A web presence can be for creating traffic to your sites or blogs. SEO opens up wide windows into realizing this one goal. Whether your site talks about a product, a service or just a piece of information, you need to identify your target readers or web visitors first. Once you develop ‘Organically Rich’ contents with relevant keywords to be posted into your site, then a majority of your work is done. The Keyword selection is the cream of the game and you need to invest time into this one step.

Next comes the level where you have to promote or advertise your web presence to the target audience. We shall look into a series of possibilities, but the selection criteria of each depend upon the user.

Social Networking Sites

Make use of the heavily trafficked ones such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace for a kick off. In later stages build a network that favors your page and engage them in conversations.

Blogs

Here too, you can use the most powerful and highly reachable blogs such as WordPress and Eblogger. Optons such as Tumblr, SquareSpace, Typepad, Posterous Spaces, and Compendium Blogware, Drupal etc can also be looked into based on your priorities.

Videos

You can have real life videos, animations or even PowerPoint presentation regarding your product, service or informative content posted onto sites such as YouTube, Google videos etc for creating traffic. If specific keywords are being tagged along with such postings, these video sites themselves will enable a good traffic to your content automatically.

Plugins

Plugins are crucial for many web users, especially after smartphones have bombarded the consumer electronics market. Using RSS feeds button, affiliate links, Facebook and Twitter Plugins, Blog Plugins etc on your main web page will enable to create cyclic or repeated traffic.

Reviews

If you are good in writing, being a good critic then you can make use of the numerous article and review sites for posting you contents. Sites such as ezinearticles and articlesnatch are examples where people post their contents for free, but most of them with a hidden agenda to drive traffic to their main web pages!

Search Engine Optimization, as most of us might know is a set of practices that complements each other’s in order to create a required traffic level to the web presence of a piece of information. For traders, making use of B2B platforms by incorporating few SEO skills will assist in reaching their target fast. Let’s get this in detail through an example. Alibaba.com is a worldwide B2B trading platform deep-rooted in China. Anybody who intends to buy or sell things from a business viewpoint can register either free or paid memberships with Alibaba. Sellers can have webpages to key in information of their company, business, products and services. Buyers on the other hand can key in their buying interests. Alibaba after verification will match the buyers and sellers interests in order to initiate a business deal. Now, this can be even better by the suggested SEO’s. Traders can do basic Keyword based studies which indicates the keyword searches related to the business, product, service or the industry. Creating content that is ‘Organically Rich’ with these highlyb relevant keywords and tagging them with sites like alibaba will notify search engines like Google on the genuine availability of a piece of information.

Alibaba, is just one such example. There are business directories online that will help you identify various local, international and industry wise segmented B2B platforms. Simply creating a profile page in all such directories also won’t help in a long term basis, instead key in relevant information only with platforms that are frequented by your targeted users. One another advantage of using them is that major such platforms like Alibaba and eBay have already got a genuine identity and traffic via major search engines and registering with them will help businesses get noticed much faster.

Remember SEO as discussed before, is a multilevel game and only a combination of various proven SEO techniques will yield good results. IF you are a trader stuck with your marketing online, start signing up with these B2B’s and get your organic traffic for a competitive advantage.

It might sound odd, but in reality Google uses a combination of various such tools for ranking web pages. So why not trying to improve the speed of your web page as well? Make it simple, you as a user will wait or not for some 10 seconds for a flash to load or a page itself to load? None of us do. Hence we need to make sure that our contents are easily loadable. The point out here is something even worthier than just a site rank. It’s about the end user. Yes, most end users won’t be interested in your web content if it takes time to load. Whether it’s a product or service that you are selling or just a piece of web information, they will easily switch back to the results page due to a lagging download.

As far as search engines are concerned, it’s easier to use ‘speed’ as a factor in ranking a web page. While indexing your web pages, the Google Spiders will report on the loading time taken for each of the pages in a site. An average amount of time will be calculated over a specific period of time which will have an overall impact on Google’s ranking. This doesn’t mean that a site which loads in 4 seconds ‘will’ get better ranking as compared to another that takes 6 or 8 seconds to load.

When starting a new website, it’s advisable to select a web hosting company that offers faster services. Fast hosting will offer your web visitors a better surfing experience and will motivate them to visit the site again and to promote via word of mouth.

Site speed is not the only factor that Google takes into account. But remember, it’s something that can definitely add on the ranking criteria, an easy tool to get listed in search engines faster.

Online world is equipped with open source and paid tools for SEO’s. The following are some of the paid and unpaid, Keyword Research tools.

Free Tools

• Google Keyword Tool
• Wordtracker

Paid Tools

• Market Samurai
• Micro Niche Finder

Market Samurai and Google Keyword tools are the leading ones respectively in the paid and unpaid categories. Both have a frequently updated database on keywords. If you are ready to pay a little extra, Market Samurai can take you on a sure hit trip in the web world. Wordtracker is another option, but the limitation of results to 100 numbers and extra payment thereafter makes it a less friendly option to many.

Let’s take a closer look into Google’s Keyword tool. Being simple, user friendly and free of cost, its og no surprise that the Keyword tool has become a hit this fast. You will have to come up with the top keywords that will sell your content online. Then you can feed in those keywords one by one into Google Keyword tool’s search bar. Upon search, keyword tools will list down the Global Monthly Searches (GMS) and Local Monthly Searches (LMS) report of the provided keyword. Say for instance your keyword is having a GMS of about 30 million. This indicates a tough competition. Using this keyword can be profitable, but needs extensive amount of time and money to be pumped in.

Users can also make use of the secondary report of allied or related keywords automatically generated by keyword tool. This long list of keywords also acts as a checker whereby you can cross check to identify any keywords missed out by you. While optimizing the web contents with the selected keywords, users can try many trial and error sessions to identify the closer words that will bring in traffic.

Remember, search engine like Google is far brilliant than what we think, and doing so mechanically rather than in a natural way can create poor traffic to your contents. Always do a thorough step by step process of keyword identification and keyword research with the help of such tools to make sure the beginning of an online success!

Mobile Organic Search

• What we need is to have a presence in the 1st search page results. Mobile users are never even thinking of going to a 2nd page of the results! Let’s see some tactics.
• From your desktop site, you already link to your FB profile. Brand name can be included as the anchor text for the link and try to avoid the ‘Find us in Facebook’’ plugin.
• In your profile name, try including few keywords as choice. In this way you can optimize the title as well as the URL of your FB profile for matching with the keywords.
• Upon getting relatively good traffic to your Facebook page you can get an easy to remember Facebook URL. For example if your FB URL is like https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1115529110, you can change it into http://www.facebook.com/(name provided by you).
• Your FB profile has got valuable Text Fields. Making use of the options such as ‘Info’, ‘Description’ etc with Organically Rich contents can get you sustainable traffic over a long period.
• Follow the much used strategy of linking your FB page from other social profiles of yours. Connecting with your blogs and video sites are proven tactics.
• Crawler activities on FB can be monitored once you setup branded redirect tracking links while linking profiles.

Mobile Paid Search

These days many brands are using their FB profile as a mobile PPC landing page. Some ways to maximize mobile engagement are as follows:

• You need to connect to the exact mobile landing page. Normally FB redirects those offline smartphone users to m.facebook.com Info page, which is likely to change as ‘Timeline’ is already rolled out for smartphone users.
• Be aware of the fact that mobile users while clicking on your FB links from other web sources mostly requires user name and login password to be keyed in every time ad this annoyance can turn away the user, unless he or she is redirected using their FB app.

Social Media

This one aspect of internet has changed the world dramatically over the last 2-3 years. It seems like no web content can live longer unless it has a good social presence. Yes, the number of Facebook likes, Twitter followers all add on to the popularity of the web page which is what the basis upon which SEO is linked. The more social your site is, the more chances for search engines to place you higher on its results.

Google+

Even thought Google+ was started by Google as an initiative to combat Facebook, it’s now used by marketers to create healthy and organic traffic to their sites. The benefit of using Google Plus is that Google, the search engine giant will include any Google plus contents along with its search results.

Off Page Optimization

Earlier in web marketing we only had on page optimization where marketers used to include the most relevant keywords and contents to drive traffic to their targeted web pages. But now the competition has led to a fully exploratory practice termed off page optimization. Off Page Optimization is simply link building, where traffic to particular web content is created via other pages and contents.

Videos

Video sites such as Youtube and Metacafe allows users to submit videos for free. Most marketers use these platforms to leave a link along with the video that redirects the users to the main web page. As most such video sites are already having a natural traffic, marketers can make use of this opportunity in redirecting the traffic to their web contents.

Organic Traffic

2012 is witnessing the biggest leap ever in the SEO industry. Even professional services offering Search Engine Marketing services finds it difficult to create targeted traffic levels within specific time periods, which was a common practice few years ago. Google along with other major engines is now favoring a natural, slow and steady organic traffic to web contents. To end users this is a blessing, whereas for web marketers it’s an alarm to get back in to the ‘natural’ way of marketing.

Today, we will be seeing some of the numbers and figures that Facebook has achieved this year. It is estimated that Facebook has around 845 million monthly active users and this number is gigantic compared to Twitter which is around 300 million active users. There are currently 100 billion connections between profiles in Face and this number increased in thousands each day. The highest number of users of Facebook is in Europe where 27 percent or 223 million Europeans have created at least one Facebook profile. Asia was second with 183 million people using Facebook. However, the continent which has the highest percentage of population using Facebook is North America where half of its population is using Facebook everyday.

Users play a great role in Facebook where they posted photos, comments, pages and likes to their profiles. It is estimated that more than 250 million photos are uploaded into this social network site daily and Facebook has recorded that the ‘Like’ button is clicked 2.7 billion times daily. One of the newer features inside Facebook, the ‘Pages’ is currently clocked at 37 million pages but this is not including the private notes that are not shared by its maker.

It is estimated that 57 percent of users in Facebook is female while the other gender is at 43 percent. With the advent of smartphones and tablets just years ago, these devices also help in making Facebook more popular than ever. There are currently 425 million people that surfed Facebook through their mobile devices and most of them spend around twenty minutes per visit to the Facebook application.

Games also played a significant role in making Facebook one of the greatest human inventions. From the total net income of US$1 billion that the Facebook made in 2011, Zynga, which is the one of the main playmaker in the Facebook games industry provided 12 percent of it. This shows the influence of the games industry in making Facebook the main social network site of the world. Some of the games made by Zynga are Mafia Wars, FarmVille, Zynga Poker, Words with Friends and Hidden Chronicles.

1. Facebook

The top of the list will always be the most used social network site on the planet, Facebook. It has more than 850 million unique monthly visitors and this number is increasing in thousands every day. If Facebook manages to become an Initial Public Offering, it is estimated that its vale will be around $75 billion and $100 billion.

2. Twitter

The second place goes to the social networking site which is known for its cute blue-coloured bird logo, Twitter. Even though it is placed second, the unique monthly visitors that the website received are too small compared to the throne holder with just 250 million. Not like any other social network sites available, Twitter can be said as a unique site which is so far able to connect popular people around the world with their supporters.

3. LinkedIn

LinkedIn occupy the third place in this list. Known as the social network site for professionals, it has more than 150 million members with around 110 million unique monthly visitors. This social network site is able to not only stay in touch with your current and former colleagues but is also a place where you can explore opportunities to launch your career to the top. You will also be able to find experts and share ideas with them using LinkedIn

4. MySpace

At fourth is MySpace, which is now owned by the pop star Justin Timberlake. With around 250 employees, this social network site is able to receive around $109 million revenue in 2011. It is estimated that MySpace has around 70 million unique monthly visitors. During its early days, MySpace copied some of the features in Friendster which is a really popular social network site before 2005 and it manage to become the most popular social network site for three years until Facebook overtook the popularity vote in 2008.

5. Google+

The fifth place goes to Google Plus+, the most recent social network sites among the top five. Most people said that Google Plus+ or Goolgle+ is a mixture of features from different social network sites. It may not give a unique feeling to the social network site but thanks to the brand that they use, Google+ is now the fifth most popular social networking site in the world, surpassing DeviantArt which is on the sixth place. Google+ has around 65 million unique monthly visitors and this number is greatly increasing day by day.

Remember, Social Media even though not too formally declared, are still a part of a businesses’ customer service function. It’s a medium where the customers can open up any viewpoints regarding a product or service. This is the crucial point where the customer might take up the opportunity to back lash, as he or she can make use of the benefits of their virtual presence and can put forward any critical comments that can even bring down your sales! Hence you need to handle carefully such situations. First of all you have to keep in mind that a feedback or response can be true as well, whereas on the other hand it can be purposefully posted to harm the company or business. The identification of either of these two lies within the hand of the business owner. If the latter is found to be true, then it’s always recommended to delete such illegitimate comments and provide the other web visitors with a reasonable statement for the same. If the former is found to be the reason for such posts, various moves can be adopted as follows –

• If the response is a complete truth, then acknowledge the same, apologize formally and try to figure out a solution offline with the complaints.
• If the response is partially true, acknowledge it and provide the users with proper information. Further clarifications can be done offline.

Remember, a feedback provided by a web visitor can’t always be controlled, screened or monitored by the administrator and there can be many other visitors who might have gone through the contents before the administrator himself. Deleting such feeds and posts straight away will throw a bad image of yours in the minds of many other users. A ‘smart’ action is recommended, where the business gets its image doubled when it is ready for apologizing on its falls and to discuss it openly with its clients, rather than opening up a battle against its own customers and well wishers!

The most successful socialization that happens in the web world is through the question answer platforms such as portals, blogs and article sites. Initiatives like wiki answers, ehow and yahoo answers are examples where people take the pain to sign in and post their queries about anything under the sun. Being a business, you have the responsibility in catering t the needs of the customer that you serve and to add a little extra you can always do this by reaching them before they reach you.  Either it’s about a product or a service that you have to offer, you can engage people in talks, solve their queries and pass on more specific information about the products and services that they are looking for. It’s not necessary that you only have to focus on up-selling your things; you can just involve them in related talks even.

Blogs can be used towards the same where businesses can follow relevant related blogs and can engage discussions via comments. Similarly, signing up with the Q&A platform and web portals that has your targeted individuals entering in, can help in building up a strong and sustainable reputation among your existing clients and also paves the way for the future ones.

Remember, the expectations of any sort of customers are changing far more drastically than what you might think.  In this information filled world, customer has the right and ability to reach information faster and more accurate. It might seem like negativity for businesses to break through, but a careful consideration will allow them to make use of this as an opportunity to create a healthy business, of course for a long term!