Traffic, competition, and internet marketing

Did you know that majority of web traffic to a website comes from search engines? In a study conducted by ComScore Media Metrix in 200, shows that 37% of people who use the Internet use Google first to mine information from the web. Yahoo comes in next with 30% and the rest uses AskJeeves, AOL, MSN and other search engines. The goal of Internet sites is to get indexed with search engines, preferably Google and Yahoo since these are the two biggest search engines in the Internet and are the biggest source of traffic.

Now you need to keep in mind that there are millions of pages on the Internet and getting to the first page of search engines is the ultimate goal of any Internet marketing campaign. Several studies have already shown that 90% of Internet users do not go beyond the first page of search results. Those in the first few pages of results are pages with the higher page ranking, so in order to get more people to go to your website, you need to increase page rank. In laymen’s term, you need to be more popular.

Now, increasing your page rank is not an easy task. There are two methods by which this can be done – through search engine optimization (SEO), and search engine marketing (SEM). Some people might think these are the same, well, they are very similar but the control that advertisers have over customers’ landing page makes the biggest difference. I know that’s a little too technical so I will try expound more on this.

SEO differs from SEM in that it uses the organic or the natural flow of traffic from the Internet. It involves link building and back linking. SEO professionals focus not only on the number of links to the website, but also on the quality of these links. How many people are actually buying from your online store? How many people directly search for your site? Are you providing content which are relevant and useful for your visitors? These are some of the questions that a SEO professional needs to address, not to mention the easy retrieval of information from a website.

Now SEM, has higher costs because you will need to pay for click costs (also known as a pay-per-click campaign) and management costs. In this methods, sites can buy text links to their site from a website with higher page rank and more traffic. Let’s say you want more people to visit your online store, you can buy space at ebay so that your link can be displayed on their site. Because there are more people visiting ebay, then the chances of seeing your advertisement is higher and there is a greater chance of people visiting and buying from your site.

In the Internet world, your competitors are also your allies. Even if you are selling the same products and services, your competitors are willing to help you with traffic as long as they are compensated. The Internet has reinvented the way business is done nowadays and it is bound to continue in the next few years.

Terry is the owner of one of the internet's most popular link building websites - www.iSellPagerank.com. To find out more, please visit www.iSellPagerank.com