Online marketing involves ways and means to optimize your web site and get that all important visibility in search engines and directories including other entry points on the web . Increasing the visibility of your web site starts from getting a top listing in search engines which in turn increased traffic to your site which results in increase in sales Here I shall outline 5 methods of increasing traffic and promoting your web site site without costing the earth .

Create good content: On the internet Content is the king Create high quality content on something you have enough expertise on . It might be a niche are like candle making or opening a wine bottle without a cork screw or it might be on some general topic on How to successfully run a a franchise . Whatever your area is try stick to that . Remember you cant be everything to everyone . Select you niche audience and make sure they like you enough to keep coming back again and again. Remember the 80:20 rule in marketing .80% of your business is generated by 20% of your visitors . Find them out and retain them like crazy .

Usabilty Design: Make your web site user friendly . The site map is an essential feature so that visitors clearly know the navigation path of the site . Avoid heavy animation and graphics in your site . Though the site might seem attractive when you employ rich and heavy designs however they will take greater loading time which most users do not like . Make a links page and provide hyperlink to the internal pages and homepage as well so webmasters know the exact way to access your links page

Link Building : Links are the key to search engines listings . No matter how beautiful and attractive your your site is , If it does not have any incoming link ,which is if your site is not linked to any other web sites it simply cannot get ranked ins search engines . Building links are like building a foundation structure for making a skyscraper Start looking for your industry competitors and see who is linking back to them . Find out their contact and send them a mail and ask them if they could have a look at your site and link back to you . Reciprocal links helps your site to gain credibility and ultimately they help is getting citations from other sources which helps in search engine rankings and also increases the traffic to your site. .Content and back links are related . The more authoritative the site is , the more inbound links it has. eg . Sites likes New York Times and 123greetings.com has a large no of backward links .

Search Optimization ; Search Optimization makes the site user friendly to search engines . While site usability features makes the web site user friendly to an average visitor,search engine optimization aims to make the site friendly for the search engine crawlers . For better optimization do not have your link page more than 3 clicks away from your homepage . Most search engine crawlers do not crawl a page deep enough than 3 pages . Provide a title, description and keywords for each pages of your site . These are some of the factors and parameters that search engines employ to rank a web site according to the keywords that are being typed by users .

Use an Analytics tool to track Visitors . You need some analytical tool to track your visitors . You need to know which page of your web site is bringing you the most traffic , you need to find which search engine gives you maximum referrals . Tracking your visitors path and finding where they are going once they come to your homepage is of paramount importance . If you are into online selling you should find out what is the conversion rate of product .Try to think of innovative ideas to increase your conversion rate You could use a testimonial of someone who knows you and have used your product many times and use this to your advantage . Online marketing is no different than offline marketing . Your need a product or service to sell which is your content . Your distribution channels are search engines , external referrers and directories . You need to promote your site at a certain price .Writing articles and Press Release are some of the other methods to promote your web site further. More on this in my next article..