Wednesday 30 December 2009

New Year, New Goals, New Search Marketing Methods

As I am writing this it is almost the end of 2009. The first decade in the twenty-first century is coming to a close and many things have been discovered and changed over the last ten years. The use of search engines and the Internet in general has increased in population size and in speed. Now, faster than ever before people can find what they are looking for instantly. Ten years ago Google was still in its' infancy and most people who were on the Internet were using dial-up modems. People had more patience then, but with 2010 quickly approaching those of use on the Net expect things almost at the speed of light!
With this new year upon us many people are setting new goals and milestones for their personal lives, as well as businesses. No matter what type of business that you may have, your goal is probably to get more customers, make more money, or both. These are not the only two goals that are important, but they are crucial in order to grow a business and website. In order to get more customers, your search engine marketing has to be something that you focus on and put effort into in order to thrive in today's market.
Some newer marketing methods that have surfaced in the past year or two is the use of social networks to build brand awareness and attract more visitors to your website. Sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter have been the talk of the Internet. MySpace's popularity has died down in the past year, but Facebook and Twitter have sky-rocketed. It wouldn't hurt to have a presence on MySpace, but if you were to focus on two social networks right now, I would say make sure that you are on Twitter and Facebook. Even people that don't have the Internet at home know what Facebook and Twitter are!
If you are looking for new ways to improve your website to attract more customers one thing that you need to focus on is speed. The speed of your website is what I am referring to. If your site is sluggish to download you will loose many customers. On top of that, Google has mentioned that they may start using the download speed of a website as one of their factors in determining search engine rankings.
Of course good, relevant content is still a key factor, but now more than ever people are not going to be sitting around waiting for your page to download. They will simply click away back to the search engine and find another website. If you think your big, flashy presentation is neat, but takes 3 minutes to download, you'd better re-think your website design. If you have video that takes forever to buffer, you will get considerably less visitors. Speed of your website is something that everybody needs to consider as an important factor of keeping visitors on your site and now even in terms of ranking high.
So if one of your goals this New Year's is improving your website and marketing methods to increase customers you need to focus on speed of your site and make use of social media to increase your popularity. Although it is still not 100% clear how these factors will exactly be applied, we know that they are important and it is never to early to start working on them. If you jump on taking care of these things before your competitors, it can leave you in a much better (and higher) search engine position.
Scott Young is the owner of Florida SEO Pro, an Internet marketing company specializing in Florida search engine optimization and local website marketing. They provide their clients with dynamic optimization services to help keep up with the major search engines and build long-term, top rankings.

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