By Mark Walters


Nowadays, with an extreme level of competition on the internet, such that has never been seen before, it takes inside knowledge to gain a marketing advantage. Unlike with other mediums, on the internet all businesses are on a level playing field and any small business is able to compete with international corporations if they can market themselves well enough. This is where online marketing agencies come in. The services that online marketing agencies offer are vast. We can not cover them all here but we will look at the main services that they provide.

One of the most important services that online marketing agencies offer is search engine optimization. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of increasing a websites ranking in popular search engines like Google by using natural or algorithmic means. There are many ways that this can be achieved, either by optimizing a websites coding to improve keyword relevance in search results, promoting the website to increase the number of pertinent backlinks, or even by the use of black hat SEO which refers to the use of link farms, keyword stuffing and article spinning to increase a websites exposure and number of backlinks.

Some of the SEO methods that online marketing agencies use are: video submissions, blog and forum posts, comments and reviews on products, directory submissions, copywriting, articles and press releases. Alongside the use of SEO to optimize a websites results in a users search, a website can employ paid for methods such as paid placement, contextual advertising or paid inclusion. This is simply advertising on other websites to increase your sites web presence.

Another method that has been shown to be quite effective, and is used by many of the larger retail websites is email marketing. Email marketing means sending email newsletter to previous customers and all users that have signed up to your website, to inform them of product or service updates, new products or services, changes to your business and any other information. The emails can not be too frequent as they will lose their value to the potential customers.

One method which is being increasingly used and frowned upon, to an extent, is search saturation. While SEO or SEM target increasing one page of your websites ranking with the goal of getting it right to the top of the page; search saturation aims at taking over the whole of the first page of results with only links to your website. Although this method is not easy to achieve and can be quite expensive to implement, it is also extremely beneficial.




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