There are several components that make up the web marketing strategies currently being used to achieve visibility on the Internet and allow for a successful return on investment (ROI) from web site. We will touch on both how take advance to the new wave in marketing your website, product or services (what we call SESMO^TM), as well as putting the right tools in place to allow your online presence to take full advantage of the traffic it gets through proper design, build and function. Check out the video introducion below:

SESMO^TM stands for "Search Engine Social Media Optimization". The pronunciation of this term is ‘seez-mo'. This is a strategy that the founders of the H3BGroup have been working on for years. Many of you have heard the term search engine optimization (SEO) as one of the main ways to prepare your web presence for ranking placement in the search engines. This has been the main way to get traffic to sites for years as most consumers find businesses through search engines. While search engines are still very widely used, this one angle approach doesn't work anymore with the emergence of the social and community based sites in today's internet age. Search Engine Optimization is still very relevant however as Google and Yahoo are still two of the most trafficked sites online.

Narrowing down the "SE" in SESMO^TM. Search Engines are based on algorithms that comprise over 1,000 unique variables to determine where sites are ranked in their respective directories. These are based on "keywords" and "key phrases" that web surfers use to find information and ultimately the website that offer what they are searching for. Optimizing your site for the search engines is a science that has been built upon for the last nine years and is ever evolving as the search engine change algorithms to better serve their users. The topics that we will cover in this presentation are:

1. Having a site that is coded properly. This is a key feature that a lot of web design companies don't stress enough. Every web page built needs to have proper coding taking care of all invisible tags and statements that the end user will likely never see. Your site can't just look pretty it must also adhere to what we call meta-tags on every page. These are description tags that define what the page is about, give correct keywords to search engines, explain what any images or pictures on the site are conveying and much more.

2. Content is still KING. This is a mantra we have lived by for years and is still very relevant. When a web site is built out in robust fashion it will gain strength in the search engines naturally by content density. When you have a lot of unique, relevant content to offer your visitors the search engines will see this and through their algorithms you become an authority on the subject, place, event, or anything you decide to market online. If you look at sites like Wikipedia, about.com and many others that have thousands of pages of content on any given subject you will notice they are ranked very well in the search engines. Let's say you are a local ice cream shop in Fort Collins and you have built a website all about your store and product offerings. It is likely you will have a website like many other ice cream shops in town. If you take it a step further you could explain the history of ice cream, how it is made, and the proper ways to eat it and have other reference pages to ice cream and what it's about. This strategy would place you higher in the search engines for your area of business than other local ice cream shops and, in the eyes of the search engines, make you an expert on the subject.

3. Keeping things FRESH. The search engines are always looking for sites that are constantly updated with fresh content. When they see a site that has new content they are more likely to give it better ranked positioning. This can be achieved in numerous ways, by adding new products and information about those products, providing special offers, creating blog posts - and the list goes on.

4. Words are KEY. When writing the copy for your website it is important to know what terminology people will use when searching for your site. If you sell clothing in Fort Collins it is important to keep in mind what people will type into Google or Yahoo when searching. There are ways to find out exactly what the search terms are, for instance "Fort Collins shirt store" may be a relevant keyword. So when putting up copy on your website it would be important to use the exact phrase "Fort Collins shirt store" somewhere in your copy so the search engines have a direct reference to it.

5. Links make you POPULAR. The more sites that link to your web site and the more represented you are throughout the Internet on other sites, the more popular you become in the search engines. When starting out in the web design business I made it a point to have my name and a link to my site on as many other relevant sites as possible. There is a science to link building as more "authoritative" sites that link to you, or industry specific sites that link to you carry more weight than a link from random sources. This will also be covered in the social marketing strategies. As you can see, there are numerous strategies to optimize your web site for the search engines. These are only some of the key ingredients to being placed or ranked successfully in Google and Yahoo for relevant terms to your business, service or product. But, web site optimization doesn't end there. A new strategy is now on the scene and is becoming a huge influencer for web site ROI.

Social Marketing, the new frontier and the "SM" in SESMO^TM

Looking at past advertising vehicles we recognize the influence that radio had on our society. While radio still has an audience and is an important social media for us, television has impacted our society on a large scale by combining site, sound motion and emotion into one experience. In the same light while search engine optimization is important... SESMO^TM is bringing about a whole new generation of media to everyone on the Internet. In today's Internet marketing strategies businesses need to learn the call of a new generation - Gen C! Generation C stands for Community Marketing. The fact is that Google has been the big player in directing where people go on the Internet for the past 5 years. We are seeing trends change dramatically nowadays with the advent of community driven sites.

The new trend of social media marketing. Social Communities have become the next Internet giant. This has caused everyone participating online to drive traffic through a new concept called Social Marketing. The research and numbers are in and the search engines are not the only way people are engaging there hobbies, work or others online. There is a lot of talk lately about social websites and their value for Internet marketing and online business. Social networking sites are websites like MySpace and FaceBook to name the most recognized. In total there are more than 2,000 social networks out there.

To publish a comprehensive list of social networks would already take weeks. And now literally every day this number grows by the hundreds. Social Networking sites are community websites where everyone can join in for free, add personal information, blogs, gadgets and, most important to Internet marketers, links to one's own work. What better market could you imagine than social networking sites with millions of users, grouped into networks of interest and location? Social networking websites are the best places to find not only mind-like people but also very targeted traffic to whatever you offer on your blog or website.

In September 2006, Hitwise, an online marketing research firm, reported that the majority of traffic to online music retailer, HMV.co.uk, was referred from MySpace, a social networking Web site. This traffic surpassed searches from two of the most popular search engines, MSN UK and Yahoo! UK. While connecting users with information and content was once defined by complicated search algorithms MySpace' impact indicated a profound shift in the structure of the Internet was on the horizon. MySpace has reached 30% of the amount of traffic Google got in the same time (from Alexa.com). And the numbers are solid. 300,000 people out of 1 million visit google.com that means that every third visited page is a Google page and according to these numbers, every 8th visit on the web goes to MySpace! Well that is a lot of people hanging out there and that is a lot of potential traffic to your website or blog by participating on just this social networking site.

When you combine the traffic generated from MySpace, Facebook and YouTube combined, not only almost equal the traffic from online from Google, but the actual time spent on these sites goes way beyond that of Google. The numbers are staggering and ever increasing.

H3BGroup is a Fort Collins Internet Marketing company that offers a wide range of plans and strategies to optimize your website through the SESMO^TM philosophy. Contact us today to see how we can help you achieve your online marketing goals.