Internet Marketing is almost impossible without a webpage or website to serve as a platform. So once you have decided what you will provide in this global market, sales or service, you will need to create, or have created for you, a website. As long as you can remain focused and yet prepared to adapt and adjust to the fast-paced change of the World Wide Web, you will probably do well.

One of the first mistakes you can make when creating your first web site is to "design" something beautiful or impressive. You might think that an aesthetically pleasing web site is essential to attract business, like a hotel or a bank. That's not really how the Web works.

The first design element must be functionality. The people who come to your web site are not looking to be awed by your artistic, graphic, and programming skills. They are looking for information.quickly, please. At least 50% of web users use dial-up connections that can deliver information at a slow 28 kilobytes per second (kbps) If your images, splash, flash, or background images take too long to load into their browser window, they are gone.in maybe.. 10 seconds!. You must, at the very least, have something worthwhile for them to read as the images are loading. This means that all of the memory that it takes to generate your page on their browser, including text, images, tables, etc. must be less than 30 kilobytes. Your pages must load fast or they might be irrelevant. It won't matter how valuable your information is or how exciting your graphics are. One-third of your visitors are gone and they are not likely to come back !!!!

Logos, banners, backgrounds, images and flash presentations are great, but if they are slowing the loading of your page, they are getting in your way. If you must use images, keep the file size small, reduce the number of images, and use the many optimization tricks of web site design. Respect your visitors' time by avoiding anything that seems to stand in their way of getting the information for which they came. 20-30% will leave immediately if they feel that you are wasting their time. Keep the number of buttons they must click to get to your information as low as possible.

And give them great copywriting! Hot copy that holds their attention and gets them to the next step--sales! If you don't have anything to say, the visitors are gone, GONE!!! So talk to them respectfully and honestly, but let them know that a fire is burning inside, there's smoke coming out of your ears, and they are going to learn something from the depths of your being that will make a difference in their life..

Search Engines are Your Basic Marketing Tools

Without search engines indexing your site, the visitors would probably not know that you exist or how to find you. The search engines are like the Yellow Pages of the Internet and they, too, are looking for information. They cannot index images, graphics, and flash presentations. Despite the capacity of the Internet to serve up images, the bread and butter of the Web is words: keywords that people enter into the search engine to find you, words that describe what your web site is about, words that are well crafted to transfer information quickly and efficiently. The first element of design is well-written content directed toward those to whom you wish to market.

Search engines depend upon hyperlinks to find all of the pages on your site and index them. Java script links work on 90% of all browsers, but they don't work for search engines. Exchanging links with popular web sites is an effective way to improve the way the search engine will rank your web site. There is a lot you can do to promote your web site to make it more visible on the Internet. More about that.

If your most important words are graphics, the search engine cannot index them and you lose their effectiveness. Search engines don't have a way to appreciate pictures. Word Art is very splashy and artsy, but the words have become images and the search engine will pass them by without notice.

Tables and frames can also break up the continuity of the text, especially if paragraphs and sentences are in different tables. The search engine is looking at the HTML program running behind the scene that creates the web page. If your words are divided into separated elements, the continuity is broken and the rules by which the search engine ranks your web site will effect a lower position. Higher rankings result in more traffic, which can result in more sales. People using search engines are not so likely to look much farther than the first three pages of the results of their keyword search. If you are not in the top 30 web sites for a key word search, potential customers might not take the time to find you. Search engine optimization is vital to your Internet success. So you will wish to learn the tricks and techniques from the outset of your entry into Internet Marketing. It's a game: you need to learn the rules so you can play to win.

Keywords are...Key....Words

Before you begin to write the introduction to your web site, you will need to attend to determining the keywords by which searchers will find you on the search engine. Imagine you are John Doe or Susie Smith looking for your web site. What word or words would he enter into the search engine to look for you? Try to find a site like yours by using the keyword or keywords you've selected. Then look at the keywords in their source code. You can find the source code by clicking on View at the top of your Browser and clicking on Source near the bottom of the drop-down menu.

Don't be dismayed by the gobbledy-gook if programming isn't your strong suit. You might come to understand some of it as you grow into the job, but you can start gradually as you need to know. In the first part of the html programming, called the "Head" you will usually find "<meta name=" followed by" keywords." That is the list of keywords the webmaster of that site chose. Check them out for possible keywords you might have missed. The websites at the top of the Search Engine results are likely to be your strongest competitors. You can learn a lot from them. Look for word combinations, spellings and even misspellings. Remember that the search engine is likely to bring at least 1/3 of your visitors. If surfers misspell your keyword, they don't get a low grade. They just don't find you.

In Front Page, to add the meta tags, "keywords" and "description" to each page, just click on File on the far left in the toolbar on top, go down the drop-down menu to Properties, click on the Custom tab, choose the second set of CGI boxes (fill in the blank boxes) titled "User Variables" and click "Add." In the top box (Name) input the name of the tag you will create. Type in keywords. To the box below that (Value) add your keywords, all in lower case, separated by a comma and a space. Click OK in that box and OK in the Properties box and you've got meta tags!

While you have the Properties-Custom-User Variable open, add the description meta tag. You should prepare a carefully written description of 200 characters or less that says as much as you can say clearly using all or most of your keywords. This is often the description that shows up in the search engine and it's your rare chance to advertise for free to the marketplace. There are a lot of competitors out there and you must shine your light brightly at this moment. Without description meta tags the search engines will extract a few of the first lines from the top of the web page. I wasn't careful at first and I put a reminder to bookmark the page and that made it into the search engine results. I bet that not too many surfers took the time to click on the link and check it out for themselves. They probably gave it a tenth of a second look and moved on.....so much to see and so little time.

Even your Internet address, called the "URL", can be rich in key words or keyword phrases. If your domain name is your primary keyword, you will have an advantage. If that is not possible or practical, you can create folders named for your key word or keyword phrase. Then the files in the folder can also carry your keyword phrase. At this writing I have moved www.real-dream-catchers.com ahead of 99.93% of the competition for the key word phrase, "dream catchers" after less than seven months. That website is still a long way from the top at #314 out of 408,000 websites, but now it gets harder.  Don't miss the opportunity to add alt-text tags to every graphic. That's the only way that the search engines can credit you for the use of your key words. Hover on my graphics above and you will see how I used the alt text tags for each image. Each image can also be a link that can have your keyword phrases in the URL to which it is linked.

One of the most helpful resources I've found on the Internet is Cory Rudl's Internet Marketing Center. I decided to get his course, The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet, studied it carefully on the train from Vienna, Austria to Wuppertal, Germany. By the time I got to Wuppertal I had a rather good handle on how to proceed. Frequently, I refer back to it and read the newsletter he sends out. Before you even think about creating a website, start at the foundation of your enterprise. marketing. Cory's course is the best I've seen. Try it! There are several other good sources on the Internet. I get several newsletters that help me stay in touch with what is happening and I almost always learn something useful and new.

One of the ways to learn successful Internet Marketing is on The Seventh Fire website which my formerly trusted friend stole from me in 2006. Although there are enough bonehead mistakes still hanging around, there are many tips that you can pick up on. In 2002 this site had an amazing 2000 visitors in one month. That was then, this is now. I brought The Seventh Fire to over 200,000 visitors per month before it was stolen. It was regularly in the top ten results on Google and Yahoo for such key words as dream catchers, dream catcher kits, sage bundles, natural serotonin, Pycnogenol, debt elimination, mortgage elimination, eliminate credit card debt, Miracle II, Sonic Bloom, natural disinfectant, and Project Bojinka. I had several # 1 keywords and bouncing around the top 5 for several others. It's potency has been degraded by the current webmaster and still maintains strength for primary keywords.

I decided that I had to start over again, but this time with more knowledge and experience to accomplish as much and more in less time. I've still made mistakes and I've just learned that "relevancy" as determined by the proportion of code to text can be another vital factor. As a result, my next push is to adopt Cascading Style Sheets to reduce the amount of code needed to present my content. I've also learned that larger websites are given an advantage by Google in determining rank on the results pages. I've divided my content into more specific websites which will be inter-connected in a megaweb. That has given me greater specificity in linking exchanges with other websites with complementary content. This time I'm not bringing in links to unrelated websites. Even this page adds relevance to websites that use keywords and keyword phrases such as "computers, Internet, search engine optimization, SEO, web hosts, web hosting, web marketing, Internet marketing, software", etc.

This website is part of that growing megaweb and in nine months since I began to build it on the Internet, it has gotten as high as #65 in a field of 866,000. I had passed 99.93% of my competition rapidly and stand ready to make the final effort to reach the top. I continue to optimize, add significant content, add new links through link exchanges with relevant websites, and place my link on forums and offer linked content to other websites. When I add cascading style sheets, nothing will stand in my way of being in the top 10 or even being #1 in such a large, revenue-producing category.

Internet Marketing can be a lot of fun and a big challenge at the same time, like a big real time video game. Done correctly, Internet Marketing is a powerful way to reach people with your wisdom and intelligence....or you might just as well scribble a flyer and post it on a tree.

But I couldn't have done it without The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet. That was worth it's weight in gold.

© 2007, Allen Aslan Heart / White Eagle Soaring of the Little Shell Pembina Band, a Treaty Tribe of the Ojibwe Nation