Affiliate Marketing Learning

When is the internet marketing going to be finished? This question gets asked far too often, even

by marketing professionals, and it is clear that a lot of them just don’t get it. Is Toyota or Ford ever

finished? Is McDonalds or Burger King ever finished?

We all know who they are and what you can get from them, but they continue to advertise. Sorry if

my question comes across as an obvious rant, but I only point it out because the marketing manager

of a major corporation actually asked me, “When is our internet marketing going to be finished?”

Well according to the American Retail Council, “Companies that advertise less than the national

average have sales less than the national average. Companies that advertise more than the national

What’s important to understand is that your internet marketing is never finished. Search engines

change how they operate almost monthly and you will need to adapt and change your pages, fine

tune them or create new ones to keep up.

Just like any other form of advertising, your online promotions and internet marketing must be an

on-going process to keep your site in the top of the search engines and fresh in the minds of your

customers and prospects. Be sure to align yourself with people that understand that they must

commit ongoing resources (that’s time and money) to their marketing efforts.

All successful companies advertise. You would be wise not to waste your time with companies or

managers, that do not understand this fundamental law of doing business, and are not willing to

commit full time resources to the internet.

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Slowly the internet has evolved, and almost daily, people are waking up to the enthusiasm I

discovered back in the fall of 1994, when I first used a browser called Mosaic (in pre Explorer

or Navigator days) and realized that Gutenberg (his invention of the printing press) was about to

happen all over again.

The internet would be as important as the invention of print, radio, television, fax or the telegraph.

And like the telegraph (that ended the Pony Express and threw thousands of people out of work

overnight), we had better be prepared to adapt, change and embrace the new medium. That’s if we

want to guarantee ourselves employment and make a lot of money in the future.

In the beginning, internet marketing used to be a simple matter. A few newsgroup announcements, a

few classified ads on AOL, a few tricks like hidden text on your web page, and you would jump to

the top of the search engines and the order lines would ring off the hooks. Ahh, those were the days.

The internet was not a crowded place and the big companies treated the world wide web more like

a passing fad. They handed off their web site design to people who knew nothing about marketing,

selling, partnering or lead generation, and their web sites just sat there like big static brochures.

Some literally just scanned in pictures of their brochures.

Then people like me came along and put up interactive sites that boosted the visitor’s confidence,

had a clear sales message, a call to action, asked for the order and actually answered the email. I

positioned my clients high in the search engines and their order lines began to ring.

My sites immediately made money for my customers, as well as saved money in customer service

and support costs. Slowly people started to realize that good marketing is good marketing, all the

old rules of advertising still apply, the internet is just another tool. And those search engines, they

were great, the advertising was FREE, if you knew how to play the game.

Page importance is all about links - their quantity, quality, and strength, which we will
discuss later on. This part of the algorithm is also called the Google PageRank (PR).

Google looks for links that point to your site from other websites. Google believes a
link from website A to website B is a “vote” for the importance of website B. In this
way, other websites add votes for your website, which in turn helps increase a pages
PageRank value on your site. Each page on your site has a PR value. Usually the
PR value is the highest for the home page as most people will link to your home
page rather than another page on your site.

The more web pages that link to your site, the more important Google thinks your
site is and hence the higher your PageRank value can be. Moreover, it is the quality,
as well as the quantity, of links that matter – not all links are valued the same.
However, keep in mind that PageRank is but a single (albeit important) factor used in
ranking. Sites that are highly optimized for particular keywords can outrank sites that
are less optimized but have higher PageRank values.

PageRank value is assigned after comparing every page on every site in the Google
index against one another. This is over 3.3 billion web pages! Note that PageRank
does NOT factor in keywords or phrases used on your site.

Note: When Internet marketers speak of increasing your link popularity, they are
generally talking about increasing the quantity and quality of links to your site,
generally through a reciprocal link exchange effort.

Keywords are intrinsically related to search terms – those words and phrases that
people enter into a search engine to find specific information. Most people enter 2 to
5-word phrases in Google to find what they are looking for. Google in turn analyzes
all pages in its index and lists the pages which contain those search terms. Each

website usually contains one or two keywords that are repeated more often than
others throughout the site. These keywords dictate the “theme” of a website, and will
be discussed later on.

How well you can define the theme of your site, and how well you can optimize the
use of keywords that comprise the theme of your site, will greatly influence your
ranking with Google.

Google determines the most relevant web pages based on a hypertext search and
analysis of your site AND of other sites that contain links to your site. Specifically,
Google looks to see if the text of a link (the clickable portion) that points to your site,
the title of the linking page, and other content on the linking page, also contain your
keywords.

Google uses a sophisticated and proprietary algorithm for ranking Web sites that
uses over 100 different criteria in the calculation, each of which is given a specific
weighting which can change over time. Because the algorithm can change, specific
techniques that used to work well may no longer work as well over time. This is
important to remember when your site’s ranking seems to change for no apparent
reason. For this reason, optimizing your site should not be considered as a one-time
task. You should always try, test, and refine your efforts.

With that said, the Google algorithm can be broken down into two major groups of
factors:

Keyword (textual) factors. Keyword factors involve how, where and when keywords
are used. Meaning how well your website is optimized for your chosen keywords,
and if those same keywords appear in links that point to pages on your site. Keyword
factors determine page relevance.

Link (PageRank) factors. These include the quantity and quality of links that point
to your site. Link factors determine page importance and are strongly related to
Google PageRank (PR).

Very simply put, Google finds pages in its index that are both relevant and important
to a search for a particular term or phrase, and then lists them in descending order
on a search results page.

Related Post:

Keyword factor and page relevance