Website Marketing: What You Should Know Before Getting Started (Part 4)
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Once your domain name is chosen and your Web hosting is set up, several webpages are built and linked together to make up your entire website. Finally, your site is linked to your domain name so that visitors can type this domain name in a browser and view your webpages.
Website Marketing Is Concerned About What Happens When Your Visitors Stop By
Using a Web browser, a visitor views your webpages. These pages contain text, images, and other multimedia. And the visitor navigates between them using hyperlinks. A client program called a "user agent" retrieves information resources, such as webpages and other computer files, from Web servers using their URLs.
Most of the time, the user agent is a Web browser such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, Opera, Netscape, or the program that you used to check out this webpage. The user agent retrieves content from remote Web servers where the website is stored and displays it on the visitor's computer. The visitor can then click on hyperlinks on each webpage to other webpages or World Wide Web resources, whose location (including their domain name) is included in the hyperlinks. This is called "browsing" or "surfing" the Web.
To find a webpage, you can always type the domain name into the address field of your browser such as "ebay.com". But what if you don't know the address? Or what if you want to find all websites on a specific topic? If you don't know the address then how can you get there?
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The Search Engines Are Critical To Your Website Marketing Success
Well, just as you probably found this webpage or our website in the first place, you can use a search engine or directory. The top three are: Google, Yahoo! and Bing (formerly MSN Live). Because these search engines are preferred by Web surfers, every webmaster wants to get included in their search engine results pages (SERPs). These search engines create an invaluable source of free traffic and this converts to profit if you sell goods or services online and are critical to your website marketing success.
Additionally, you should consider how you can use email to market your website and business. Email is "a store and forward method of composing, sending, storing,and receiving messages over electronic communication 
systems. Email predates the Internet [and was] a crucial tool in creating the Internet."
Email was quickly extended and became a highly useful tool for website marketing because it costs nothing to send. Plus, an auto-responder system only costs a few bucks a month and makes it's very easy to build a list of current or potential clients. When you have a list like this, you can then email them automatically with special offers, send them a newsletter and keep you at the top of their mind.
And keeping you at the top of their mind is important to your "viral" success. Take our business, for example, we have a free weekly newsletter that we send out (sign up yourself) to current and potential clients. This gains the trust of our readers such that when people ask them for a website design or SEM company, they frequently recommend us. To be sure, about 40% of our traffic comes from the three major search engines but the other 60% comes from thousands of other sites, from our newsletter or from our newsletter being forwarded to others.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
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