by: Adrian Austin
The main part of making a home Internet based business opportunity work is advertising it. The best way of advertising on the Internet is through search engines. The three ways search engines work is through natural search, pay for inclusion(PFI), pay per click(PPC), and a combination of PFI and PPC.
Natural search is free. Say you sell widgets. A potential customer will go to a search engine and put in the term "widgets". The results they get will be a list of sites that sell widgets. Hopefully one of the top sites will be yours.
To get a high ranking site, you try to make your site search engine friendly by having key words and other content. Since Google.com was born in 1998, the use of search engines has gone up. Approximately 114.5 million Americans or 39% of the U.S. population use search engines.
In addition to Google, there's yahoo.com, msn.com, askjeeves.com, and others. Each search engine has its own algorithm for ranking websites. The way to make the most of your home Internet based business opportunity is focus less on algorithms and more on the needs of the site's visitors.
You can also use pay for inclusion and pay per click to promote your home Internet based business opportunity. Pay for inclusion is when a site owner pays a search engine to be included in their directory. Yahoo.com, looksmart.com, inktomi.com, and teoma.com have pay for inclusion programs. Usually the site will be in the directory for a certain amount of time such as a year.
Pay per click is when you bid on search terms at a PPC site, and usually the higher you bid, the higher your listing on a search engine. Those most successful in these ventures have a popular, high-markup product with targeted keyword strategies.
Choosing the right keywords you think your potential customers will use on search engines can be tricky. Start with a basic keyword and expand on it. A yellow page search, yahoo directory, or Open Directory (dmoz.com) can help you find out what keywords are relevant to your product. Google Adwords has a tool that lets you find keywords (https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmdKeywordSandbox).
These sites are also keyword finders www.inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ and www.wordtracker.com. Another way to get keywords is to go to competing sites, and look at their keywords in their titles, descriptions and HTML source code. You can do this by right clicking on a site and clicking on "View Page Source".
Use your site logs to find out visitor statistics and search engine referral information on keywords. Ask your customers what keywords they use. Do they use singular or plural forms? Do they use brand name or geographic-specific terms? Determining the search engine game will help your home Internet based business opportunity be more successful.