Getting a business site up and running on the Internet has become so trivial nowadays that what once took thousands of dollars and weeks of time can now be done in mere minutes. There are tons of tools and services in place now, in fact entire infrastructures in place that largely automate the process and make it quite painless. The automation the website creation process does not a business make, however. Today, Web promotion is even more critical than ever.
Is the Web becoming saturated? Well, that’s an interesting question. Saturation can never truly occur because the Web’s real estate is virtually endless. However, what you really have to consider is that, for all practical intents and purposes, there are only three locations that control the vast majority of the Web when it comes to the search industry: Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google is hugely dominant in this arena and even though there are more than 20 different large scale search engines available, these big three by far dominate everything else combined. So, your chance to shine is limited to 30 locations: 10 top spots on Google, 10 on Yahoo and 10 on MSN.
Now, is it really that bleak? Not quite, but if you want to see abundant traffic to your site – traffic on tap – then you have to be in the top 10 of Google for the desired search terms. Now you can rank there organically or you can buy your way there via sponsored search advertisements, but the most important thing you need to understand is that if the traffic is there, you need to be there as well. There are many other ways to drive traffic to your site, SEO is not the only option. But people are inherently lazy and studies confirm these facts. Many people never navigate beyond the first page of search results and many more only click on the first 1-5 positions.
Now, there are other manners of driving traffic besides search engines (organic or PPC) and you should look into all of them. This is just a partial list:
- Media buys: simply place your ads on other websites, track absolutely everything and, in time, filter out the websites which aren’t worth it and stick with the ones that are
- Offline Media: There are many forms here – local TV, radio, mailings, magazines, postcards and so on
- Web 2.0 Marketing (Social Media Marketing): This is dominating the Internet right now and there is a lot of traffic on the table when it comes to Facebook, Digg, Propellar, Twitter and other such websites.
There are far too many options for them to be all listed here, but the important thing is seeing the big picture and understanding that you need to be where the traffic is. Everything else will follow.
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