Here is a basic “quick-list” of 14 principles that should be used to increase a website’s traffic and search engine rankings:

1. Build a website that has significant content, products or services.

2. Maintain the website’s simple layout so that your consumers can easily navigate your web pages and find what they are looking for.

3. Advertise your industry and product or service expertise by posting articles on your site and submitting articles to article directories.

4. Submit your website to the top search engines and directories. Employ somebody to do it if you cannot. You should only ever add your site manually and never use an automated directory submission service.

5. Transform your website into a dynamic tool that caters the ever-changing needs of your customers.

6. Explore and apply the appropriate keywords/phrases to catch the attention of your prospects.

7. Utilize your keywords in the appropriate sections of your site such as page titles, meta tags, headers article and blog post titles.

8. Within the first 25 words of your page’s content, put your primary and secondary keywords. Then, spread them equally throughout the document.

9. Update your customers with the latest development on your website, through newsletters, free reports, special offer coupons etc.

10. Keep up to date on the latest Internet trends in terms of design, navigation, content, keywords, etc and note how they are implemented by your competitors and other high-ranking websites.

11. Analyze the flow of your traffic by using reports and logs from your web hosting company or Google Analytics. Determine where they come from, how they found your website and what keywords they have used.

12. Watch for the updates in search engine algorithms and processes through online tools and utilities. Modify your web pages according to the new updates.

13. If you want to sell products online, apply simple payment and shipment methods to provide a good shopping experience for your customers.

14. When you do not have much experience in SEO, hire the an expert. This idea may be expensive but it is more expensive to spend money on a website that has no visitors.

In order to dominate the fierce competition in online business, a website must be presented as professional and be as creative as possible. Since the competition is so tight, all of the marketing processes available must be used to try and gain ground on the competition.

What is the use of having a promising product or a well-designed website if people are not aware of it? Your business could die if you do not know how to boost your popularity rating. One of the most commonly used methods to get the very often free traffic that you need is known as Viral Marketing.

The word Viral may conjure up images of a computer virus, but Viral Marketing is something totally different, although it is spread in a similar viral fashion.

So what is Viral Marketing?

Also known as Viral Advertising, Viral Marketing is a marketing procedure that builds the publicity of a product or company. By using various kinds of media, you can reach out to the public without actually directly promoting your products, but by using a more stealth-like approach that will get people to pass on an advertisement about the product to their friends and colleagues.

The general belief in Internet marketing is that when people enjoy or find the content of something useful they will share it with their friends and family. Therefore, they unknowingly sponsor media such as flash games, funny videos and stories that get passed onto other people with the company logo or the product description attached to it. We have all seen this with websites becoming huge overnight because of a YouTube video or a story they break first.

Viral Marketing became popular in the advertising and marketing world because it is relatively cheap compared to other marketing strategies. Using this technique can also stop you being tagged as a Spammer, because instead of the information being spread by one source, other unrelated people are passing your product advertisement around for you.

Lots of companies offer incentives like discounts and rebates if you help them spread their viral marketing message. They base the amount of the incentive on the number of recipients a viral marketing campaign gets from a person.

How to use Viral Marketing

The main reason why you need to make use of viral marketing is to increase publicity and public awareness for your site and company. You need to attract a large crowd of potential customers to your site. By offering prizes and incentives, you can reach more people and announce your existence, a small cost now, can result in a steady income in the future.

Viral Marketing requires clever planning to let other people get to know about you, and they will then pass on your ads to others. All you need to do is to be creative in generating things like addictive games and amusing stories to go with your product.

One of the biggest and most successful viral marketing campaigns of recent years was the low budget movie “The Blair Witch Project”. This film used viral marketing better than many big studio movies that have a $200 million budget, and changed the way films are made for all time.

Microsoft’s Hotmail is also a good example of a successful viral marketing strategy. By advertising on each email that was sent through Hotmail the fact that anyone could have a free email account, which was unheard of in those days, Hotmail became huge. One reason you should always have your company details or special offer details on every email that you send out, is because you never know where it will end up!

So now it is your turn to make use of viral marketing. Be creative and study emails that you get every day that are using viral marketing, get ideas and start your own campaign.

To find the best products to sell online, you need to identify what other people would like to buy. This marketing quest is always associated with determining the customer’s demand for the product and the level of competition in the current market.

Good research is the only key to identify the ideal hot selling products to market. First, you must be aware of the needs, wants and expectations of your customers in order to please them. These three factors are considered as the basic needs, or minimum requirements in a purchase.

Needs are the qualifying or “gatekeeper” aspects that the customer seeks in a product or a service.

Wants are used by customers to determine the best product or service among the wide range of selections.

Expectations are values that are related to a product or a service and they are significant in a customer making a choice from products or services with no distinction.

For example, a customer looks for a product that is relevant to his need, user-friendly and affordable. To be a successful marketer, you should recommend a product that would satisfy this customer’s requirements.

Next, you must consider the level of competition that the product will gain in the future. Market share, commonly known as level of competition is the ratio of your own brand sales against the total sales in the market. Although corporations classify and identify their target competitors, the control of the competition still remains in the hands of the customer as they exercise their purchasing power. So you have to select the market section where you can achieve a possible advantage over all of your competitors.

Thirdly, you have to discover the general interest level concerning the product. After finding the answer to this puzzle, you will be assisted in estimating the real score in the product’s demand and competition as a whole. If the product is not in demand and the competition level for it is too weak, then you should abandon the idea of selling this product online.

Lastly, you must study how your competitors promote their similar products. If the advertisements are presented in a competitive manner then you will know that this a hot selling product which is possibly good to market.

After that, you must analyze and evaluate the data that you have gathered regarding the product’s demand, competition, and advertising factors. Weigh the results of these factors and rate the hot selling product using the following criteria:

1. Not enough demand – when only few people might buy the product.

2. Too much competition – when you do not have enough money to go up against your competitors.

3. Too much advertising – this will cause a shoot up in the price of pay per click ads and will tighten competition.

4. Not enough general interest, combined with low demand – signifies that the product is not good to market even though there is competition.