March 2012
Beginner
592 pages
12h 18m
English
Chapter 42
E-Business Essentials
The Internet is a marketing medium.
—Jay Conrad Levinson
What do you do with that pretty new website once you get it up and running? You use it to drive business and to make more money, of course. How? In this chapter, we will discuss how to get people to come to your site, what they should find when they get there, how to conduct e-commerce, how to fulfill the orders you receive, and how to use the power of the Internet to create even more business.
Search Engine Optimization
Pop quiz! What do you think might be the most cost-effective way to grow your business right now?
1. Start a Facebook business page
2. Buy some pay-per-click ads
3. Search engine optimization (SEO)
Option 1 is increasingly a good answer because let's face it—it's Facebook's world and we are just living in it. But that said, it takes work and won't produce immediate results (although it will eventually create results; check out Chapter 45).
Option 2 is a fine answer, but it will cost money and, again, usually takes some trial and error to be effective.
No, for my money, option 3, SEO, is the best choice. If you're not familiar with the concept, SEO is simply the process of making your website as relevant as possible to search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and so on. With just a little SEO knowledge, you can dramatically improve the chances of people finding you and your site through a search result, and nothing beats having people buy from your site because they did ...
