Search engines are internet venues where billions of people congregate to search for information. The most prominent search engine giants are of course Google and Yahoo. The kind of traffic these dot-com companies receive per hour is fantastic.

So naturally, companies would gravitate towards placing their links and sites in an attempt to garner more visits to their web sites.

In order to maximize ranking and placement, companies have used tools such as search engine optimization or SEO. Search engine optimization is the method or process of improving a web site’s ranking in a search engine listing.

Legitimate search engine optimization practices focus on the improvement of a page’s ranking in the search engine list by improving site content, usability and using legitimate methos of promotion through web phenomena such as viral marketing.

Search engines all use complex algorithms in keeping their relevancy in the web and to keep illegal and abusive search engine optimization methods from prospering. However, “black hat” SEO users will always be around so it is expected that search engine giant such as Google and Yahoo will continue to make more complex algorithms to filter the garbage out.

Search engines display different kinds of listings on a result page. The more common ones are (PPC) pay-per-click, adverts, paid inclusion, and organic listings. Of all these listings, SEO concerns itself foremost with organic listings for a variety of keywords. This can increase the quality and quantity or visitors to a desired web site.

Getting   or trying to increase   traffic to my website requires  a plan and  effort. The rewards are well worth it.

Organic searches are searches conducted by web users in a search engine that is free from solicitations. A study from Jupiter Media stated that 5 out of 6 commercial online purchases came from organic searches versus paid online ads.

This has made SEO much more in demand in creating revenue for companies as SEO is not a paid ad but a method of intrinsically improving content.

Here are a few tips on improving content for a much more improved result in organic searches:

1.    Expertise. Follow your strengths. Sites you set up must be on topics you consider yourself an expert on. People can smell an amateur a mile away.

2.    Plan the site. A good layout for the site can improve usability. This in turn will not unnecessarily aggravate the browser.

3.    Research. Check out the competition and see what they have set up. See what works and what does not. If possible try to communicate with users in forums and get feedback on what should or can be improved further.

4.    Decide on important keywords. Decide on the most important keywords to use for your sight. Include these keywords in the metatags, copy page, page title, and file names.

5.    The Search Engine is your friend. Make friends with your search engine and don’t give it a hard time. Being nice and friendly to it will make its job easier to serve your site up to your target audience.

6.    Focus. Focus on the topic at hand and nothing else. The typical rule is one topic per page.

7.    Join the directories. Directories are repositories of knowledge done by human hands while search engine are huge databases collected by mostly machine methods. The relevancy of your page when joining the right directory may shoot through the roof. Of course, make sure you know what you are talking about.

8.    Start a linking campaign. A most effective SEO method. This is a must do. Ask your allies, strategic partners, friends and acquaintances to place your site’s URL link on their sites. With a short description this can draw traffic from other sites and increase exposure. Google especially ranks the importance of its sites by the number of sites linked to it. 

9.    Repetition is the key to victory. Keep repeating the above tips, supporting and increasing what works and killing what does not as fast as possible until the desired result is achieved.

In the world of search engine optimization, content matters a lot. If a site has amateur or worse falsified information, fewer and fewer visitors will want to visit it. They will even spread bad news faster than good news so expect a garbage site to be ignored even in a week’s time.

So what is Viral Marketing? It’s really just a method to get your message out to as many people as possible by word of mouth. In other words the idea is to spread your message like a computer virus would spread.

“Infection” in this case though is a good thing; in this context it’s people becoming aware of you and your website.

Now the actual message can be in many formats, from an email, a video, an audio file, and more. The idea is to get people who already have your message to spread it to people they know, multiplying your message spreading exponentially.

First, let me make it very clear that I am not talking about sending Spam out to millions of people. Apart from the legalities of doing this, sending spam is just crazy, because it is not wanted, and is certainly not going to spread is it, and after all if it makes it past the spam folders and actually makes it into someones Inbox, it’s just going to get deleted when it is read isn’t it (that’s if it even gets read).

Here we go with what seems the topical phrase of all my articles, “Relevant Great Content”. Yes nothing has changed, you need to give value to people who have received your message so that a) they may want to take action with it, and b) forward it on to other people.

So how do we get people to do this? How do we get people to actually pass on your message to someone else?

First things first, it has to be something relevant and useful. In other words it has to have value, wether real or perceived. The person who has received your message has to believe it will give value to someone else (and/or them!) before they will pass it on.

One thing I have found in this industry is the power of partnerships; it’s a lot easier to get you message out there if you have friends in the industry with large mailing lists of their own.

Lets pretend you have released a new e-book. You currently have a mailing list of 1000 people who have expressed an interest or actually purchased something from you in the past.

Your e-Book is, of course in a related niche so you feel sure you can generate some interest in your mailing list so that is the first place to attack.

Now you do have an affiliate program in place don’t you? Read up on the details of why you need an affiliate program in the affiliate article, as this is a vital step because decent affiliates will market your product to their mailing lists and contacts, and this is the power of viral marketing!

When starting to look more at website promotion; it pays to do a little research first as a good way to move forward fast!

Let’s say you have 100 affiliates and each have 1000 customers on their mailing lists. Suddenly you have leveraged on your affiliate and your message is broadcast to 100,000 people in addition to your 1000 people in your mailing list.

Taking it to the next level imagine if your affiliates have affiliates of there own, see how the numbers can grow exponentially?

Now this example is about affiliates, but there is also no reason with the right message that you can’t get your customers doing the work of the affiliates by forwarding your message on to their friends.

In these cases the primary motive is not making money, but it may be because they think your product is great and a friend would benefit from it, or they just think it’s cool and want to tell the world.

Ahhh the power of word of mouth advertising, I tell you there is no more powerful force in advertising then getting your customers telling their friends how cool, hip and fantastic you and your products are (I’m sure you’ve told all your friends about me, haven’t you?).

If you can get customers telling your friends about your product and then once they sign up they tell their friends well you can see that it will take no time at all to have a huge response to your message!

You’ll be needing to buy new servers for your website because the old one has melted with the overwhelming traffic you have received (did you like how I got a reference to my website in between the valuable content?).

Ok Tim, I hear you saying I get the message that this Viral stuff may be handy, but how can I actually use this stuff on my site.

Well firstly, a great technique I used is included in with the master Mike Filsaimes Butterfly Marketing product this has Viral Software included for people who can easily pass on information about your site to other people. They actually automatically get a box to enter friends email addresses, etc.

Pretty well no other method will get you more traffic than Viral traffic because let’s face it, Viral traffic is effectively word of mouth advertising (assuming you have set it up properly). Some of the coolest sites on the Internet exist and grow in member sizes every day due to these techniques.