Increasing your Online Footprint - SEO, Social Media, Local Reviews

In today’s ever-growing online world, having a website is an important stage in anyone’s development process – but it’s just one part of your online footprint. With increasing competition on a daily basis, having adequate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategies are key to your overall success in driving both traffic to your site as well as your business as a whole forward in the right direction.
SEO and Link Building
A common buzzword found on the internet today, Search Engine Optimization (commonly referred to as “SEO”) involves establishing an “online footprint” for both you and your developing website. While the actual process in doing this can be quite complicated, one of the key aspects behind it involves a technique known as “link building”.
Link building refers to the process of establishing links back to your website on other established online sources to not only drive traffic to your website but also heighten its standings in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Each link channeling traffic back to your website from another page online counts as a “vote” from that website for yours as a relevant, high-quality website that online users utilizing search engines such as Google should visit.
In essence, links from other web pages not only drive traffic to your website from other online pages with potentially high traffic but also drive generic traffic from search engines to your web page every time someone searches for a word related to what your web page may cover. Some of the most popular ways to develop backlinks to your web page today are social media services such as Facebook, Google+ and Twitter that allow users to easily share links of interest and tap prospective markets that house tens of millions of users.
SEO is an extremely effective (and potentially long-term) way to establish yourself in the digital world. Coupling SEO with Search Engine Marketing (SEM), on the other hand, can provide highly effective short-term and long-term results as well as profitability.
SEM and Keywords
Search Engine Optimization (SEM) refers to the effective marketing of your web page through sponsored links paid to search engines such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing. These links are generally in the form of text and can be found placed both on the search engine itself as well as on various web pages that affiliates of the search engine agree to place ads on.
Effective SEM and SEO rely heavily on keywords – special words or phrases occurring frequently on your web page that are somehow related to the page itself and what it represents. These are generally determined through various methods of research, including utilizing Google’s useful keyword tool to analyze which keyword sets are most searched for by your target audience each week. SEM then looks at cross-analyzing these keywords to other competitors on the market targeting the same words and setting effective budgets each day in regards to how much you are willing to pay for a click to bring a visitor to your site. Online service providers such as spyfu.com are a great source of this information.
When applied effectively, both SEO and SEM can bring about long-term, cost effective traffic to your website that can bring about both substantial satisfaction and profits from a variety of avenues; both of these aspects should be two of your primary concerns from the start of your online web page development.