Don’t Let Internet Marketing Myths Eat Your Bottom Line
Successful Internet marketing is not magic, and it’s not hard to understand. All you need to take advantage of the power of Internet marketing are a few simple guidelines. But first, perhaps a little history is in order.

It All Started When Google Became A ‘Verb’
Until search engines like Google came on the scene, the Internet was a chaotic place with eight billion pages filed in random order and no index. While Google set out to organize the world’s information on the web, their organization progress has been remarkable, but not the real key to Google’s success. What makes Google, Yahoo! and MSN viable is relevance — the ability to sort through those eight billion pages, plus all of the new ones added each day, and quickly deliver the page most relevant to the searched terms. That’s a much more difficult task than simply indexing them.

There Is Only One Right Way To Do SEO
Wrong. Actually, there are many approaches to search engine optimization, and you need to be doing all of them all the time. If you haven’t heard that, it’s probably because you’ve been talking to companies with too narrow a focus – an SEO company, a Web developer, or a Pay-Per-Click provider, each of whom has something different to sell you, and each will tell you that what they’re selling is all you need. If you can avoid the Meta Tag and SEO myths, you are well on your way to Internet marketing success. But avoiding the myths is only half the battle. You also need to harness the real power of the Internet to generate the leads that turn into sales.The idea that a “click” on your website can somehow be turned into a sale in your showroom is simply not true. Clicks only matter when they turn into something you can close, like a phone call. What you need right now are phone calls from motivated customers who know you have something they want to buy.

Then The “Meta Tag” Was Born
Google began asking the people who put pages on the Internet to describe what they were about, and the Meta Tag, the little bit of code on a web page that nobody except a search engine ever sees, was born. Now the web builder could tell a search engine which inquiries their page was relevant to. It worked like a charm -- until marketers figured out that salting web pages with Meta Tags (mirroring words commonly used in inquiries) would drive traffic to their sites. The race was on for Google to redefine relevance. Search engines began looking into the content of websites to find relevant information, and marketers began using high frequency search words in their copy. The search engines again shifted gears and started evaluating websites based on how they were linked to other websites. Marketers responded with hundreds of dummy websites that existed only to link with their real pages and drive traffic to them. Google and some of the other search engines began looking at what people are saying about a website as a way to determine its relevance, and the marketers began catching on to that ploy, too. Whew! Meta Tags were once an important part of a website. Today, you still need Meta Tags on your website, but they account for less than 5 percent of its total search engine score. Any Web-related sales pitch built around Meta Tags should instantly trigger your doubt-detector.

For Optimal Results: Measure, Measure, Measure
Like it or not, Internet marketing is part of your business today and will be a more important part of it tomorrow. You expect print and broadcast advertising to generate quality leads, why expect anything less of your website? Successful Internet marketing is not magic, and it’s not hard to understand. However, a few simple rules must be put in place to implement trackable, measurable Internet marketing campaigns to improve sales sing a full range of leading-edge Internet marketing methodologies, business-friendly online strategies, e-commerce tactics, and proprietary tracking software:

• Approach Internet marketing as you would any
  other business decision
• Set performance expectations based on phone contacts from motivated buyers
• Track the results so you can make even smarter decisions in the future