Faced with challenging times the emphasis should be on managing cash flow. And that should not mean cutting back on marketing and advertising.

On the contrary, unless your business continues to drive prospects to your web site and convert them into customers, chances are you'll have no business to speak of should the downturn continue through 2009. Basically, you should focus on getting more bang for your marketing and advertising pounds and dollars.

It's no secret that marketing on the internet or to be more specific, website marketing, gives you more bang for your pounds and dollars. Although many small businesses have a website, are they just brochure ware or traffic generating and converting machines?

See, website marketing is an art and a science. Internet marketing optimization should be part of your small business marketing strategy. Small business owners who have embraced the Internet have seen increase in sales and this is a fact. So how can small businesses boost internet sales?

It boils down to essentially two factors, traffic generation and traffic conversion. Traffic conversion is the methods, tools and techniques used to convert visitors once they arrive at your website into customers, including the process of developing customer relationship to extract maximum long term customer value. Traffic generation is the methods, tools and techniques used to drive visitors to your website.

Let's narrow down traffic generation. It's about optimizing your web site for the search engines (Google because it's the most popular), so it ranks high (on the first page) for the keywords (and key phrases) related to your products and/or services, hence the term, search engine optimization.

Are you still with me?

Don't be confused; internet marketing optimization and search engine optimization is basically the same thing.

Now, how do you optimize your website?

You can by simply by optimizing your website for both "on site" and "off site" factors. On site factors are covered in the answer to "how can a small boost internet sales" reply. The reply failed to discuss "off site" factors which are more important than on site factors. Optimizing your website for "off site" factors determine how much free visitors your website attract from the search engines and this depends on the popularity (as determined by Google) of your website.

How do you increase your website popularity in the eyes of search engines?

By having other websites linked to your website, or having incoming links from other sites, preferably those that are related to your niche market. There are tons of ways of getting links from website. But the quickest ways are to use the tools associated with web 2.0, namely social networks, blogging, bookmarking, video sharing sites, RSS submission or syndication and article directories. When you combine these tools, your website will experience a flood of traffic. The trick is to leverage your time by using time saving tools. For submitting your videos to video sharing sites try this free video distribution tool:

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I hope you found this article helpful.

David
Small Business Resource