Online business optimization is an essential strategy for online business success in 2009 and beyond. The Internet has changed, and business promotions on the Internet have changed even faster. Top players like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter did not even exist just a few short years ago.

YouTube and other video sites have become very important to online marketing, and trendwatching.com has identified video advertising as the fastest growing trend for the future. For quite awhile now you and I have been seeing 15- to 30-second commercials at the beginning of a news video or, virtually, any other kind of video on major websites.

More than Search Engine Optimization

Online business optimization is much more than optimizing a website for search engines. While page construction still plays a vital part of business marketing online, it is a much smaller player than it once was. You might want to also read my article, Is SEO Dead…or Dying?

Your approach today must include the Social Media community. Back on April 8, 2009 (just 3 months ago) Facebook reached 200 million active users with 100 million logging on every day of the week. MySpace has 130 million users, LinkedIn boasts of 40 million and Twitter had 25 million in early May 2009 and continues to climb.

Single page complementary sites such as Squidoo, HubPages and Google Knol should also be part of an effective online marketing strategy. Major corporations now employ social media workers who do nothing but interact on social media sites all day long. Press Release (PR) media sites are equally important to getting your business message out to the public.

Social Media Linking

Social media linking strategies are not as important as having a social media presence. Yes, you can still get a little juice for your website with social media links, and forums provide an excellent opportunity to garner some link juice. However, being a good guy on social media sites can bring added value to your online business. You can provide pre-selling information about your products or services and answer questions in a non-pressure environment.

Traffic Building

Let’s step outside social media for a moment and think about other things you can do to generate free traffic to your website. Of course, you want this to be targeted traffic, people looking for your product or service. I’ll talk about article marketing in the next section. For now, however, let’s talk about being a good Internet citizen in places other than social media sites. Having a blog is certainly one no-brainer. Equally important, though, is being a good blogger. You should visit other blogs that post content similar to yours and leave comments. Most blogs allow you to link back to your blog when you post a comment.

Squidoo offers an opportunity for you to create a single page that provides specific information about your products or services with anchor text links back to your blog or website. And, of course, there are ways to promote your Squidoo lens that, in turn, promotes your other online sites.

Dozens of strategies can be found in the eBook, How to Generate Free Traffic. I’ve already written about this eBook. You can read a review by clicking How to Generate Free Traffic.

Article Marketing

Much can be said about article marketing and its value to your online business optimization strategy. Article directories are a growing segment of online information. This provides another opportunity to show your business as a good guy. A properly designed article that presents good, quality information without a blatant sales pitch can help boost your image. Today’s consumer has been over-hyped. Just think for a moment of those in-your-face Billy Mays’ commercials or Sham-Wow or free credit report dot com with the small print on the television commercial that says you must sign up for a program in order to get a credit report.

Don’t confuse article marketing with press releases. Article marketing should be more soft-sell. And you do get a link back to your main business website in your author biography.

Improve Your Online Business Optimization

Online business optimization requires a new kind of webmaster or web development team. Knowing the latest HTML, CSS or PHP is certainly not enough to optimize your online business. You can paint a beautiful masterpiece, but if you wrap it in burlap and put it in storage, the world will not know of its existence. The same goes for a online business that is not optimized for today’s online customer.

Think about this: Pew Research, in January 2009, cited some almost staggering statistics. In the four years from 2005 to 2009, the number of adult Internet users in the United States who have a social media profile increased from 8% to 35%. Narrow that down to adults aged 18 to 24 and you get 75% with a social media profile. Drop down to tweens and you’re nearly at 100%. Where are your future customers? If you still have a question about this, read those statistics again.

Related Information

Is SEO Dead…or Dying?

Making Money from Home

Key to Marketing

Article Writing for Profit

The Key to Marketing Online is not much different than the key to marketing anywhere. It is not a big "fuzzy" secret that can be understood by only a few people. Take a drive down Anystreet in Anytown during these tough economic times. What do you see?

Closed signs? Out of Business signs? Not far from my house the only store for a particular franchise hamburger restaurant within miles went out of business at the end of June. This franchise has an excellent menu and some of the tastiest burgers available. Their burgers really resembled those of the 50’s and 60’s that put the fast food industry on the map. But those "happy Days" burgers were not fast food; it was their popularity that led to McDonald’s, Burger King, Burger Chef, Minute Man and other early fast food pioneers.

Hamburgers have not gotten less popular. Quite the contrary! The decrease in disposable income had led to a resurgence of hamburger buying. So – why did this franchise store go out of business? The answer is simple: lack of traffic.

Any for-profit business must have a positive traffic flow. There must be customers coming to the store, whether the store is on the Internet or on the street. Of course, your online store doesn’t really have to be a store at all. It can be a blog or a Squidoo lens or an information website on which you have products available or you display ads for various affiliate programs or Google Adsense or any of a dozen other programs like these.

How to Get Online Traffic

There are two types of traffic: paid and free. Within paid or free traffic, there are two types of traffic: general and targeted. Targeted traffic are those people coming to your site looking for what you are promoting. When you get a case of the "hungrys" do you just head out to the first place that sells food? I guess, of course, that depends on exactly how hungry you are. For the most part we have cravings for a particular item – like pizza. Neither you nor I head to McDonald’s for a pizza. In fact, most of the time we simply pick up the phone or go online and have a pizza delivered to our home.

Now we’re talking targeted, convenient and, in a sense, over-delivery on the part of the store. After all, we would drive to the pizza store, wouldn’t we? But the store gives us more than we actually need – they bring their product to us. A KEY to getting online traffic is to have a site that is targeted, convenient and over-delivers.

First, however, people need to know your site is targeted, convenient and that it over-delivers. That means you must find first time visitors. Or, rather, first time visitors must find you. I’ve become a big believer in blogs and Squidoo lenses. In addition to those items, you should join social media communities like Facebook, Twitter and Digg.

Over-Deliver on Social Media

Be a good friend to social media contacts. A good friend doesn’t knock on your door several times a day trying to sell something. A good friend tries to help you sell something. Let’s take Digg for instance. You can Digg an article, a post or a page you have written. Your fellow Diggers will do the same. Visit your friends’ Diggs and, if you like them, give them a Digg-up. If they are good people, and not all are, they will visit your profile, see your Diggs and give you a Digg-up. You can essentially do the same with Squidoo lenses and make friends.

You can post links to your articles on Twitter and Facebook without a sales pitch. And you can re-tweet your friends’ tweets. Nice people, again, just might re-tweet yours.

There are dozens of ways to generate free traffic to your website. Only a few are mentioned in this article.