When it comes to market penetration using search engine optimization strategies, the key issue is certainly mass movement.  The tribe mentality—a unified consciousness—creates a highly mobile community that moves in the same direction at the same time, and learning how to capitalize on this mentality has been a major benefit to search engine marketers.  When Facebook launched in 2006 it crept quietly onto the already experienced battlefield dominated by the likes of Myspace, and could have easily been dismissed.  However, recent developments have circulated several Facebook-centered conversations that have, in turn, awakened an awareness of internet marketers.

This open source, web 2.0 world we live in is a forgiving one, but it still poses significant problems for search engine marketers.  As important as it is to create solid relationships in any business, digital interfacing and the short life of most projects deter the opportunity to invest and develop in said relationships.  Facebook has been able to change this dynamic, resembling the everyday techniques to building relationships:  by allowing only your “friends” access to your personal information and connecting you with other members that are located near you.  As with real life, you also have the option of sharing your information or keeping it private, as well searching out people in other areas.

Facial recognition is important to developing interpersonal relationships as it identifies you as a person worthy of connection and reminds of the experiences you share with other people.  Facebook captures this with their messaging interface as your friends will see your profile picture when contacting (or receiving contact from) you.  Also, you do not receive spam in your Facebook (or rather, you choose which types of advertisements you would like—from organizations with information you actually want!).  When you get a friend request, you are able to choose whether or not you want to “develop” this relationship based on your previous experience or recent knowledge of this person.

When a friend of yours updates their status or posts a link, or changes something, you are automatically notified through your update feed.  Uniting your “network” with these updates removes the tediousness of asking the obvious question of “what have you been up to?” (etc) and can expedite the process of familiarity.  If someone in your network participates in a charity or adds a game or application, you are also notified so that you can join them if it’s something you enjoy as well.  As this is the web, you also always have the freedom to explore on your own.

Albeit many people spend an inordinate amount of time on Facebook brewing over trivial matters or dedicating a significant amount of time inside their applications or groups, which doesn’t necessarily help them (or you) build a business.  The social networking aspect, though, is what you should focus on as it will allow you to reach more people in less time than has ever been possible without these networks.  Again, you have the freedom to seek these people out through the leg work of expanding your network through your friends’ contacts, or you could join a group and unify a movement, making it easier to communicate to a mass of people at once.

If you use Linked-In, you may be asking why you should complement or replace your activity there with Facebook.  These communities are set up quite differently and could be used for separate purposes or to approach different types of people.  Linked-In is extremely basic and is almost like a resume sharing site, but with a social network component.  It brings together people for employment or business projects.  Facebook has far more freedom and lets you create an online identity through your network.  Also, you increase the likelihood of a quality connection using the personal interfacing of Facebook because you know more immediately the interests of your community members.

Facebook is the place to be, whether a casual gamer, social-media-enthusiast, or SEO marketer—especially if you are a marketer:  If you aren’t on Facebook, you’re out of the loop.

Network marketing is an expanding industry of late which is ironic because although it ranks highly on the popularity scale, it also is extremely high in turnover.  Some statistics show that as high as 90% of all network marketing business fail, average only three sponsorships or downline.  The majority of this staggering stat is due to the difficulty in prospecting new business owners.  Network marketing professionals are not necessarily trained in the particular skill set required to succeed in this business and therefore do not turn their leads, names lists, and cold calls into solid developmental projects.  Many times, the passionately driven participants in this industry will load up training or product inventory on credit cards, in hopes to earn a big enough return in a short amount of time to recoup their losses.

This has probably happened to someone you know, or perhaps even to yourself. Though these systems are not difficult to master, it is often the lack of training or big enough motivation as a business owner to turn the numbers and create opportunities.  However, web 2.0 social marketing has created a new way for those in this industry to distribute the message about their small businesses.

Web 2.0 is the technical term for “social media,” the quickly growing, ever evolving user-generated-content-based network of websites.  This version of the internet is allowing people to communicate and connect faster and with more proficiency than ever before.  Users can chat, post pictures and videos, share links or information from other places on the web, or even create their own landing page for an interest, hobby, or passion they want to share with others.  What makes this so significant is that the programming dynamic has changed to allow users access to these platforms while having little to no understanding of the programming language.

This relates to your network marketing business in that, first and foremost, social media sites continue to grow at an alarming rate—averaging six month time frames to double in size.  By understanding the power wave of growth you can position your brand, your name, your site in front of the coming change and capitalize on the trend.  When you get out in front , you expose your brand to a mass of new eyes, often for little or no money, as the “social” media relies heavily on shared content (as opposed to the owned content of the previous version).

A word of advice:  if you want to make money on the internet, especially through network marketing, learn how to properly and efficiently use social media sites.  Web 2.0 is groundbreaking because it levels the playing field and lets anyone distribute information about their business no matter your experience or expertise.  You can do this with no initial investment, which eventually will reap you all the rewards!

The current development of web 2.0 technology have changed the way many web developers use and make money on the internet, especially when it comes to market penetration (aka Search Engine Optimization or SEO).  Through blogging and social networking, developers have found ingenious ways to benefit themselves from the new web 2.0.  As the language and landscape continues to change and grow, more and more creative options present themselves to the enterprising artist.

Twitter is a recent phenomenon that, although is still young, has managed to incorporate several aspects of some of the best of web 2.0 (like Facebook).  Marketers have been densely using Twitter since its inception as both a social networking tool, but as a “micro-blogger,” providing specific strategies for internet marketers.  If you are presently utilizing several social networks for your internet marketing purposes, you might be looking into adding Twitter to your daily update repertoire.  However, there are a few issues you will want to understand before proceeding in this medium.

The first and perhaps most crucial aspect of Twitter is that you have to remember to start slowly.  Similar to the way you constructed your other social network followings, you will need to seek out other members (by “following” them) and accordingly invite members to “follow” you.  This can take some time, but can also be respectively beneficial.  Also comparative to the other social networks is your need to grow your network to boost your user rankings.

Secondly, page rankings do not improve from clicks through your Twitter page.  One way to combat this is to re-post addresses with SEO keywords.  This will make certain that search engines can find your site easier, which, of course boosts your ranking and brings more visitors to your page.

Third, and this is probably the aspect you are least aware of, Twitter has very special limitations that other social networking sites do not.  Twitter only allows you to post a 30-character live link address inside your 140-character post limit.  You can navigate the link limit by using things like sub-domains.  Sub-domains are efficiently customizable, and they are free to the user.  Also, highly-aware marketers might create duplicate “dummy” blog accounts with relatively the same content and the intention of linking to the desired page.  Limitation often leads to innovation, and it is no more apparent than through the flexibility of Twitter’s programming (in converse to its physical limitation).

Keyword emphasis is the most important component to properly using Twitter.  Though the entry method is limited, your understanding of keyword marketing needs to not be, as your ability to fairly gather keyword accuracy will directly influence and improve your SEO.  This is necessary even if your goal is only to generate more site hits.  Of course, Twitter is more beneficial if you have a specific product or service that can unite your following, in which case it is the best (and maybe the ONLY) tool you have to communicate to all of them simultaneously.

Search Engine Marketing claims to be a set of techniques, which allows promotion of your website in a way that visitors stream into your site, almost in a seamless manner. If the credentials of Search Engine Marketing are to be believed, they ought to be something people should invest a lot of time on. After all, any asset on the Internet wants one thing for sure – Traffic and more traffic.

More than 96% of webmasters on the Internet want incremental traffic to their website and in huge volumes. This statistic is enough proof of the fact that SEM is something any individual would love to learn more about.

If you are associated with the Internet in some form of the other, some concepts of SEM may be easy for you to understand. Some of them though may make no sense to you when you hear them first. Nevertheless, we have summarized some key concepts for your easy understanding.

• Black Hat techniques – Black Hat techniques are illegal SEM techniques that promise quick traffic to a website, but could also run you the risk of getting banned by Google. Once that happens, it could be a serious question on the credibility of your website.

• White Hat techniques – Any SEM guy working to get traffic to a website would love to have the traffic for good. This obviously warrants the use of techniques that are more suited to a website from a long run perspective. And that is where White hat techniques come into play. Techniques like tagging, adding descriptions to the web-page, content optimization, directory submissions and others form a part of White hat techniques.

• Social Networking – Some years ago, social networking was considered to be a platform where people could meet and chat with each other. In the recent past though, a lot of Internet Marketers have realized the gold-mine potential of social networking to benefit their business. One of the biggest benefits of social networking is in the ROI (Returns on Investment).

Here is an example illustrating the benefit – Assume you have a contact list of 1000 people on a social networking site like Facebook and you wish to launch a product, which caters to the needs of most people in the 1000 strong list. The chances or percentage of people buying your product would be as high as about 30-40%.

That is a high enough percentage or a conversion ratio for any SEM technique!

The flipside of this though is you need to have a laser-focused contact list on social networking sites. You may get to building one, but that would take time and a lot of effort.

• Search engines – These are the behemoths of Internet Marketing. Any individual who wishes to know about a certain subject gets into the search engines, types some keywords and gets the required results. Search engines like Google.com and Yahoo.com are ranking at the top in Alexa rankings, which goes to show that they are the ones most frequently visited by people.

Here’s what the search engines do – They send spiders or crawlers who crawl the whole of the Internet for finding content according to the keywords supplied by the visitor. Search engines also do the rather complex function of assigning Quality scores or Page ranks to the web-pages, after considering a lot of factors.

• Directories – These are the Online Yellow Pages, if you are referring to Business Directories. And Article Directories make up the content database on the Internet. Both these forms of directories are different in structure and functionalities.

While business directories offer firms and Internet businesses to get listed with a slew of other businesses, content or article directories allow people to publish their content on their platforms. These articles can then be read by people who desire to seek information on a specific subject.

Both business and article directories are considered excellent means of generating back-links to your website.

• Forums – These are platforms where you could find a topic of your choice and also find how people react to a certain subject. If used properly, forums could be an excellent method of asking people to get to your website. To use forums effectively, you need to ensure that your comments on a specific post make sense to the entire thread.

Remember – People will only click on your website if they find you adding something worthwhile to the discussion, else they would at best ignore your website and your post.

• Blogging – It is no secret by now that Google and other search engines place a high amount of importance on fresh and unique content. And one of the best ways you could accomplish that is by Blogging. Get an account with Blogger.com or Wordpress.com and you would be able to upload your content in absolutely no time at all.

The biggest benefit of Blogging is the easy content-management mechanism on offer. Within no time, you would be able to upload your content on the Internet and visitors will be able to see it.

• Link Building – When you are a new business on the Internet and desire to establish your name in the market, one of the easiest ways to go about is to tie-up with reputed companies in your niche. You don’t have to build a JV with them! Just exchange links with them and you will see the popularity of your site soaring in no time.

Not to mention – The quality score of your web-pages will also get a major boost.
And many more – You will find that Search Engine Marketing has so much to talk about that we could fall short of words. But in terms of effectiveness and using the techniques to the best effect, the methods and concepts explained above should be a good starting point for you in SEM.

More on SEM can be found in the members forum.