When we say “internet marketing” we now mean everything from SEO, to social sharing, to general link building, to PPC, to community growth on social media, to CPM, to Pinterest marketing techniques and very strategy for visual social networks in general. Internet marketing can be as small as a Facebook “like” and as huge as a link to your website from CNN.com. It’s the building of your brand in every digital way possible to generate growth and revenue. It’s developing business relationships through social media or email that drive sales or your general authority within an industry. It encompasses guest appearances in real life or digitally (hello webinars!), and it can even be the single factor that makes or breaks your business.

Whew! What a list.

The new, holistic approaches to internet marketing–thanks to changes by Google and other search engines in the last 12 months–are enough to make anyone’s head spin, let alone a small business owner or manager who wears many different “business” hats everyday. Thankfully there are plenty of resources–such as this blo–to help you out along the way to internet marketing success, and in this article we’ll cover 7 rookie mistakes that we’ve found again and again in our nearly 10 years as internet professionals to make those first steps even easier.

Thinking of allocating a budget to outsource the entire process? Feel free to browse these guidelines and send us a message to see how you can streamline the growth of your business by focusing on what you do best instead.

#1 Failure to maintain an on-site strategy focused on quality content

There used to be a time in SEO history where cheap microsites fueled search engine results pages (SERPs) thanks to a huge network of inbound links from websites of a similar, cheap type. However, with Google’s Panda, Penguin, and other algorithimic updates last year, these types of link farms (along with cheap options to purchase batches of links) have been essentially wiped out from relevance.

The fact that these cheaper sites added no real value or quality to a users’ experience on their websites is what ultimately sealed their fate and failure with search engines. Instead, Google now strongly promotes websites and digital properties of the highest quality. Ranking websites on search engines with poorly created strategy or no consistently updated content whatsoever is now nearly impossible.

But what does having high quality content on a website actual entail? Google ranks quality based upon the:

• Quantity and quality of inbound links to the page (1 link from CNN = excellent, 100 link-farm links = bad)
• Quantity and quality of social signals linking to the page
  
• Grammar and spelling on the page
• Text formatting indications on the page (well organized text with subheads, bold, italics, bullet points is easy to read for readers, and translates into great quality)
• Length of content (masses of poorly written 200 character posts will always rank poorly against longer posts of varying length and higher quality) 
• Outbound links from the page (link to relevant websites that are helpful for readers and enhance their experience)

This client maintains an excellent on-site strategy by regularly posting interesting content with a variety of media.

If you’re thinking that these parameters seem pretty subjective: you’re right, and we’ll never have clear-cut guidelines as to how Google ranks websites to ensure no one games the system. However, these parameters are general enough to help create the strategy necessary for valuable, search-driving marketing on-site. Take a look at our Intro to Linkbuilding article from last month to get some initial ideas flowing.

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