I ran across a respected website where they were talking about “Destination Marketing” where by implementing a model where the website that a person lands on when clicking through a search result becomes the end of their search - in other words, a resource that fits all of their needs and is essentially the first and last website they will need to surf to in order to get their questions answered and their problems solved.

In the past it has been all about attaining the top 10 positions on generalized keywords and keyword phrases in a particular niche. While the content was there, it wasn’t the total package because webmasters and companies were more interested in getting on the first page of the major search engines rather than wondering what would happen once that desired flood of traffic arrived.

One thing I realized was that our firm had always built Destination pages and used the idea of destination marketing to not only get our clients great results in the search engines, but also have the pages where visitors arrived ready to be a one-stop solution package that the company could offer as both a resource and a platform for selling products and services.

Getting high rankings we have long known is only half of the equation. In order to attain and maintain high rankings as well as the tops in customer satisfaction required that we develop marketing strategies that took into account both search engine optimization for landing pages always delivered with a focus on providing exactly what the arriving and prospective customer needs.

In a way, the definition of Destination Search Engine Marketing is a desired destination point. In order to attain this status every marketing campaign needs to achieve top rankings and go that much further to meet the needs and desires of a specific target audience. When a site becomes a resource that people tell others about and point and return to, it has become a destination website. In a way, it is like having a resource booklet with links, sources, materials, products and services that are aligned with the search engine message and always in total sync with why a customer clicked on the SERPs results.

When one looks at SEO, rankings are at the top. Getting good ranking is what it’s all about. Knowing that is the start and not the end all to search engine marketing, many companies are now going beyond the traditional search engine optimization techniques offering clients the ability to create exceptional webpages that are tightly focussed and designed to satisfy arriving web traffic.

By taking the focus off of just getting high rankings in the search engines and looking and dealing with the total presentation, this new term Destination Marketing is in many instances like our firm already at the forefront and on the cutting edge of this marketplace.

Having a name for this methodology is great and the article went further to back up what we’ve said all along. Destination SEM is developing a website that is a cut above the mediocre SEO only sites. It attains high search engine rankings because it is not only optimized but highly deserving of those search engine results. When visitors arrive at websites they will always feel that they have arrived at a site with the complete answer to their problems.

Clients, as a result, can offer products and services, rapidly build and maintain credibility and increase ROI at faster rates. Going at it from the idea that by building an incredibly good and useful site and as a result gaining high rankings is a concept that is building in popularity and one that we’ve used successfully for our clients for quite a while.

The big picture of utilizing a destination marketing approach comes in the form of additional exposure and positive company branding that a client will receive when they shift paradigms from getting high search engine rankings alone. Not only will traffic arriving be more satisfied, it is a known fact that people drive the Internet.

One satisfied customer will tell another one who will tell another. The flipside to that which many firms have suffered is that if they are only optimized to get a visitor to their site, their credibility will suffer and trust will decrease based upon what the site offers to an arriving web surfer. What that means is that conversion rates and sales profits will decrease according to the level of professionalism, friendliness and amount of useful information provided when visitors arrive.

Destination marketing is about asking yourself a question every time you start out to build a page or pages for your site: Do you simply want an average/mediocre site that only half delivers? Or, do you want a site that goes viral, where the amount of good, useful information transforms it into a resource that everyone is looking for, will bookmark and return to again and again.

Answering that question is what makes the difference between having a good site and a great site. Destination marketing is all about making fantastic, useful resource sites that are authorities in specific niches.

Social media optimization (SMO) is an online technique for getting yourself and your online business a high profile and lots of traffic by maximizing your use of social networking online.

Social media optimization includes using social bookmarking websites for your articles and content, using RSS feeds, blogging, and sharing “tagged” photographs on Flickr or videos on places such as Video Jug or YouTube.

Social media optimization is an offshoot of SEO marketing techniques, except this is more about placement than content (though you still need to start with content) and generating website traffic straight from sources other than search engine results pages. Social media optimization is also a form of viral marketing; that is, a marketing technique where just one marketing piece gets shared and re-sent (and thus viewed and/or heard) in an ever-increasing, parabolic way throughout the Internet at very little cost to you.

This is also a 21st century online version of what successful businessmen and marketers have always done: networking in social settings to build trust and a reputation for being someone who can be related to. Networking is the most efficient means of target marketing, and the reach and speed of the Internet just amplifies or magnifies its power.

(SMO) was coined by Rohit Bhargava, who publishes the Influential Marketing Blog and is very influential indeed. He says that SMO is to be used to: increase your linkability; make tagging and bookmarking easy; reward inbound links; help your content travel; encourage the “mashup” (Mixture of content or elements. For instance, an application that was built from routines from multiple sources or a Web site that combines content and/or scripts from multiple sources is said to be a mashup.~ Computer Desktop Encyclopedia); and get communities connected.

Linkability is the key to all Internet success. It’s simply the quality of being a desirable place for other people to link to from their websites or to tell other people about online (such as at the social bookmarking websites like Digg, Yahoo My Web, Propeller, etc.).

Tagging and bookmarking are made easier by SMO because you can tag a ton of your content the same and similar ways to maximize the targeting of a given audience.

Inbound links are rewarded by being seen as “strong” by the webcrawlers. This rewards your site and sites that choose to link to your site by increasing your profiles on search engines.

Needless to say, helping your content travel and the “mashup” have been discussed above in so many words. In essence, with SMO you’re weaving your tangled Internet web and creating something like a neural network over which are transmitted ever stronger and faster signals, all giving you increased traffic and increased business.

Social media optimization should be used by anyone who is serious about Internet marketing success.

You have it all figured out: the flash on the front page is beautiful and pertinent to the site, your images are lovely and fit well, your articles are well-written and SEO’d, and you even have your SEO marketing plan set up. Everyone who sees it agrees that your site is professional and slick, well-written and informative.

So why isn’t anyone coming and why aren’t they returning when they do come?

Web site design is deceptively easy to learn, but difficult to master. Professional librarians with PhDs are often hired for the very large sites, just to keep them organized and searchable. Even smaller sites often are harder to navigate than they should be. And hardly anyone does their internal SEO structuring properly.

To tell you everything you need to know would take a couple of books, but some simple things will make your designing life easier and help you create pages that are both beautiful and friendly.

Internal Site Structure: Usability and Navigability

The way your site is linked together, page to page and level to level, is incredibly important to how the search engines look at it and how your human users get along. If you have beautiful Flash navigation bars and a search box, it may look elegant to you but it is NOT searchable, and search engines will not give you proper credit for the site. It is also not friendly for visually-impaired users. At the very least, include a text-link menu at the bottom to take users to all the sister pages to the one they are on.

By the way, a good rule of thumb is to think about how a blind text-dependent viewer would see your site and design for that person. In essence, web spiders, the little programs that document your site and help search engines rank it, “see” your site just like a person who is visually impaired. Makes you think a whole different way about that pretty Flash, doesn’t it?

On with internal links. Bread crumb links became a standard of Yahoo! in 1997, and are still very useful today. These links are found at the top of a page and work as a map for the viewer back out to where they were originally. The deeper your site, the more useful bread crumbs are. They look like this:

home : category level 1 : category level 3 : this page

with each level but the last linked back to the main page for that category. You see them used frequently on catalog sites:

home: clothing : girl’s : pantsuits : pink lamb pantsuit

By using these subtle links, you make it easy for your visitors to move back out to any level they want. And if you have these links at the top, with linking at the bottom to sibling pages, you ensure your user can get anywhere they need to go with about two clicks. In large sites, this isn’t practical, but in medium sites it can be a godsend.

Also make sure you use a robots.txt file to protect your private stuff: raw images, CGI-bin, and anything you just don’t want out on a Google search. This tiny text file goes into your site’s root directory and only takes a minute to set up. If you have a large and complex site and you want to ensure that it’s thoroughly searched, you can use a sitemap file, an XML file (you can use it even if the rest of your site doesn’t use XML) that ensures web spiders map every part of your site you want them to.

Lastly in site usability, make sure that on every single page your user has a simple means to contact you, preferably a link to a Contact Me! page. This is often included at the bottom of the page, but some webmasters find it works better somewhere else. Just be sure it stands out in the page.

SEO: Your Site and Your Campaign

Search engine optimization is the life’s blood of web business. If your site is not optimized, it is not visible. While Google has done a number of things to keep you from cheating by keyword stuffing, using gateway pages, and using invisible text, there are many, many things you can do to make your site SEO friendly and ensure that your ranking is as high as is possible.

Start with the rule of thumb from the last section: the blind man, Every single important element on your page should use alt-text to label it, and each one can use a little SEO. That butterfly jumper on your girl’s clothing page? Label it in alt-text girl’s clothing butterfly jumper.It’s that simple. If you have a database-driven site, you can simply ensure you include an alt-text column for each item’s description and include the right HTML in your page templates; if your site is smaller, you’ll need to label each image by hand. You don’t have to label every image, mind, but each label is going to give you a little boost.

Use pertinent anchor text for each link. If you’re linking to girl’s dresses, that phrase should be used as the link to the other page. This is a way of getting a keyword bump for free the search engines assume that this page will be about girl’s dresses. The worst link: the lazy man’s “you can find it HERE”, linking the word here.

Avoid overusing Flash. This is one of the most common errors made by people who are excited about beautiful web pages. Get this one thing straight: a site entirely designed as Flash may look impressive, but it is harder to navigate and will not be picked up well by the search engines, no matter what trick or workaround you use. It fails the blind man’s rule. Use Flash sparingly, and as a way to enhance your site, not to impress visitors. One of the few places that uses it well: the Ikea website, where great Flash is used to demonstrate things like putting furniture together. Another good one: Discover.com, where components are often designed in Flash and embedded in HTML pages.

Try not to use duplicate text. The search engines see this as spam, and it can end with your site being penalized. Instead, use unique text on each page.

Finally, optimize your entire site, not just the home page or the articles section. Your site, if it’s like most sites, can be entered at any level. Assume that your reader may come in anywhere, and design accordingly.

Looking for a way to drive traffic to your real estate website? Need more traffic to get more showings? Sure, you have a website up and running, but did you know that just putting up a website on the internet is not enough to increase your business? A website alone cannot do the job that you want it to. You have to put a great deal of work and time into generating traffic for your website as well.

This means that you need to be using the latest and coolest 2.0 website that gives you the opportunity to easy and efficiently market yourself to your targeted market. In this article, we will discuss eight of the top 2.0 real estate websites that you can use to drive traffic directly to your real estate website.

Before we really get into these hot and cool websites, there are a few things that you need to be made aware of. First, you have to really work at these sites. You have to use each and every one of them to really make your mark on the real estate world. At the same time, you want to make sure that for each real estate site that you are using, you are including a link back to your own website.

Why should you include a link back to your own website? Well, it is really very simple. Think about the search engines, particularly Google. Each and every day people use the search engines for a variety of different search words. Some of these words might be