Practical Web 2.0 Tips From a Florida Search Engine Optimization Firm

The site has been built, the content has been targeted with keywords and long tail phrases. We're spending time commenting on blogs and submitting links to directories. So, where's the traffic?

Well, the search engines and the people have to find your website in some manner. There are a few key ways that internet users find websites.

- Direct links from advertising

- Search Engine Searches

- Virtual Word of Mouth

Direct links from advertising is pretty much what it sounds like. You pay to place your link or your ad or your link and ad in a highly visible place where people click on it and are guided to your website.

Search Engine Searches: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc. You get it.

Virtual Word of Mouth. In the past few years there has been explosion of websites that are not using the traditional static information pages to generate and drive content. A new player has entered the web information realm. You, the user.

No longer is the all knowing webmaster, the man behind the curtain, the one pulling the internet's strings. There has been a revolution and the people have spoken up, and everybody's listening. User driven content has become the focus of the web. Suddenly, the web has become a social place.

This is Web 2.0.

Social networking, social bookmarking, social searching, social interaction.

Okay, so what does this mean for me? I mean really, I just have a local Garden Shop here in Seattle with a new, little website that I'm hoping will bring a little business my way.

Web 2.0 properties (websites) can be great sources of traffic. And they're also a great way to get your website indexed by the search engines quickly.

What are some useful Web 2.0 sites?

There are literally thousands of user interactive, user driven websites out there. And a hundred more appear each day. You might have heard of some of the bigger 2.0 sites out there: Stumbleupon, Digg, Del.icio.us, MySpace, Facebook, Technorati, Wikipedia, etc. Some of these sites are the most trafficked sites on the web. Millions of users are using these sites on a daily basis.

There are two important things that each of these successful 2.0 sites have. First, they're free to use. And second, they encourage and thrive on social interaction.

Anybody can use these sites. They're free. And they're great ways to build backlinks to your website that have the potential to be seen and used by a large number of users.

Each of these sites promotes social interaction in a slightly different way. MySpace and Facebook encourage social networking in a 21st century way. They make it easy to find users and large groups of people with similar interests and contact or market to them in a quick and efficient manner.

The social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, and Stumble upon (among hundreds of others) have users submit content - articles, webpages, videos, blog posts - and promote them in different ways often employing a form of online voting (digging, thumbs up or down, bookmarking) that encourages more traffic the more users promote/vote for different sites.

Wiki's are a great way to find user generated information. On Wikipedia anybody can go in and write about or edit information on a million different topics. It's like a giant online encyclopedia that is continually being generated/edited/written by the readers and users themselves.

So how will these sites help my small business?

Use them. Promote your site with them. Bookmark your content and articles. Submit links to them. Add your link to a wiki. Create a gardening group on Facebook.

Remember, as more and more people come across your site, a certain percentage of them are going to promote your site by voting for your articles, bookmarking your page, joining your Facebook group. As this happens, more and more people will be coming by your site, and more and more backlinks will be generated for your site by other people than yourself. As this happens - your web presence in the search engines is going to continue to outpace your competitors.

The internet is a marketing tool that most small businesses don't understand how to use for marketing at this point. By getting into the internet marketing game early - you're getting such a head start on your competition that it's like you've run the first half mile in a mile race before your opponent has even started.

Santiago Caicedo is the founder and President of Sell With SEO, a Florida SEO agency. To learn more about Miami online marketing as well as visit our website.