One of the biggest problems online marketers face, if not the biggest problem, is standing out from their competitors. Standing out in an online business means not only having a website that grabs the attention of the viewer (and keeps them there), but it also means being visible to people searching for your product or service.

You can create the most fantastic website in the world; it can be filled with useful information, interesting videos, and enticing graphics, but if Internet users can not find it, it is worthless. The problem is that in these days where millions of people the world over are creating websites and even trying to earn money online, competition is fierce. Once upon a time you could whack up a simple website and rank highly without much effort. Now, that is not possible at all.

Too many people enter the world of online marketing with little more than a great idea. They get excited and motivated by their idea, create a fantastic website (or even pay someone to create their website for them) and then sit back and wait for the visitors to arrive, only to discover that nobody does! It is not that it is not a quality website, it is not that the product or service is not great, it is just that there is nothing on the site that will get it noticed by the search engines. Sad though it is, much of your marketing efforts early on need to be directed towards Google rather than paying customers.

Yes, it is possible to get website traffic by paying for advertising. If you have got a large advertising budget this is certainly doable, but unless you get your site ranking naturally in the search engines you will be paying for advertising for a long time (which is not to say this is not a valid method as long as you are making more money than you are spending). However, it is also true that many Internet visitors are more savvy these days and are less likely to click on advertisements, and more likely to seek out websites that rank highly on Google or Yahoo.

So, the first thing you need to do is to promote your website in the right way. If you need some initial visitors, then by all means get some advertising, but while you are doing that you need to get your website ranking. This means ensuring that your on page SEO is sound for starters. If you want to rank for a particular search term, then you need to incorporate that search term (or keyword) in your website (but not so much that your text is repetitive and unnatural). It is helpful to put your keywords in the title of the page, in your domain name if possible, and once or twice in the text of your website. Anything more is overdoing it and will work against you. Another way of promoting your website is submitting articles with a link to your website in article directories such as Ezine Articles or Go Articles (there are literally hundreds more too).

Even if it takes awhile for your site to rank highly, a well written article published in Ezine Articles can rank highly in the search engines, and visitors to your article will also be able to find your website. As long as you have created a website with useful, valuable information, and you can give the website visitor what he or she is looking for, then a visitor is likely to hang around your site for awhile. Plenty of valuable information, in both article and video format if possible, is the key to having a website that visitors will explore.

Standing out from the competition needs a two pronged approach: first, create a fantastic website that leaves your competitors' websites for dead; then, get your website promoted so that visitors can actually find it before they find your competitors' sites.