:Online Marketing

T & A of Internet Marketing

Everybody laughs.

It is an almost universal reaction when I stand in front of a large crowd and declare that T and A are the most important elements in Internet Marketing. I didn’t understand what was so funny about that until I went to Google and entered the search term:

define:”T & A”

… Although I guess that “a Tonsillectomy and a Adenoidectomy performed at the same time” might be amusing to some, I still don’t find that particularly funny.

In the context of Internet Marketing, the term T & A stands for the absolute most important factors in online success, search engine rankings, and converting traffic to results (sales, revenues, profits, brand awareness, etc.).

T and A in the Internet context are Trust and Authority.

In the real world, people want to do business with well-known, knowledgeable (authoritative) and trustworthy people. On the Internet, search engines want to provide results that are useful and worthwhile to searchers and they have injected the elements of trust and authority into that goal. The major search engines seek to generate an estimate of the trustworthiness and authoritativeness of particular pages and web sites.

Trust and Authority can be derived from a number of factors.

Trust can be derived from elements of site design, site structure, site content, age of the domain, Top-level Domain (TLD) of the domain, and from the existence or creation of relevant links from trustworthy sites.

Authority can be derived from the existence or creation of large volumes of authoritative content as well as from the existence or creation of relevant links from authoritative sites.

Both authority and trust can be influenced by the age of links, the age of content, the quantity of links, the quantity of content, the relevance of links, the relevance of content, the context of links, the context of content, the diversity of links and the diversity of content.  It is all about links and content driving trust and authority.

The three L’s of Internet Marketing and the Five C’s of Internet Marketing serve to drive trust and authority and trust and authority influence the major search engines’ ranking algorithms and the results that they serve to the searching public.

Reputation management should be a major part of your marketing efforts.

Both online and offline - your reputation is the key to leads, referrals, sales and profits. Generating real world trust and authority and online trust and authority for your name, your company, and your brands, will go a long way toward making every other part of running your business fall into place.

Compiled into a single article here: Internet Marketing