Businesses the world over are benefitting a lot with the advent of the online marketing capabilities afforded by the internet. This is especially true of the small and medium firms that are able to compete on the global arena on equal terms with large companies that have larger advertising funds available to them. Because of this online marketing has become a strategic method essential for SMEs.

But websites are also prone to stiff competitions from rivals who want to attract more customer traffic to their sites. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is another term used for online marketing that involves using search engines to attract the customers. As the numbers of online marketing companies keep increasing daily, the competition also increases. High levels of traffic and easy access to the website with large number of hits are the keys to successful online marketing. Poor search listings leads to reduced consumer reach. Ranks are awarded according to the numbers of hits a websites records. High ranking websites are most searched. The methods for increasing website traffic are using tools like press release distribution, bank-links and directory submission.

Link building and directory submission have been proved by many researchers to be two of the most effective tools to increase website traffic to attain a high rank (Yang, 2006; Thurow, 2003; Evans, 2007 and Smith & Chaffey, 2005). Press releases may be found effective in increasing website visits for a short time but have the tendency to get overshadowed by newer releases as the days pass On the other hand, directory submission, though initially generated less traffic than press release has been demonstrated a steady increase in traffic as the websites become more noticed in the directories as endorsed by the findings of Kahlow (2006), Scoviak (2005) and Thies (2005). When press release and directory submission are combined the initial increases in the traffic induced by the press release was sustained by the directory submission thus displaying a synergistic effect.

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