There are thousands of well-designed Web
sites, but very few are visible on the search engines. Almost 90
percent of Internet users today use search engines to find the
information they need. Yet, many businesses are not registered with
search engines. Four billion searches are done in the U.S. each month.
Search engines have a great capacity to drive traffic to your site, yet
few new entrepreneurs have the know-how to tap into this resource. Top
search engines such as Google and Yahoo! now provide local search. Local
search makes it even more important that you market your Web site
effectively.
Search engines: your primary marketing tool
In the past, the methods that search engines used to rank pages were primitive and easily deciphered for savvy Webmasters to manipulate.
Times have changed and gaining a high rank on the top search engines has become extremely competitive. Today, submitting your Web site to a large number of free search engines will only result in your e-mail address being added to a large number of spam lists. Search engines are now looking to provide quality listings for their users, but also to turn a profit: hence "paid listings."
How does your Web site rank?
It is important to monitor your search engine rankings so that you can track changes, monitor the ones that you need to improve and identify engines with whom you are not listed. If your customers did a search for specific keywords on a search engine, would they find your site? Are you in the first 10 results or the first 30? The average visitor scrolls through 1.8 page results during a typical search. If your business does not appear in those first 1.8 results, that could translate to lost business.
What are people searching for?
"Search volume" is the number of times a specific keyword is searched over a period of time. Having knowledge of search volumes will give you a sense for what is being searched for and what keywords you may want to focus on. A good place to look up search volumes is through Wordtracker.com and its search suggestion tool. The goal is to find keywords or keyword phrases that you feel would drive qualified traffic to your site. Keep in mind the amount of competition for each keyword and be creative in finding different keyword combinations that others may not have tried yet.
How to manage search engine placement
It takes hard work, market research, educated decisions, and even trial and error. There are ways to improve your rankings - and actions to avoid that will hurt your rankings. While you have the option of hiring a search engine consultant to manage this important responsibility, you can also do this yourself. Here are the factors that go into search engine placement and how to better optimize your pages for search engines.
Local Search
With the advent of "Local Search" the playing field has just gotten a whole lot more competitive. Now it is almost essential that you have an internet presence or you will lose out to your nearest local competitor that does. Do a search on any of the major search engines and look for a "Local" tab to see how this works. Expect "Local Search" to greatly expand and improve over the years ahead.
Key components to successful search engine marketing for a Web site
If you would like to out source search engine optimization, ask your professional consultant for the names of previous clients or "case studies". Speak with these clients to determine what, if any, improvements they experienced. Make sure that unethical or questionable practices are not used that will be harmful in the long run.
Targeted e-mail
E-mail allows you to communicate directly with your customers. It is also one of the most abused forms of online advertising. Nobody enjoys receiving unsolicited e-mail touting a business or service. While it is possible to purchase huge mailing lists of e-mail addresses that can be used for marketing your product, you are likely to turn off large numbers of potential customers by engaging in this practice.
Instead, opt-in mailing lists are now the preferred method of establishing e-mail lists of customers who are genuinely interested in your product or service. Consider creating an online newsletter. Make it informative, useful and worth reading.
Finally, remember that each e-mail should also contain instructions for how the recipient can be removed from the e-mail list.
View the free My Own Business Newsletter.
Search engines: your primary marketing tool
In the past, the methods that search engines used to rank pages were primitive and easily deciphered for savvy Webmasters to manipulate.
Times have changed and gaining a high rank on the top search engines has become extremely competitive. Today, submitting your Web site to a large number of free search engines will only result in your e-mail address being added to a large number of spam lists. Search engines are now looking to provide quality listings for their users, but also to turn a profit: hence "paid listings."
How does your Web site rank?
It is important to monitor your search engine rankings so that you can track changes, monitor the ones that you need to improve and identify engines with whom you are not listed. If your customers did a search for specific keywords on a search engine, would they find your site? Are you in the first 10 results or the first 30? The average visitor scrolls through 1.8 page results during a typical search. If your business does not appear in those first 1.8 results, that could translate to lost business.
What are people searching for?
"Search volume" is the number of times a specific keyword is searched over a period of time. Having knowledge of search volumes will give you a sense for what is being searched for and what keywords you may want to focus on. A good place to look up search volumes is through Wordtracker.com and its search suggestion tool. The goal is to find keywords or keyword phrases that you feel would drive qualified traffic to your site. Keep in mind the amount of competition for each keyword and be creative in finding different keyword combinations that others may not have tried yet.
How to manage search engine placementIt takes hard work, market research, educated decisions, and even trial and error. There are ways to improve your rankings - and actions to avoid that will hurt your rankings. While you have the option of hiring a search engine consultant to manage this important responsibility, you can also do this yourself. Here are the factors that go into search engine placement and how to better optimize your pages for search engines.
Local Search
With the advent of "Local Search" the playing field has just gotten a whole lot more competitive. Now it is almost essential that you have an internet presence or you will lose out to your nearest local competitor that does. Do a search on any of the major search engines and look for a "Local" tab to see how this works. Expect "Local Search" to greatly expand and improve over the years ahead.
|
|||||
- Start with a descriptive domain name: The domain name you choose is important. It is so very important because the name itself can help your Web site be more relevant to search engines. Pick a domain name that is easy for your clients to remember.
- Submit to the top engines: Submit your Web site for review and indexing only to the top search engines where people are actually doing their searches such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Be careful to read the submission guidelines for each search engine before submitting. For example, have a look at Google's search engine guidelines.
- Focus on your homepage: Your homepage is the single most important page on your site. Your homepage represents your business and its image. Make sure you focus on developing the content and the relevancy to search engines for this page.
- Develop content rich pages: Add content that includes keywords and phrases you are targeting. Many search engines consider the location of the keywords in your site along with their frequency to assess how relevant your site is to those keywords.
- Keep an eye on your competition: Stay informed of your competition's rankings. Top-ranked pages rank well for a reason - so see what you can do to be more competitive! Can you offer something they do not offer?
- Add new content: Keep your Web site fresh and updated with new content. Your visitors will appreciate it, and the search engines will look favorably upon it.
- Networking with others: Expand your "link popularity" by gaining more inbound links to your site. Get the word out and let other sites know about your site and how to link to it. The more links coming into your site, the more doorways you open for visitors to find you.
- Title Tags: Make sure the title tags across all the pages on your site are relevant to that particular page. Your domain name is not a good idea for a title tag.
- Pay Per Click Advertising: Consider "pay per click" strategies such as Google.com and MSN.com to enhance your overall marketing strategy. Pay per click now offers local search options to better reach a targeted audience.
- Review your activity logs: "Activity logs" or "server statistics" provide you with statistics on the number of visitors coming into your site, where the visitors come from and what keywords are used. Some Web servers/hosts provide this information free. Google also offers this as a new free service called Google Analytics.
- Checking on who links to you: Google offers a service to determine who is linking to your Web site. Go to Google.com and in the search box type in "site:http://www.yourwebsite.com/". You can also go to bing.com: enter "site:www.yourwebsite.com/". For a complete list of Bing query language syntax, see msdn.microsoft.com
If you would like to out source search engine optimization, ask your professional consultant for the names of previous clients or "case studies". Speak with these clients to determine what, if any, improvements they experienced. Make sure that unethical or questionable practices are not used that will be harmful in the long run.
Targeted e-mailE-mail allows you to communicate directly with your customers. It is also one of the most abused forms of online advertising. Nobody enjoys receiving unsolicited e-mail touting a business or service. While it is possible to purchase huge mailing lists of e-mail addresses that can be used for marketing your product, you are likely to turn off large numbers of potential customers by engaging in this practice.
Instead, opt-in mailing lists are now the preferred method of establishing e-mail lists of customers who are genuinely interested in your product or service. Consider creating an online newsletter. Make it informative, useful and worth reading.
Finally, remember that each e-mail should also contain instructions for how the recipient can be removed from the e-mail list.
View the free My Own Business Newsletter.
