Imagine printing a brochure and nailing it to a tree in the forest. How many leads is that likely to generate? Having a website without a strategy for driving people to it is pretty much the same approach – an optimistic waste of time and money.
During the ‘dotcom’ boom of the late 90s/ early noughties, companies spent millions on fancy websites and marketing campaigns to promote them. Many went bust – the ‘dotbombs’ – because they hadn’t researched their market, didn’t control their costs and failed to understand the unique nature of the web.
You can avoid their mistakes and drive the right people to your site by following these search engine marketing guidelines and exploring a few of the resources I’ll highlight.
1. Mastering search engines and directories
Between 70-95% of all internet traffic passes through search engines like Google, depending on which research you believe. Either way, they’re critical to your success.
Your objective should be to achieve top twenty rankings against the search terms your target market is using to find sites like yours. Sites achieving top twenty rankings against hot keyphrases get thousands of visits a day. There are two main ways to get the search engines to rank you highly – by being seen as relevant and popular. And you do this through providing good content, site optimisation and linking.
Optimisation
Optimisation’ is the term that describes how you or your webmaster prepares your site so that the search engines can identify your visible and invisible (html) content as relevant to a particular subject. At its simplest 'on-site' optimisation (more about off-site optimisatiom later) involves:
- identifying the keywords and phrases that your prospects use
- structuring your site and writing your pages so that they feature those words and phrases in sufficient density but without 'spamming'
- organising your html meta titles, descriptions and header tags so that they feature these terms and adding sitemaps in the preferred formats of the main engines.
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'Off-site' optimisation or Linking
The more inbound links you have from sites deemed to be ‘important’ in your sector (due to the number of visits they attract), the higher your ‘link popularity’ and the higher the search engine rankings you’ll achieve. This is especially true of Google which is known to rely far more on backlinks as a criterion of quality than your site's content.
Again, you can research the sites that you want to have links from simply by identifying those achieving top rankings in your sector. You can approach them and see if they’ll link to you. If they’re competitors, they probably won't want to. Which is where a bit of lateral thinking will be needed. Identify complementary, non-competitive sites with good rankings and ask them to link to you. They may want to swop links but these are nowhere near as valuable so avoid if you can.
Link popularity - the key to search engine success
At Incise we recommend submitting your site to as many search engines as possible. You may wonder, ‘why bother with the top 100 search engines when a big proportion of traffic is generated by the giants?’
The answer is that when you look at the traffic generated by the smaller engines, they're far from insignificant BUT CRITICALLY BECAUSE getting ranked by the smaller search engines improves your site's link popularity. Along with keywords, link popularity is the most important criterion for getting top rankings in search engines and directories. And it's getting more important by the day. So getting ranked by the smaller search engines improves your link popularity and makes you more popular on the giant search engines like Google. No matter how many times you submit your site and how hard you work at finding the right keywords, search engines will always rank the most popular sites first.
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To learn more about linking, go to www.linkingmatters.com and download their report. It’s a great way of learning quickly about the importance of linking and the priorities you should have.
The minimum you should do is develop lots of good content, get your site optimised, link to some big hitters and make sure your site’s submitted to the top ten search engines and directories.
If you’re building and marketing your own site, I can recommend Site Build It. It provides hosting, building and marketing in one comprehensive package at reasonable prices at http://www.sitesell.com/nethelp4u.html
That’s it for now.
In my next article we’ll talk about Pay-per-click advertising and how you can get a Free ebook to learn the tricks the experts use.
How to use the search engines to attract the right visitors to your site - To learn more about this author, visit Paul Lock's Website.
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Paul Lock
(Visit Paul's Website)
Brought up in London and been in marketing
since the days of Johnny Rotten - yes,
that long. Corporations may be slow moving
and full of political windbags but
they're a great way to get your training.
After 20 years 'training' I went into
the agency world and set up my own company
three years ago. We help small businesses
make the most of their web marketing
investment, from design and planning to
search engine optimisations and analytics.
If you can't measure it, don't waste
your money - are you a business person or
a gambler? Over the years I've made more
mistakes than you could shake a stick at
and, on the basis that an investment in
knowledge pays the best returns, I offer a
few morsels which might help you make
fewer mistakes than me. I hope my articles
help and feel free to visit my web site.
Best of luck,
Paul
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