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How to use the search engines to attract the right visitors to your site

Written by: Paul Lock

Article Overview: Why promoting your site through the search engines is critical and how to do it cheaply and effectively

How to use the search engines to attract the right visitors to your site

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.

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  Search Engine Marketing - Why You Should Write Search Engine Friendly Copy?
  Best Internet Marketing
  How a Sitemap Differs From a sitemap
  Why optimise your website?
  Article #37 How To Do Simple Search Engine Optimization

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Related Forum Posts
Seo way of Marketing... - Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.
Keywords - Keywords in your URL are good, but you also need to include these in headings on your pages. If you were going to search Google for this content, what words would you use? What common words would people use in a search engine if they wanted to find your site? You don't need to overdo the headers, just add a couple to each page and especially on your home page to attract search engines. I think someone also mentioned listing your site in directories. This is good and make sure to list your site under beauty - this should attract people that want to find you. Trading links with sites is good and especially sites that attract the people you want to bring onto your site. Miss Shri
Re: SEO... - Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of civilizing the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical searchengines. This gives a web site web presence.
Re: Search Engine Optimization - As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
Re: Can someone explain Search engine optimization to me? - Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence. As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. The acronym "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure. Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spamdexing, use methods such as link farms, keyword stuffing and article spinning that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.


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