How to use the search engines to attract the right visitors to your site
How to use the search engines to attract the right visitors to your site
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.
.
'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.
.
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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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.
.
'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.
.
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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John AlexanderJohn has taught keyword research and SEO skills to small groups of business owners and Webmasters from over 80 different countries world wide since 2002. John is also the Director of Search Engine Academy ; Co-director of Training at Search Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with his partner SEO educator Robin Nobles, author of the very first comprehensive online search engine marketing courses at SEO Training Online and the SEO Workshop Resource Center. I look forward to hearing from you! - Visit John Alexander's Website |
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I've created this section on my site to share some of the incredible tools that I've used to build my business. I hope you too can benefit from them and look forward to hearing your feedback on the reviews! - Visit Evan Carmichael's Website |
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Cheryl MatthynssensCheryl is a life skills coach, licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor and a 20 year entrepreneur. Cheryl's dedication to achieving a life of balance led to her expanding her teaching from the simple managing of life's daily challenges to adding financial well being as well. A direct marketer with DrinkACT, she is gaining ground in the online community with her concepts of making sure business owners, entreprenuers and employees have well rounded life styles. She opened up a small affiliate site - The Balance Guide- to help others find resources for mental and emotional well being. Visit Cheryl's blog to see more of the diversity beyond business she has began offering online at www.thebalanceguide.blogspot.com - Visit Cheryl Matthynssens's Website |
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John BrennanJohn Brennan Ed.D. Dr. Brennan is President of Interpersonal Development, LLC, a training and development firm. Interpersonal Development has provided sales training and coaching to more than 3,000 sales reps from over 100 companies. A native of Australia, Dr. Brennan received his doctorate from the University of Rochester. His dissertation researched the effectiveness of Behavioral Modeling Technology in training people in interpersonal skills. While he has spent most of his career designing or delivering training, he was also a Vice-President of Sales of a training and development franchise with operations in 25 markets. Dr. Brennan has designed and delivered sales training in North America, Asia, Europe, Australia and the Middle East. He has been a guest speaker at numerous national and regional professional conferences. When Microsoft wanted Best Practices articles on sales for their web site, they called Dr. Brennan. The results are at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX011387391033.aspx His firm’s clients have included Volvo, The Prudential, Merrill Lynch, Eastman Kodak, Gannett, Equifax Europe, the Economist Group and countless small businesses. - Visit John Brennan's Website |
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Stephanie RobeyStephanie Robey is President and CoFounder of Pivot Positive, LLC - an Internet marketing business focused on helping people start work at home ventures. Previously, she was employed at The Search Agency with over 20 years experience in graphic design and 10 years experience in online marketing. She was responsible for launching the Conversion Path Optimization (CPO) unit where she and her team have conducted hundreds of optimization tests for online companies across multiple verticals. She is a successful entrepreneur having started and sold 2 companies and remains on the board of directors of the third, PhotoSpin.com Stephanie began her career in the direct marketing realm creating and producing direct mail for many of the major cable television companies and directly attributes her understanding of Internet marketing to those early offline experiences. Stephanie is a graduate of San Diego State University with a BFA in Graphic Arts and also holds an Executive MBA from the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University. Read Steph's Blog Meet Steph and Dave Sign up for our Free 7-Day BootCamp: Self Employed & Rich - Visit Stephanie Robey's Website |
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