Well, now you’ve built your site and are ready for all those people to flood your site with traffic and make you a millionaire overnight, right? Yeah, I know, you’re smiling now. not so easy, is it. If you’ve put up some sites and watched and waited for the traffic to come in, you know it takes getting your business out there and getting yourself “found”. First things first, is the beautiful site you just built optimized for search? Since I know you read part 1 of this series, I know you have done your keyword analysis homework and figured out what terms you want to be best found on.
Marketing a website is a multi-pronged thing. What I’ll cover in this part of this series is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click Advertising. In future blogs, I’ll discuss Forum Posting and Social Media.
Now, SEO is the holy grail of Website Marketing. You configure your site to maximize your position on the search engine results pages. Only problem is that the different search engines look for different things and it changes from time to time. So, you need to think about who your audience is and what they might be searching for that you want them to find. Keywords are the key here and multi-word keywords are significantly better than single words. You want visitors who are going to be specifically interested in your product or service. Single word keywords are, for the most part, too generic to get you a customer. by using 3-4 word keyword terms, you hone in on exactly what you are selling and what the customer is looking for. Research by Google, which commands 65% of the US search market, shows that more consumers are using multi-word keywords to fine tune their searches and 3-4 word search terms are the biggest growing section.
The very basics of SEO are that you need a great website title, a good website description and good on-screen keywords. Now, let me hit on the keywords META tag debate first. Google has long said they don’t bother with them. Neither does Bing. So what about Yahoo. well, funny thing. Yahoo SAYS they don’t. But a test of a jibberish keyword proves that wrong. So, for 18% of the search market, you’re damned right I’m gonna make the effort.
A website title is that single sentence you see at the very top of your browser, just to the right of the Internet Explorer or whatever other browsers’ logo. It is NOT necessary to put your company name in there. The way I figure it, if they knwo your company name, they’ll find you. What you want in your title is a single 35-40 character sentence that entices the viewer to click and also gets picked up by as many searches as possible.
Last on the SEO bandwagon is the site description META tag. This would be a 2-3 sentence description that accurately describes what your visitor will get from your site. Here’s your marketing pitch, in 65-80 characters. Don’t load up with keywords, it won’t be a good thing.
Lastly, I wanted to talk about Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Sometimes this is also referred to as SEM or Search Engine Marketing. Each search engine, and social media site too, has ads on the side that relate to your current search. This is the ads you want to concern yourself with. You pay per click, real piece of writing savvy there huh, and you can set your account to bid on keywords on a word by word basis or allow the place you are advertising to do your bidding based on your per day ad budget. Yes, you have to bid on each keyword and it’s not the highest bidder winning. This is where is gets a bit funky for the rookies out there. Each search engine works a bit differently, but the more popular the keyword or keyword term, the more expensive and the more competitive the bidding is. Everyone wants page 1 and for good reason. Think about your own search experience, how many pages down do you go before you do a new search? Google has a terrific keyword research tool as well as a plug-in for Excel that works with the AdWords keyword tool. A warning about using the Excel plug-in, it’s complicated and should only be used by someone familiar with keyword research concepts.
Well, those are the basics. I know I skimmed alot of things, but this is a huge topic and hopefully you now know enough to do some research and be able learn more as you go. If you don’t have the time or want to do the SEO or PPC campaigns yourself, at least you now know enough to speak with a professional intelligently about the topics.
Please post your comments, I’ll use them to help mold the next chapter in this series, SOCIAL MEDIA.
