Not by any sense
of the word is search engine marketing a secret. However there are secrets
and tricks to search engine marketing. In this article we'll try to
successfully educate you on the different factors which contribute to
SEO, SEO is becoming a 'Hot Word' in Internet marketing
In case you don't already know, SEO stands for Search
Engine Optimization. And it is a vital part of any
online marketers quest for success.
It means preparing your
website with the 'right ingredients' for the search engines
to 'like' it. If they 'like' your site you can expect to get hundreds
if not thousands of free visitors from them.
In fact some research has
found that at least 65% of traffic to websites comes from search engines.
This is just a general figure and of course varies depending on the
other marketing methods you employ, however this figure does give you
an indication of how important SEO is to any online business.
OK now we'll go through
the different factors which affect your sites ranking. First things
first!
Choosing the right keywords
and Keyphrases
With most of the big 'useful'
engines now operating express submission services you will want to spend
your dollars wisely. Do You want:
Highly targeted
visitors?
Very good visitor to sale ratios?
Lots of profits?
If you answered 'yes' to those questions, then forget about choosing
the right keywords, realize the benefit of keyphrases. This approach
is likely to generate much higher click through of highly qualified
visitors.
Let me explain this to
you - How many people do you think search for the word music? ''A lot''
- How many results come up for music ''A lot''.
What do you think your chances of appearing near the top are? Well I'll
answer that one for you- SLIM TO VERY SLIM. Not to worry though because
visitors who click-through to a site after searching for music are not
highly targeted, you don't know if they're searching for:
music tickets
music lessons
music CDs
music related equipment
music software
music news
etc., etc., etc.
It's so vague that your time and effort would be better spent on other
methods.
However if a search engine
visitor types in 'Special Offer Music CDs' and you have targeted that
keyphrase in prominent places where search engines look on your website,
you have a much better chance of appearing near the top of the pile.
Also if in fact the visitor clicks through on your listing, you are
much more likely to make a sale, because you have exactly what the searcher
was looking to buy.
RECAP
The more complex your keywords are the more highly qualified
visitors you are going to get from the search engines.
Qualified visitors = Sales!
Sales! Sales
Also try and regionalize
your keyphrases if possible. This will, of course only apply to certain
websites.
What I mean by this is
that if you operate out of a specific location; target that location
and maybe the surrounding areas in some of your keyphrases. This helps
to improve the quality of your visitors aswell
Example: Imagine that the
biggest & best car dealer in Detroit happens to have a website,
but they are unwise and their title tag is as follows:
#1 Car Sales Dealer and Garage in America. They think this will bring
them lots of visitors because it has and alphabetically high start to
their title (#1) and has decent keywords, they're probably right, However
the visitors it does bring will not exactly be targeted. A visitor from
the other side of America could visit their website, are the going to
travel across America to buy a car from someone just because the visited
their website? No.
Now; Lets say a man from
Detroit is looking to buy a new car, the dealer he bought his two previous
cars from has closed down and he doesn't know of any other dealers around,
so he decides to use the Internet to look for "Detroit car dealers"
. Chances are the above car dealers competition will show up because
he has used a title like this: #1 Detroit car dealer, garage and sales
website. Obviously the man looking to buy are car in Detroit is going
to be interested in the site. So if you can - always regionalize.
Maybe you don't know what
words to target in your keyphrases, well simple solution - visit WORDTRACKER
and do their free trial, enter in a word that you think people searching
for your site will enter on the search engines, and WORDTRACKER will
give you a list of 15 related words and keyphrases. These are what you'll
use to make you keyphrases.
OK now you know
what keyphrases you want to rank well on the search engines, but where
do you put these on your website pages to improve your chances of appearing
near the top. Click NEXT
to find out.
