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Search Engine Marketing Success With Search Engines
| Success With Search Engines |
| Technology |
|
It’s no secret that to get your site noticed on the Internet, you need to score well with the major search engines. Unless you have a truly niche product or service that might appeal to the membership of an identified group (catering to the needs of a college alumni membership, or a trade association might be some examples), your business needs to rank well on the major search engines for your business to be successful at attracting traffic to your site. If you examine the statistics, that means you need to make the most of your efforts with Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. There are, of course, many other search engines out there, and you might consider exploring the benefit of being listed on some of these if they make sense for your business. First however, you need to focus your efforts where 85% of your traffic will come from – the big three (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN). For proprietary reasons, the people running the various search engines like to keep exactly how they work a secret, but we have some insights. These come directly from the search engine companies, as well as data gathered by webmasters and site builders that has been discovered empirically by testing different ideas, and then tracking the impact that they make on a site’s search engine positioning. There’s no guarantee that any of these will work in the future – so view them as guidelines.Search engine optimization (SEO) contains a huge body of evolving knowledge. Unless search engine optimization is your business – you need to be realistic about how much time you can devote to this topic. Make sure you have the basic guidelines covered, and then get back to running your business. Pay attention to executing the fundamentals listed below. A small business owner paying for someone to do this for them seems like a low ROI activity. Stick to the basics and avoid anything that smacks of deception or trickery. This may work for some in the short term, but for most its a long term disaster. The HTML <title> is one of the most important entries you make on your web page; chose your title wisely. This information is what appears in search results once your site has been indexed. Make sure this is entered with care and that it represents the content of the page on which it appears. This is also the information that appears at the top of your visitor's web browser, and also appears in the site's bookmark description should someone decide to bookmark the page. Appearing below is an example of the HTML code that would be entered to accomplish this: <head> KeywordsA good set of keywords is one of the most important things you need to focus on. These are the words that a potential customer might type into a search engine to locate your site. Think like your customer and try to understand what the key phrases might be that someone looking for a site that offered your products or services might use. Use these same phrases in your keywords Meta section, and probably more importantly, use them two or three times in the content section of your web page. Do this in the natural flow of the page's content. Don't just repeat the key phrases arbitrarily. Meta tagsAlthough becoming less important according to some experts, you should still take the time to enter them correctly. They can also be used to control which pages of your site get included in the various search engine results. ContentRelevant content is very important! Content should match your headings, keywords, and Meta tags. Make sure the keywords that you expect people to be searching for appear as a natural part of your page's content. Titles and HeadingsInclude your key words here as well to the extent possible. Heading and Titles still need to be meaningful to the human that visits your site. Don’t sacrifice the usefulness of your site to a visitor searching for information in an attempt to improve search engine rankings. Include a Site Map on your site and submit one directly to Google – see the Google Webmaster tools . If your business has a physical location that you invite customers to, take advantage of the free Google Map listing. Robots.txt file – use Google’s tool to make sure you are using this correctly for the Google search engine. Important TipThe search engines can only read text – keep this in mind when you are tempted to load your page with graphics. If you do use a graphic, use an Alt Tag to describe what the graphic represents. This helps the search engines, but more importantly makes your site more accessible to visitors that use screen reader programs. Avoid Frames and session ID’s - these can become a barrier to the search engine robot that is attempting to catalog the pages of your site. Session ID’s are used by some websites to retain a visitors session information or pass referral data. These ids are attached to a page’s URL and for the most part give the search engines a bad case of indigestion. There will be situations when using a session ID is required, just know that it may impact search results. Avoid placing session IDs on key pages, such as the home page and landing pages, that you want the search engines to be sure and visit. Submit your website for inclusion to the major search engines. Do this manually. Do it once and wait for the search engines to visit your site. Be patient as this may take a while. Make sure your site is ready for the search engines to visit before you submit your site for inclusion by paying careful attention to the items listed on this page. If you make significant changes to your site, submit to the search engines again. Search engines will eventually revisit your site once it has been cataloged. Here are the links to submit your site to the major search engines: MSN |