Optimize Your Website Or Get Lost In The Crowd!
|
It used to be that designing an attractive website to promote your company and products was fairly straightforward. After you designed your site and built a few keywords into the code, you would simply submit the site to the search engines or a directory, grab an iced tea and wait for the traffic.
That model worked fairly well in 1996 but if you are still following this strategy in 2005, you are effectively non-existent on the internet. Why? There are now dozens of search engines and directories and somewhere in the area of 80 million websites on the www. Still think folks are finding you?
So how does the average consumer find your company? They type in a couple of keywords into a search engine and are then presented with thousands of your competitors' websites.
Let's say your company is Walt's Widgets. You have a pretty website with pictures of your widgets, a nice "about us" page, maybe some employee pictures and a picture of your beautiful building. It all looks good on the website but when Mr. Consumer types "widgets" into Google, poor old Walt's Widgets is on page 620 of the search results!
How can this be? Your site is not optimized for the search engines and is not being indexed by the search engine spiders and robots so you aren't being seen!
Research has shown that the average surfer will only review the first three pages of search results and will not drill down any deeper. If you are on page 62 of the search results, you effectively don't exist!
Surfers and search engines view a website completely differently and for you to appear on the first three pages of search results is critical to your continued profitability. You must know what the search engines are looking for, what relevance they are placing on your keywords, what elements of your site have a "welcome sign" for the spiders and, most importantly, know what keywords the surfer is using in his search. Just because you sell widgets it doesn't mean that "widgets" is the term being used the most by surfers when looking for your product.
SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is the process of analyzing keywords, reviewing search trends, analyzing link popularity, building code tags, analyzing your competition, optimizing pages within your website to be search engine friendly, editing web pages, submissions to directories and search engines, and reciprocal link building?just to name a few.
What you are after with SEO is not getting the highest number of website visitors. What you are actually seeking are qualified site visitors who have an interest in buying what you're selling. Professional SEO can help deliver a targeted audience to your business. After all, what would you rather have? 500 site visitors with a 1% conversion rate or 100 site visitors with a 10% conversion rate?
Professional SEO is critical to your company's web presence so if your site was designed by your summer intern in 2002 or your bookkeeper's son as part of his high school "media class", I assure you that you have some work to do.
Start with a good website design featuring good content and navigation. Then, utilize an SEO professional who can wring the most out of your website and deliver dollars to your doorstep.
Allan Gunnneson is the CEO of Gunner Web Group (http://www.gunnerweb.com), an internet marketing, website design, web hosting and search engine optimization company based in Kansas. Republishing this article is permitted if the content is presented in full and all credits to the author are presented on your site along with the originating URL (http://www.gunnerweb.com).
|
|
|
Press Releases Can Increase Search Engine Positioning
When you write a press release, what is your ultimate goal? No doubt, getting the information to as many publications and on as many Web sites as possible. The focus lies in moving outward? taking the press release to as many *other* sources as possible. We buy lists of journalists, pay public relations companies to distribute the release to thousands of targeted leads, use online press release distribution services, and create our own in-house list of reporters to touch base with. This isthe "standard" route that press release distribution takes.However, we generally don't think about how these releases can work for us in other ways. For instance, have you considered the fact that adding your press releases to your own site can ...(related: Seo)
Ppc Advertising ? The First Step In A Seo Marketing Campaign
Often, sites view seo and PPC marketing as exclusive marketing techniques. Each marketing method has its advocates. In reality, both have a place in the Internet marketing process. If you intend to pursue a major seo effort, a PPC campaign is a critical early step.PPC For TestingLet's say you have a site offering a service or product in the travel market. You've put together a healthy budget and decided to go for broke. Yep, you're optimizing and trading links in an effort to go after keyword phrases with major traffic and competition. For instance, you've decided to have a go at "Europe travel", which has roughly 400,000 searches each month and major c...(related: Seo)
Search Engine Optimization: Get The Low-down
Been hearing the words Search Engine Optimization lately? I know I have. But what is it, you wonder? Well, that's what I'm here to talk to you about.Search Engine Optimization is a type of pull marketi...(related: Seo)
Writing Seo Copy ? 8 Steps To Success
We all know that the lion's share of web traffic comes through the search engines. We also know that keywords and links to your site are the two things that affect your ranking in the search engines. Your keywords tell the search engines what you do, and the inbound links tell them how important you are. This combination is what determines your relevance. And relevance is what the search engines are after.There's a lot ...(related: Seo)
Google Wireless - Search Away From Home
For so many web surfers, it's almost automatic to type Google.com in to our address bar when we want to search. So big and well-known is Google that many browsers have a built-in search box or typed shortcut for Google searches. In fact, we tend to associate Google with search so much now that the word itself is commonly used as a verb, as in "let me Google that". It's much the same as Band-Aid, Kleenex, and Xerox, where the brand name is so pervasive that it's very often substituted for the generic function of the item the brand is applied to.We're used to searching from home, where we've had Internet access for years now. But Google Wireless search is also a...(related: Seo)
Link Popularity: Improve Your Search Engine Rankings
What is link popularity?Link Popularity is simply the total number of pages that link to your website. Most search engines, including Google, consider that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote of confidence for the other page. Therefore, the likelihood of you being the best source of information for their searchers is directly linked to the number of votes you have. It is therefore safe to assume that the higher the number of pages linking to your website, the higher you will be ranked on the search engines. Link popularity has become a critical success factor for search engine optimization within popular search engines.H...(related: Seo)
Website Promotion: 10 Search Engine Optimization Blunders To Avoid
If you want to develop a successful search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, go out of your way to avoid blunders that limit rankings.Here are 10 to keep in mind:1. Don't use frames.Why would you want to...(related: Seo)
How Search Engines Connect Sellers And Buyers
Maggie knows how to find what she wants. She lets her fingers do the walking ? not in the Yellow Pages, but at Google.com. She wants to learn about bread baking, and you have just written Bread Baking Made Simple, and you sell some great baking tools. The good...(related: Seo)
Torpedo And Sink The Ship Ss Search Engine Ranking
I was recently contacted by one of my best clients who askedme what I thought of his decision to make a major change toone of his highly ranked pages. His initial concern was thatvisitor sales conversion ratio was low. At almost one percent,it wa...(related: Seo)
?web Content Management System Fr Window?: Search Engine Typos
Oops! I meant "web content management system for windows." Do search engines understand consumer search engine typos? Typing something so close to what you are looking for, like typing "web content management system fr window" instead of "web content management system for windows" may not seem like a big deal, but search engine bloopers alter consumer searches more than we know.The phrase used in the title, "web content management system fr window" is a real-life example of a common search engine typo. In fact, within that phrase, the "o" and the "s" are missed so often that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN have recorded the phrase "web content management system fr window" as searched ab...(related: Seo)
How To Top Google By Writing Articles
Search engines determine their rankings based on two things:
Table Structures For Top Search Engine Positioning
So you have a beautiful website that you paid a pretty penny for and you are completely happy with it ? except no one can find it. Many web designers do not understand search engine positioning, so when they design your website little or no thought is given to the elements of design that may affect your rankings on search engines. On the other hand some search engine positioning...(related: Seo)
How To Improve Your Search Engine Rankings
When people think of search engine optimization, they immediately think of time consuming very tedious tasks that are way beyond their capabilities. That might be true if they put no time and effort into it. I do agree that improving search engine rankings in competitive niche markets require a good deal of knowledge and expertise. It's TIME to learn the basics of how to improve your search engine rankings. There is huge need for search engine optimization experts, but most websites don't find themselves in a very competitive niche market. Many websites can achieve top rankings by applying my optimization basics. All you have to do is put in t...(related: Seo)
site-map - Copyright © 2006 | You can send your articles and get links. Contact Webmaster | All Rights Reserved. | Seo