When your site was in development your consultant should have worked with you to determine what the keyword phrases were that your target market would likely use to find a site such as yours. If they didn’t, you now know for a fact that your site is not in a position to have a chance to pull relevantly for your targeted keyword phrases.
See, optimizing a site when working with those who really know what they are doing, begins even before a bit or byte of code is typed. Your top keyword phrases need to be considered during the design process to give you a running start when you launch.
Several times each week I get contacted about why a site isn’t pulling for a phrase that either isn’t searched (or researched) for properly or wasn’t considered during the development process. Time to do some educating on how search engines work and a bit of tweaking on the site to compensate for new targeted phrases!
Ever wonder how you rank with Google, Yahoo and MSN? Check out Marketleap who has some free nifty tools that can help you can get a better idea of even if you are being found by the phrases you want and how the search engines list your site differently.
Then, get to work optimizing your site!
At your service,
Judith
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I was recently asked “If a new site owner wanted to know how to start increasing traffic to their site, what would be first 5 things you would advise them to do?” Hmmm… As far as I’m concerned it is tough to limit to 5 things because their are literally hundreds of things you can do. Let’s start with the the basics below as a new site starting point for increasing visibility and therefore ROI:
- Make sure you get listed with the major portals and search engines and then monitor and track your listings to ensure you can react to any changes or drops in positioning. This can take up 6-9 months or more for new sites. Getting listed is one thing; then attaining the top page positions is another that requires various other criteria be met, updated and improved upon continually. It’s called a long term plan. Have a written strategy and follow-up program in place.
- Request reciprocal links or also called “smart linking” with complimentary sites. Don’t fall for linking schemes or link farms — those will do more harm than good. Many of the top engines use an algorithm that gives your site a popularity boost if you have sites linking TO you. And they can detect linking “programs” in place purely to manipulate search engine rankings. Avoid getting penalized by working on your site as one way links TO your site because of all the valuable information you offer is what is best! A properly executed linking campaign should be part of your marketing strategy.
- Advertise your dot com in local newspapers if you are seeking a local market. Advertise in industry publications or topic specific magazines if you are going for a wider audience. Off-line advertising is imperative to building awareness with folks who may be interested in your site but may not have thought to look for you. This becomes critical if you do not keep up with your Search Engine rankings. By the way, relying on Search Engine free/organic listings as your sole venue of exposure is no longer considered a viable business methodology.
- Offer a content rich valuable newsletter each month and daily postings on your Blog that folks can sign up for and also recommend to their friends. This type of viral marketing has proven to be extremely effective in building awareness for your site. Be careful though, your newsletter and Blog must contain needed, unique and valuable information and not be a hard sell of what you want to commercially gain from. No hypey sales pitchy stuff!
- Invest the time and the money necessary to reach your goals. This could include a budget for Pay Per Click Campaigns while your site is new and not yet indexed by search engines. (This depends on your market — I’m no longer an across the board fan of PPC services as of late.) Getting found online doesn’t just happen by osmosis and in actuality is getting more complicated each day — and it isn’t free. Ignore the hype out there that makes getting found sound as though all you have to do is have a dot com, stuff in some keywords and millions of Netizens will contact you. Keep in mind there are literally billions of pages online and you have to continually, consistently work at getting exposure - for perpetuity moving forward.
These 5 tips, when integrated properly, can help to produce increased visibility for your program and should be applied with a long term point of view. They are not the end-all-be-all but should be at the nucleolus of any online businesses core strategies. Most importantly realize that online marketing is a never ending effort!
At your service,
Judith
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First, who is “they?” “They” are always popping up as experts on advertising to zeppelins! Second, “Top 10″ for what? Your specific keywords? Or, phrases they deemed they could accomplish that for you? Very important distinction folks!
Those of use who do White Hat SEO, which basically means our first priority is to our site visitors needs and experience, then to search engines, realize there is no wave of a wand or snapping of fingers to make Top 10 rankings happen. And, we don’t break or bend rules, use tricks or anything stealthy to satisfy either.
When it comes to Top 10 Positions the bottom line is you need to be strongly about the phrase being searched for. One of the 10 sites/pages amongst the billions out there that are more relevant than any others. Top 10 out of billions — does that put this into perspective?
The way you accomplish Top 10 rankings it to have a long term view and consistently work on your site to be the best it can be in its niche. Write articles, include a Blog (Search engines love Blogs!) and add white papers that all cater to what your target audience wants, needs, desires to know. That’s what makes rankings happen!
Without valuable information, you won’t get the links TO your site that are part of getting into the Top 10. Remember, not just any links will do — all links are NOT created equal.
At the end of the day, be leery, very leery of anyone who promises Top 10 rankings as though it were a matter of flipping a switch, using stealth tactics, linking farms or shuffling some keywords. You know better than that!
At your service,
Judith
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Whenever I use any of those three terms I get that infamous “deer in the headlights” look from those I am talking to. If on the phone, dead air…
Bots, Spiders, Crawlers are all nick-names for the little programs that are constantly scouring the Internet indexing every file they find. You can see which Bots have visited your site in your site’s stats.
For example, Googlebot is Google’s little indexing program. These Bots are how search engines become aware of your site and new additions/pages so you can be listed accordingly. Understanding how they work is pretty important to every site owner because you can control what they index.
If you don’t want to let these critters in to index certain areas of your site, (images, member or private directories for example) it is important that you set up a robots.txt file. These little algorithms, at least the well-behaving ones, will look for that file before they proceed in case you want to designate areas on your site/server that you do not want indexed.
Well-behaving ones? Yep, there are nasty little devils that ignore your robots.txt file requests. Shame on them!
Read up and understand what Webcrawlers, Webrobots, Bots, Crawlers and Spiders are all about @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler.
At your service,
Judith
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