When you have launched your website, whether it is an eCommerce
store or a corporate promotional site, you must have set certain
goals regarding the quantity of traffic you are expecting
to have on your site. If you did not pursue your goal with
specific web promotional marketing strategies, chances are
there you are not very happy with the results you have achieved
so far. Although, there are numerous web promotional methods available to your
disposal, optimization of your webpages for search engines
is the uncontested leader in this field. If you sell products
or services through your website, it is even more so for you.
Consider this. Out of various possibilities which include:
going to a shop, calling a shop, etc. the prospective buyer
decided to search for the product online. Then he or she used
certain key-phrase to make a query on a search engine and
then among other sites, he or she chose yours to click in.
As a seller this is the kind of visitors you need for your
site! Search engines have more than twice the e-commerce conversion
rate of other traffic acquisition sources. You can get these
results for your site with the help of search engine optimization.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is a set of actions carried out with a webpage
to improve visibility of that webpage in search engines. The
goal is to ensure top places in the search engine results
for a specific query.
How important are the search engines? Data show 81
percent of Internet users find the sites they're looking for
through search engines. Over 57% of internet users search
the internet everyday. Up to 500 Million searches take place
in a day. 55% of all internet purchases originate at a search
engine as oppose to 9 percent from banners. These statistics
are pretty convincing, but surprisingly, according to StatMarket.com
only 7 percent of websites are visible by search engines.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can really bring amazing
results. Our page http://trade-leads.rusbiz.com
recently started to show on the first page of Google for the
search phrase "trade leads". Within the last month
we have noticed almost 30 percent increase of traffic to this
page which is pretty much inline with the available statistics.
If your optimization efforts started to bear fruits and you
ended up on the second or third page of Google search, you
can expect a dramatic increase of almost 5 times more traffic
than before and after two months it can be over 9 times! An
upward move from 2nd and 3rd pages to the much coveted first
page will bring an increase of around 30 percent. Along with
the traffic the conversion rate - the quantity of actual purchases
- also goes up significantly.
Your position within the first page also makes a lot of difference.
The top positioned web page in the sponsored - paid advertisement
- receives 50 percent of all clicks and first three top ranked
web pages garner 60 percent of all clicks.
Once you have decided to go for search engine optimization,
your next step is to figure out for which search engine you
should work on optimizing your site. After all there are so
many search engines out there!
If you look at the latest statistics available for the month
of November, 2005 compiled by Nielsen/NetRatings it, probably,
won't be any surprise to you that Google at present has the
most search market share. There were 5.1 billion searches
done in November. Out of 60 search engines monitored, Google
had a share of 46.3 percent, Yahoo - 23.4 percent, MSN - 11.4
percent, AOL - 6.9 percent, Ask Jeeves with its other affiliations
MyWay, Teoma, i won and search sites of Excite Network has a combined share of around 6 percent,
etc. This clearly shows that Google is the undisputed leader
among search engines at this moment. That's why in your quest
of getting more traffic to your site, you have to emphasize
on Google.
Other key indicators which favor Google as well are:
Google is most favored by business people - 82.9 percent
of all business users make their queries through Google.
The Google users are more educated. They are more likely
to have a college degree.
The Google users are from higher income group.
As mentioned earlier search engine optimization is a set
of actions that you have to take regarding your web pages.
Here are the key steps of the process:
Select keywords for search engine ranking
Make a list of keywords that you think buyers might use
to search for products and services you sell.
Use a thesaurus to check synonyms of the words and phrases
that you have chosen. You may come up with additional keywords.
Eliminate all single words from the list!
Go to several of your competitors' websites and check
out what keywords they are focusing on by viewing the html
source of the pages.
Now go to Yahoo! pay per click search marketing site
Overture, which has an excellent keyword selection tool.
Google also has a similar tool located at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox.
Get the search phrases or terms that are popular enough
and fall into your criteria from above mentioned lists.
Now try to find whether you should use your keyword in
singular or plural, or which one of the two similar search
terms or phrases are more desirable by going to the following
page: http://www.onfocus.com/googlesmack/down.asp.
Remember, studies show that conversion rate for plural words
are in generalhigher than singular!
Now that you have a number of keywords, cluster two to
three of them for one single page. Remember, every page
of your site should be built surrounding one single theme
and focused on maximum two to three keywords.
Optimize the pages for keywords
Place keywords in Title tag, Meta description, Alt tags,
Heading tags, Comment tags. Here is an example:
<title>Search Engine Optimization for the Rest of Us</title>
<meta name="description" content="Article
about search engine ranking at ezine.rusbiz.com">
<meta name="keywords" content="search engine
ranking, optimizing web pages for keywords, SEO steps">
<meta name="author" content="Nowshade Kabir">
<meta name="copyright" content="Nowshade
Kabir"><meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
Create content
Now develop informative content using these keywords. Use
your key words in headlines and alt tag of the pictures. Make
sure that you don't over do it! If you stuff keywords more
than necessary for a normal text, search engine can ban your
site for keywords spamming. Here is a tool for checking density
of keywords on a page: http://www.gorank.com/seotools/.
Maximum preferable density is 3-5 percent.
Submit to search tools
Effective promotion of a website starts with submission of
the site to various search tools available on the Internet.
There are two different types of search tools - search engines
and directories. Search engines index their listings based
on the information retrieved by their spiders which crawl
through the hyper links constantly looking for new websites.
The directory listings are compiled by human editors from
the URLs submitted to the directory. If your website is listed
in the directories you can be sure that the spiders of different
search engines sooner or later will index your site. That's why you should
start submitting your website to the directories. The major
directories are GMOZ, Yahoo!, LookSmart, etc.
Link popularity
The quantity of links in different websites pointing to your
sites is called link popularity of your website. The more
popular is your site the more links you get from other websites
and vice versa. Link popularity is one of the key factors
that search engines consider in their search algorithm while
indexing a website. What would be the rank of a website in
a search result depends on its link popularity in a very big
way. Work on getting as many backward links as possible, preferably
from the web pages with higher page ranking than yours.
Track ranking
Search engine optimization requires constant monitoring and
updating. Don't forget that the competitors are working relentlessly
on achieving high positions. The search algorithms are also
constantly changing and improving. That's why every now and
then you should check out how your site is doing.
Track traffic
If your work started to bring good results and you are getting
more traffic, but the visitors are not taking expected actions,
this means, you probably have selected wrong keywords. Start
all over again with keywords analysis.
Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing
web pages for natural or organic - as they are also called
- searches. Once you are certain that you have done everything
possible to achieve maximum results in this sphere, you should
consider pay per click marketing with Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Effective web promotion requires a combination of both of
these two search engine marketing strategies..
Nowshade Kabir is the CEO of Rusbiz.com, a global B2B
Portal, which helps companies build web store, buy and sell
products and services using eMarketplace, eCatalog and other
features. Rusbiz also offers website development packages:
http://www.rusbiz.com/design_package.html
