Web Marketing Secrets Part 3

Parts 1 and 2 of this article have focussed on how you should plan and manage the appearance of your site and how you can make sure that it can achieve sales. The next three parts will look at how you can bring visitors to your site in numbers sufficient to really impact your profits.

Design for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

This is another rather large topic and one which regularly changes as search engines modify the way they work and how they rank pages. However I have included some principles as a starting point. Bear in mind that you must plan this work before you build the site. You will waste time and money changing the site significantly if you do not.

Search engine users type in keywords or expressions that they want the search engine to find for them. Your task is to find words and expressions that you think will bring potential customers to your site. These keywords must be relevant to your site and they must be both popular and attainable. You need popular keywords to bring large numbers of visitors to your site and you need keywords that do not have so much competition for them that you have a low chance of getting a reasonable placement with the search engines. You should ask your web designer or optimisation company to select 15-20 keywords and to rank them according to how popular they are (how many clicks per month for example) and how many sites are there on the web competing for that keyword. Use this data to decide which words and expressions to target. DO NOT let them make the decision; you know your products and customers better than they do.

Rank the selected keywords and target 2-3 on each page of your site. The keywords should appear regularly on your page and particularly in prominent positions such as the page title, in titles in your text, and in hyperlinks or close to them. When search engines examine your site and see the keywords in these important positions, they take that to mean that your site will be relevant to people searching for those topics.

Links from one website to another are an important part of the power of the web as an information source. Search engines consider that sites with a lot of links into them on a topic are a potentially good source of information on that topic. Some people have sought to exploit this by linking to each other indiscriminately and search engines have reacted by adding more complexity to their evaluation of links. However, the fact remains that links are an important tool in improving your site rankings with search engines. Your web designer will suggest some ways to generate links, but you should also use your contacts in your industry to get links to your site from distributors, the trade press and other non-competing contacts.

Go to Part 4