Steps necessary for successful search engine visibility
The Stairwell is proud to introduce our guest columnist for the month of November:
Lawrence Stopa, President, E-Power Marketing
Online marketers have long known that search engines generate traffic from target audiences who are well motivated to take action. Few marketing strategies attract audiences ready to take action like the results of search engine marketing.
So how do you create strong search visibility for your Web site to take advantage of these marketing opportunities?
The days are long gone where you enjoyed good search visibility by simply adding meta-tags then submitting your pages to search engines. Today top search engines are vastly more sophisticated with billions of pages indexed. Their ever more complex algorithms are designed to deliver the most relevant search results. Therefore you must do more to gain your full share of search referral traffic.
Keep in mind that the top priority for search engines is to deliver the most relevant search results to their searchers. To achieve that, search engines have minimized the effectiveness of "tricks" and made fundamental search engine optimization the necessary and appropriate focus.
What are the fundamentals of search engine optimization?
1. Content remains King
Searchers want to find the information that they are looking for -- and search engines measure whether particular Web sites do that or not. Give your visitors the content they desire, and they will stay. Search engines will measure this and reward you with better search positions.
2. Choose Your Target Key Phrases with Relevancy as the Priority
The absolute relevancy of your target key phrases is critical for the success of your search engine optimization program. The more relevant the phrase, the better your long-term success will be. Consider how search engines measure whether a site satisfies searchers for particular search phrases. Feed into the relevancy and you will feed your Web site with target audience visitors.
3. Check that the Phrases You Target are Searched
There are a variety of tools that will help you determine the actual phrases that people use to search. Try WordTracker or Yahoo Search Marketing to identify key phrases. Use Pay Per Click advertising to test for your most important key phrases.
4. Use Your Key Phrases Well
Identify keywords unique to each page. Be consistent in precisely using your key phrases in page titles, meta-tags, alt tags, headlines, content and links.
5. In-bound links
You don't need to submit your Web pages to search engines. Instead you need to establish quality in-bound links. Today search engines find sites by following links from other Web sites. If you do not have links from other Web sites, then search engines will not reward your site with decent search positions. Search engines consider in-bound links a "vote" that your site is worth indexing.
6. Text links
Search engines know what pages are important for a key phrase by analyzing text links that point to a page. Place text links around a phrase that describes the page and you will strengthen the search visibility of that page for that phrase.
7. Site Map
Building a Site Map with key phrase text links lifts search visibility for all the pages. It provides the search crawlers a roadmap of the themes and phrases for your site's most important pages.
8. Don't ever forget the End User
For both you and the search engine, the end user is the primary customer. Give your customers what they want and you will keep them longer on your site. That is exactly what search engines look for and measure. By building a stronger customer-centric Web site, you will also give yourself the benefit of better search engine visibility.
Forget the gimmicks and stick with optimization techniques that search engines respond to. Implement these fundamentals well and you will begin to see increasing targeted traffic from search engines.