What is the most important part of marketing a website I have always wondered what it is about a website that will bring people to it. Turns out that the biggest factor is usually search engine marketing. It is, actually, becoming increasingly important in the marketing process of any online presence. Search engines can drive very qualified traffic to a website because the process of searching for something in an inquiry is initiated by the user. If someone is searching for what your site has, then that makes them all the more important to your site.
The main reason that search engine marketing is important is simple stats. According to a number of studies done, there are approximately eight hundred million people who access the internet. Of that number, 86% of them seek their information via internet search engines. The same research says that the majority of those seeking search engine help for getting information will only look at the first two or three pages listed by the search engine. So, you want your website as high as possible. The best way that you can accomplish a high ranking is by an aggressive search engine marketing campaign. There is no better way to get a piece of that eight hundred million people.
Search engine marketing is based on knowing how these search engines work. Search engines use software that looks all over the web for content to index for the engines use. The software need to find text machine readable content on sites to index and categorize it. It looks for meta tags, content on the pages, and filenames. The better your content in terms of hitting search engine friendly topics, the better your chances of being ranked highly by the software reporting to the search engine are. So in an effort to improve your ranking, you need to make sure you are aggressively using search engine marketing for your site.
The reason that search engine marketing has become so big is because, simply, search engines figured out something. They realized that it is not just important to make sure people find what they want and that sites have equal opportunity to be found, but rather that they themselves need to make money. The search engines now worry more about finding the most significant information so that advertising revenue can be used on the search engine sites. The decision to use that as a base is much more realistic to the search engine companies than the idea of charging users for a search.
Having a presence on the internet is important to business and many individuals. However, to be effective it is important that people find their way to your website. Basically, you know that exposure equals revenue. In order to make that exposure a reality, marketing is the key. More specifically, search engine marketing is important. By ensuring that your website shows up early and often in search engine searches, you can draw many more people to your site than just through traditional marketing techniques.
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Search Engine Optimization. There is a so called debate among professional marketers as to whether or not SEO is worth the HTML its coded in. A friend of mine who is a professional web designer and makes a living at this swears that SEO is a total waste of time because the chances of reaching a page 3 position with your web site, depending on how much competition there is in your field, is slim to none. Why page 3 he says Because it is believed that the majority of searchers will NOT go beyond the third page of a search. If they havent found what they are looking for by then theyre not going to and in most cases give up. Nobody has any patience when it comes to combing the search engines.
But what exactly IS SEO Well, in its simplest definition it is the process of making your web page search engine friendly so that when each search engine spiders your site, the more search engine friendly the site is, the higher up in the rankings you go, and closer to that coveted page 3 position.
So how exactly DO you go about SEO Well, theres a number of things you can do. The main thing is you have to look at the content of your page or pages and most web sites are more than a single page, and actually that is where SEO begins. You want to make sure your site is laid out logically and professionally. A standard, well made web site has what is called a main or index page where people will come to first. This page should have some kind of a welcoming message and give the visitor an idea of what they will find at the site. On that page there should be a logical layout of navigation links. These are links to other pages in the site which should include a site map. This makes it easy for the search engines to go through your entire site. A typical sales site for say, toys when arriving at the main page will have a welcome to the company and on top of the page will have a number of links, each one pointing to maybe a different kind of toy, or categories. You would then click on the category you were interested in, say games and continue from there. Maybe the games page would then break games up into sub categories. Each site of course is going to be different but should be laid out in some logical order.
The design of the site is only the start of the SEO process. See, spiders (the tools search engines use to visit your site) are really blind to the look of the page. They need something with a little more technical substance. That something comes in the form of what web designers refer to as Meta Tags. These tags are various ways to describe each page in the site. There are two Meta Tags that are extremely important.
The first one is the keyword tag. This tag is used to give the search engine spider a list of words that accurately defines what is found at the site for each particular page. So in the case of the toy example above, a page at the site that lists all Board Games would include the keyword board games in the keyword Meta Tag and any other keywords that would be pertinent to that particular page. This would be done for EVERY page on the site. Needless to say if you have a large site with many items on each page this could become a very time consuming process.
The second Meta Tag that is extremely important is the Description Meta Tag. Description is used to do just that, describe the page the spider happens to be on. For the toy example above the Description Meta Tag might read something like All Board Games For Children Ages 5 and Up or whatever is appropriate to describing the page. It is this description that you will see when doing a look up in the search engine directory for each site. Obviously the better descriptions are going to be the ones that will attract your eyes. That is why this is so important.
There is more to SEO than the above but those are the main things. Again, the battle rages as to just how important all this is in the grand scheme of things. One site my friend worked on for 2 years, optimized fully, and with countless thousands of dollars spent on search engine bribery, as he calls it, and this site STILL cant be found on any search engine on the first 3 pages.
So the debate will of course go on. Those who swear by it and those who think its a crock. You can make up your own mind about all this.
Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to SEO