One of the best ways to attract potential customers to your website is to feature high in the free listings of search engines like Google. Because these 'organic' listings are not paid for and - to an extent - reflect your popularity, potential customers tend to trust them more.
You can improve your chances of appearing above your competitors in the free results through 'search engine optimisation' (SEO). If you combine this with pay per click advertising (PPC) on search engines, you will greatly boost the traffic to your site
- and increase your chances of making sales.
Your search engine marketing strategy
Search engines are one important source of website traffic for many businesses.
Alternatives can include promoting your website directly to existing customers (including using traditional offline marketing methods), or buying PPC advertising on websites your target customers are likely to visit.
If you expect your target customers to use search engines, consider the competition. You should be able to anticipate the keywords and phrases your potential customers will enter into a search engine and feature these on your site and in your pay per click campaign. If your competitors are using the same keywords, however, it might be difficult to get a high ranking.
You'll also need to decide how much you are prepared to spend on search engine marketing and what website traffic is worth to you.
Basic search engine marketing
For search engine marketing to work, search engines need to know of your site's existence. Search engine submission is a simple way of doing this, and is usually free for the major search engines.
But you will need to make sure that your website contains the right keywords and phrases. If it doesn't, your site will not appear on the results of a search using that keyword.
You should also make sure that online business directories, such as Yell.com and the Open Directory (http://www.dmoz.org/), are aware of your site. If you take out PPC adverts on a search engine, your site will appear on the first page of results even if many other websites are higher in the free search engine rankings.
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
SEO involves using keywords and phrases intelligently on your website while generating good content that other sites are happy to link to. It will improve your ranking in the free listings on search engines.
Using the right keywords and phrases in prominent places (such as page titles and section headings) can boost your ranking for any search using those words. Links from relevant websites will increase your profile further - particularly if they are highly-ranked themselves. Encourage other sites to link to you; simply offering interesting content is generally seen as the best way to achieve this.
You'll probably have to keep testing and developing your approach to search engine marketing to keep yourself high up in the listings. Quick fixes like 'stuffing' your pages with keywords generally do not work: the search engine software will not be fooled.
0 comments :
Post a Comment