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Hello again Name and welcome to 'Why promoting your site through the search engines is critical and how to do it cheaply and effectively' . This lesson splits into two mails - the next one covers the essential things you must know about Pay-per-click advertising and includes a link to a valuable ebook - at no cost to you. 1. 'Optimising' for the search engines and where to find the right keywords. 2. 'Link popularity' - the key to search engine success. --------------------------------------------------- 1. 'Optimising' for the search engines and where to find the right keywords. Imagine printing a brochure and nailing it to a tree in the forest. How many leads is that likely to generate? Having a website without a strategy for d riving people to it is pretty much the same approach � an optimistic waste of time and money. During the �dotcom' boom of the late 90s/ early 'noughties', companies spent millions on fancy websites and marketing campaigns to promote them. Many went bust � the �dotbombs' � because they hadn't researched their market, didn't control their costs and failed to understand the unique nature of the internet. You can avoid their mistakes and drive the right people to your site by following these search engine marketing guidelines and exploring a few of the resources I'll highlight. 1. Mastering search engines and directories About 80% of all internet traffic passes through search engines like Google - they're critical to your success. Your objective should be to achieve top twenty rankings against the search terms your target market is using to find sites like yours. Sites achieving top twenty rankings against hot keyphrases get thousands of visits a day. There are two main ways to get the search engines to rank you highly � by being seen as relevant and popular. And you do this through providing good content, site optimisation and linking. We covered the importance of good content in an earlier lesson so let's go straight to 'optimisation'. Optimisation Sorry about the jargon but �optimisation' is the term that describes how you or your webmaster prepares your site so that the search engines can identify your visible and invisible (html) content as relevant to a particular subject. At its simplest it involves:
You can do this yourself or hire specialists like us � it's a matter of time, money and learning like most things. To find the hot keywords/phrases used in your sector try www.wordtracker.com or http://www.wordstream.com/keywords/ Linking The more inbound links you have from sites deemed to be �important' in your sector (due to the number of visits they attract), the higher your �link popularity' and the higher the search engine rankings you'll achieve. Again, you can research the sites that you want to link to simply by identifying those achieving top rankings in your sector. You can approach them and see if they'll link to you. If they're competitors, they may not want to. Which is where a bit of lateral thinking will be needed. Identify complementary, non-competitive sites with good rankings and ask them to link to you. --------------------------------------------------- Protect your business from crashes, viruses and hackers. Incise subscribers save over 15%. Depositit is the leading online data back-up solution. Incise subscribers get nearly 20% off standard prices. Find out more here --------------------------------------------------- 2. Link popularity - the key to search engine success At Incise we recommend submitting your site to as many search engines as possible. You may wonder, �why bother with the top 100 search engines when a big proportion of traffic is generated by the giants?' The answer is that when you look at the traffic generated by the smaller engines, they're far from insignificant BUT CRITICALLY BECAUSE getting ranked by the smaller search engines improves your site's link popularity. Along with keywords, link popularity is the most important criterion for getting top rankings in search engines and directories. And it's getting more important by the day. So getting ranked by the smaller search engines improves your link popularity and makes you more popular on the giant search engines like Google. No matter how many times you submit your site and how hard you work at finding the right keywords, search engines will always rank the most popular sites first. -------------------------------------------------- THE RISK-FREE WAY TO DRIVE THOUSANDS OF VISITORS TO YOUR SITE If you don't want to investigate search engine marketing yourself, at Incise we have a range of search engine optimisation and linking packages. We even offer guaranteed, risk-free top 20 position packages over a six month period. Find out more at www.incisecomms.co.uk --------------------------------------------------- To learn more about linking, go to www.linkingmatters.com and download their report. It's a great way of learning quickly about the importance of linking and the priorities you should have. To sum up, the minimum site promotion you should do is develop lots of good content, get your site optimised, link to some big hitters and make sure your site's submitted to the top ten search engines and directories. If you're building and marketing your own site, and you don't want to work with us at Incise, I can recommend Site Build It . It provides hosting, building and marketing in one comprehensive package at reasonable prices. That's it for now. In your next lesson we'll talk about Pay-per-click advertising how you can get a Free ebook to learn the tricks the experts use. Cheers for now, Paul NOTES 1. Please forward this course to anyone you think might find it useful, whether they're considering starting an online business or already running one. To get the email, they can sign up in less than 10 seconds at http://www.incisecomms.co.uk 2. As a reader of my course, you're my most important critic and commentator. I welcome all reader feedback. Email me anytime at paullock@incisecomms.co.uk 3. If you really don't find the course useful, then reply to this email with the subject field 'unsubscribe'. I'd appreciate any feedback. 4. Lastly, I've taken every care to check the information and advice I give. However, I regret that I can't be responsible for any loss that you may suffer as a result of the advice or from any omission or inaccuracy. This disclaimer also applies to 3rd party links. � Paul Lock 2005. All rights reserved. No copying or extraction without permission from service@incisecomms.co.uk |