By Nowshade Kabir
When you have launched your website, whether it is an eCommerce
store or a corporate promotional site, you must have set certain
goals regarding the quantity of traffic you are expecting to have
on your site. If you did not pursue your goal with specific web
promotional marketing strategies, chances are there you are not
very happy with the results you have achieved so far. Although,
there are numerous web promotional methods available to your
disposal, optimization of your webpages for search engines is the
uncontested leader in this field. If you sell products or
services through your website, it is even more so for you.
Consider this. Out of various possibilities which include: going
to a shop, calling a shop, etc. the prospective buyer decided to
search for the product online. Then he or she used certain
key-phrase to make a query on a search engine and then among
other sites, he or she chose yours to click in. As a seller this
is the kind of visitors you need for your site! Search engines
have more than twice the e-commerce conversion rate of other
traffic acquisition sources. You can get these results for your
site with the help of search engine optimization.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is a set of actions carried out with a webpage to improve
visibility of that webpage in search engines. The goal is to
ensure top places in the search engine results for a specific
query.
How important are the search engines? Data show 81 percent of
Internet users find the sites they're looking for through search
engines. Over 57% of Internet users search the Internet everyday.
Up to 500 Million searches take place in a day. 55% of all
Internet purchases originate at a search engine as oppose to 9
percent from banners. These statistics are pretty convincing, but
surprisingly, according to StatMarket.com only 7 percent of
websites are visible by search engines.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can really bring amazing
results. Our page http://trade-leads.rusbiz.com recently started
to show on the first page of Google for the search phrase "trade
leads". Within the last month we have noticed almost 30 percent
increase of traffic to this page which is pretty much inline with
the available statistics. If your optimization efforts started to
bear fruits and you ended up on the second or third page of
Google search, you can expect a dramatic increase of almost 5
times more traffic than before and after two months it can be
over 9 times! An upward move from 2nd and 3rd pages to the
much coveted first page will bring an increase of around 30
percent. Along with the traffic the conversion rate – the
quantity of actual purchases – also goes up significantly.
Your position within the first page also makes a lot of
difference. The top positioned web page in the sponsored – paid
advertisement – receives 50 percent of all clicks and first three
top ranked web pages garner 60 percent of all clicks.
Once you have decided to go for search engine optimization,
your next step is to figure out for which search engine you
should work on optimizing your site. After all there are so many
search engines out there!
If you look at the latest statistics available for the month of
November,
2005 compiled by Nielsen/NetRatings it, probably, won't be any
surprise to you that Google at present has the most search market
share. There were 5.1 billion searches done in November. Out of
60 search engines monitored, Google had a share of 46.3 percent,
Yahoo – 23.4 percent, MSN -11.4 percent, AOL - 6.9 percent, Ask
Jeeves with its other affiliations MyWay, Teoma, Iwon and search
sites of Excite Network has a combined share of around 6 percent,
etc. This clearly shows that Google is the undisputed leader
among search engines at this moment. That's why in your quest of
getting more traffic to your site, you have to emphasize on
Google. Other key indicators which favor Google as well are:
• Google is most favored by business people - 82.9 percent of
all business users make their queries through Google.
• The Google users are more educated. They are more likely
to have a college degree.
• The Google users are from higher income group.
As mentioned earlier search engine optimization is a set of
actions that you have to take regarding your web pages. Here
are the key steps of the process:
Select keywords for search engine ranking
1. Make a list of keywords that you think buyers might use to
search for products and services you sell.
2. Use a Thesaurus to check synonyms of the words and phrases
that you have chosen. You may come up with additional keywords.
3. Eliminate all single words from the list!
4. Go to several of your competitors' websites and check out what
keywords they are focusing on by viewing the HTML source of the
pages.
5. Now go to Yahoo! pay per click search marketing site
Overture, which has an excellent keyword selection tool.
Google also has a similar tool located at
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox.
6. Get the search phrases or terms that are popular enough and
fall into your criteria from above mentioned lists.
7. Check where you stand with these keywords or key phrases in
main search engines. Find the needed tool for this here.
http://www.marketleap.com/verify/default.htm.
8. Now try to find whether you should use your keyword in
singular or plural, or which one of the two similar search terms
or phrases are more desirable by going to the following page:
http://www.onfocus.com/googlesmack/down.asp. Remember,
studies show that conversion rate for plural words are in general
higher than singular!
9. Now that you have a number of keywords, cluster two to three
of them for one single page. Remember, every page of your site
should be built surrounding one single theme and focused on
maximum two to three keywords.
Optimize the pages for keywords
Place keywords in Title tag, Meta description, Alt tags,
Heading tags, Comment tags. Here is an example:
Create content
Now develop informative content using these keywords. Use your
key words in headlines and alt tag of the pictures. Make sure
that you don't over do it! If you stuff keywords more than
necessary for a normal text, search engine can ban your site for
keywords spamming. Here is a tool for checking density of
keywords on a page: http://www.gorank.com/seotools/. Maximum
preferable density is 3-5 percent.
Submit to search tools
Effective promotion of a website starts with submission of the
site to various search tools available on the Internet. There are
two different types of search tools – search engines and
directories. Search engines index their listings based on the
information retrieved by their spiders which crawl through the
hyper links constantly looking for new websites. The directory
listings are compiled by human editors from the URLs submitted
to the directory. If your website is listed in the directories
you can be sure that the spiders of different search engines
sooner or later will index your site. That's why you should start
submitting your website to the directories.
The major directories are GMOZ, Yahoo!, LookSmart, etc.
Link popularity
The quantity of links in different websites pointing to your
sites is called link popularity of your website. The more popular
is your site the more links you get from other websites and vice
versa. Link popularity is one of the key factors that search
engines consider in their search algorithm while indexing a
website. What would be the rank of a website in a search result
depends on its link popularity in a very big way. Work on getting
as many backward links as possible, preferably from the web pages
with higher page ranking than yours.
Track ranking
Search engine optimization requires constant monitoring and
updating. Don't forget that the competitors are working
relentlessly on achieving high positions. The search algorithms
are also constantly changing and improving. That's why every
now and then you should check out how your site is doing.
Track traffic
If your work started to bring good results and you are getting
more traffic, but the visitors are not taking expected actions,
this means, you probably have selected wrong keywords. Start all
over again with keywords analysis.
Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing web pages
for natural or organic – as they are also called – searches. Once
you are certain that you have done everything possible to achieve
maximum results in this sphere, you should consider pay per click
marketing with Google, Yahoo and MSN. Effective web promotion
requires a combination of both of these two search engine
marketing strategies.
About the author:
Nowshade Kabir is the CEO of Rusbiz.com, a global B2B
Portal, which helps companies build web store, buy and sell
products and services using eMarketplace, eCatalog and other
features. Rusbiz also offers website development packages:
http://www.rusbiz.com/design_package.html
