The Internet is driven primarily by content.
Content is driven primarily by keywords.
New websites are designed to attract new visitors, as many
as possible.
engine rankings high and maximize
your new visitors. By maintaining fresh content constantly,
your established visitors will keep coming back.
What's Your Theme?
The theme of your website is basically the purpose of it. Are
you here to sell a product? Or are you more interested in
informing people about something, reviewing other
products, or cataloging something?
Most people take their theme and run straight to – graphics.
And why not? Graphics are fun. Create your company logo,
get it just right. Take pictures of your products, toss on
some fancy Flash animations, maybe stick a dancing GIF
email down at the bottom of the page so people will see the
movement and email you. You're done now, right? The intro
page is awesome and forces viewers to go through it, the
bells and whistles are impressive, and the logo says exactly
what you want.
Here's the truth.
Most customers remain on a website for a maximum of ten
seconds before giving up. If it takes your graphics-laden site
more than that to load, they won't wait for it before clicking
the back button and going to the next store on the search
engine list. Animations distract your customers from what
you're selling. Fancy logos are largely a waste of time until
you're a huge company worried about brand recognition
don’t bother with designing a complicated logo. Keep it
simple.
The most important item on your website, and the item
most often ignored, is good solid content. Keyword rich
content. Content that makes the customer go "wow," and
then bookmark your site to come back to later.
Search engines catalog content, not images. Why? Content
is recognizable and categorizable to automated programs
used to map the Internet; images (except in certain cases)
are not. And when customers look for pages for information,
they are generally looking for informative text, not your bells
and whistles or your logo.
Rich descriptive words make your site rise in search engine
rankings. Some fortunate webmasters are also prolific
writers, and can whip up content articles in a jiffy to toss up
on their websites. If you're not one of this fortunate group
though, you can purchase articles and place them on your
website as your own. Or you can use free articles from an
article exchange (beware – there is a hidden pitfall here.
More later.) This unique and fresh content is vital to your
site's success.
The perfect content article delivers easily-understood and
useful information to the reader. It also is keyword-rich –
that is, it focuses on specific words that the search engines
will subsequently catalog and use to rank your site in the
listings it returns to searchers. Your first job before writing
(or hiring someone to write) your articles is to determine
what keywords your customers will likely use to search for
sites like yours. One place you can do this easily is at
http://www.nichebot.com. Nichebot and similar sites can
inform you on what search terms are most often used to find
websites like yours.
Keywords should be listed in the metatags, headings, and
description of your site, as well as sprinkled through at least
the first portion of the article. This tells the search engine
spiders how to catalog your site. Fresh and unique content
keeps the spiders ranking you higher, and it keeps your
customers coming back. Your content should be organized,
easy to scan as well as to read, and user friendly. It should
also be spread among your pages, not just on your index
page. Avoid heavy graphics, and make sure your site is free
of spelling and grammatical errors.
Now, about those article exchanges. Deals that are too good
to be true usually are, and article exchanges offer you free,
well-written content that you can use on your website at
will. What's wrong with that? Article exchanges also require
that you include something called a resource box. This box
contains information about the author of the article,
including his or her website link.
By using this, you're telling your customers: I'm not really
the guru here, but you can click here to get to the site of the
guy who is. What are they going to do?
Well, what would you do? Click to the other guy's site, of
course.
If you must use article exchanges to get your site going,
follow the rules, but try to replace it with content you own
as quickly as you can. This makes you into what you should
have been: the information guru for your site.
Articles: Your Key to Internet Marketing Success
The Internet is primarily two things. It's a huge reference
library with information of varying quality, free to anyone
accessing it. And it's the biggest marketing and advertising
engine ever invented.
You can take advantage of the enormous advertising
potential of the Internet by using well-written and optimized
content articles. Content articles are the key to:
Delivering good information to your customers
Showing that you are the master of your topic
Placing well on search engines
Keeping your customers happy enough to come back
Good websites, laid out in a friendly way, with excellent and
constantly fresh keyword-optimized content, are the ones
that will wind up at the top of the search engine rankings.
How can you own one of those websites?
First, always have unique, friendly, keyword-rich
content articles on your website.
Spiders, web crawlers, and robots sound icky, but they're
really the tiny little engines that drive the Internet. They are
constantly roaming the Web, looking for changes in pages
they've cataloged, seeking keywords so that they can
determine how to rank your page. If you have articles on the
first and subsequent pages of your website, these electronic
critters will go through them, seek out how often, say,
"feather boa," is mentioned on your website, and then
catalog it according to that (and other variables).
Now, when a customer does a search at Google for "feather
boa," he or she will find your website ranked with others
that offer this keyword. Free advertising, targeted to
customers looking to your product – that's what search
engines really are to businesses.
Always ensure your content is friendly to the
customer, not just the web crawlers.
Here's the number-one mistake made by webmasters: they
think about the web crawlers, but not about the proven fact
that you have ten seconds, tops, to captivate your customer
from the second they click your link. This means your page
must download fast, it must have easy-to-find content, and
it must be easy to read. And that's all before you get to the
quality of the content!
Keep your pages skinny, without huge graphics and moving
pictures. Keep them simple and attractive as well, without
loads of heavy design. And make sure the content is at the
top, with plenty of headers and bullets to make it easy for
your prospective customers to find what they're looking for.
Always keep content fresh.
This may be the second most common mistake made by
webmasters – putting content up, then sitting back and
ignoring it. Web crawlers seek out fresh content, and sites
that are always fresh get ranked higher.
Also, the most valuable customer is a repeat customer. If
you have captivated your customer by providing the perfect
feather boa, and now he or she is looking for items to add to
that boa, you aren't doing yourself a favor if you have the
same old information about using the feather boa as an
everyday accessory. Instead, you should have information
about the shoes you're also selling; or the sequined tops
designed to go with the boas; or how to treat the boa so
feathers don't molt from it. If the customer never sees new
information, they get tired really quickly, and go to the next
person on the search engine listing. You've just lost a sale.
Use reciprocal linking.
Search engines are great, but what do they really do? They
link to your site. An awful lot of web traffic, however, comes
to people laterally – in other words, they find a link on one
website leading to another, and it looks interesting so they
click it.
How do you do this without paying tons of money to
advertise on other people's sites? With reciprocal linking.
You have the feather boa site. Another website you frequent
sells how-to videos on burlesque and bellydancing. Another
is a teen fashion site, and you know feather boas have just
become popular with teens. Yet another is a Phyllis Diller
fansite.
Set up a win-win situation. Email the webmasters of these
other three sites to ask if they are interested in linking to
the content on your site. Offer, in return, to link to their
sites from yours – ideally from inside content articles. You
get three new links to your website, and they get mentions
to your current customer base, from inside your articles.
You all win in a different way, too. Search engines rank by
keyword quality and freshness of articles. They also rank the
number of links other sites have to yours, though. If you
have fifty links to your site from other places and Bob the
Boa Maker has only ten, guess who ranks higher, and thus is
likely to get more traffic directed from search engines?
