SEO is a big word these days. It stands for "Search Engine
Optimization," and it's the holy grail of web design.
Search engine optimization really refers to the development
of keyword strategies that make your website rank high in
search engine placements – giving you a spot in the top
fifty, rather than in the top thousand. The most effective
advertising technique online today is good placement in the
search engines. If you are #996 instead of #23 in the
primary listing for your product, the likelihood that a
customer will find your site through Google to click on it is
remote. And most traffic to sites these days comes through
search engines.
Without an optimized website, you probably will not make
many sales.
Start at the top. On a web page, before the title and
anything else that appears onscreen, metatags should be
filled in. If you look at the source of any website, (view –
source on most browsers), you'll see where the metatag
description and keywords are placed.
Choosing your keywords wisely, fill in the metatags first.
Make certain your page title (that's the data that shows up
in the blue bar at the top of the browser) uses at least some
of the same keywords. And make sure your first page
header does the same.
Keywords should be carefully sprinkled through your wellwritten
and edited text as well.
That's it. That's all there is to SEO. But it raises its own
questions.
How do you figure out what keywords to use?
Http://www.nichebot.com is a site that will suggest
keywords for your site. You enter your main site theme
(shoes, for instance, if you sell shoes) and Nichebot will
return a list of keywords and keyword phrases in order of
search popularity that you can then use on your website.
There are several other keyword suggestion engines as well.
How do you get the articles? This is more difficult. Some
people can write their own, particularly those who have
written for the Internet for a long time and have seen the
changes along the way. But not everyone can write well, and
not everyone has the talent for careful placement of
keywords in text. Besides writing them yourself, you can try
to get articles from an article broker like
YourOwnArticles.com, or you can download them for free
from online article directories.
Free, however, isn't always free. Articles you purchase from
an article broker like YourOwnArticles.com are yours to
use as you will, without any strings attached. If you
download from an online article directory, be warned: you
are required to place a resource box referencing the article's
author and his or her website on your page. You may not
mind this. But if the author is a direct competitor, you're
risking the loss of customers.
How do you keep customers at your site, then?
Providing customers with unique, easy-to-use information
will make them happy and keep them with you. Don't
advertise other services on your front page. Don't put up
flashy animations on your website. And don't make it hard
for them to find content. Regular fresh content is the best
way to keep them happy with you. And if you have relevant
content on every page of your website, your customers will
stay longer, and the ranking of your website on search
engines will go up.
You can purchase articles from article brokers like
YourOwnArticles.com instead of using the online article
directories. These articles can be published on your website
as your original work, they aren't duplicated elsewhere on
the web, and if they're good, your customers will continue to
come back, hungry for more.
Increasing Traffic
The best way to sell your product or service is to keep new
customers coming in, and keeping old customers returning.
There are several ways to do this. First, you can provide free
articles to article directories so other people will direct traffic
to your website from theirs via your resource box. Second,
you can ensure you always have fresh, accessible content on
your site.
Ebooks are another tool you can use. Put together a number
of your old articles into an ebook, and provide it to your
customers for free, with your name and web address
embedded in the book's cover and at the end of the book.
You can even use the ebook to direct them to special tools
on your website.
Yet another trick is to provide a free newsletter generated
from your website. Allow customers to sign up to be on your
mailing list, and send them regularly-published newsletters
containing fresh articles not available on your website,
information on sales and special bargains, and other things
you think your customers would be interested in that will
drive sales to your site. Newsletters ensure you have a
constant pool of customers interested enough in your
product to ask you to send them advertising; what better
tool can there be?
