Search Engine traffic has always been and continues to be one of the best
ways to drive qualified traffic to a web site - it presents information
about goods and services when the interest level is high and it can be acted
on immediately. Up till now opt-in e-mail marketing has been an effective
complement to search engine ranking campaigns; but the never-ending deluge
of Spam is rapidly ruining the effectiveness of opt-in e-mail and helping to
add luster to the value and cost-effectiveness of search engine traffic.
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Unfortunately, the increasing popularity of search engine ranking
methodologies is helping to raise the barriers to entry - as more
businesses, ad agencies and SEO firms concentrate their efforts on creating
highly optimized web sites, the competition for keyword rankings and
qualified traffic is increasing significantly. The rules are changing
rapidly and if you expect to succeed you must deploy a sophisticated
methodology that blends technology and processes. Here is a list of five
bottom line requirements that must be adhered to if you expect to generate
qualified traffic:
Link Strategy:
The web is maturing and search engines are putting more and more emphasis on
link popularity or page rank or "PR" in Google's vernacular; i.e.
the number of web sites pointing back to your own. If you are to be
successful you must develop and deploy a systematic process to establish
links to your web site with others that are in your market segment and setup
an outbound "link to" resources page via your own site. This takes
an investment of time and resources - typically you need between 400-800
links back to your web site to achieve a good "page ranking." Here
is a link to an excellent detailed article on setting up an effective link
popularity strategy: http://www.website101.com/arch/archive143.html
Keyword
Fundamentals: Keywords are
the fundamental building blocks of any search engine ranking campaign -
many/many companies waste significant resources optimizing for keywords that
are either wrong; i.e. not targeted for their market or there is too much
competition and rankings will never be achieved. You must utilize keywords
that are targeted for your market and find those that can effectively drive
page 1-3 rankings - WordTracker www.wordtracker.com has rapidly emerged as
the defacto industry standard technology tool for researching keywords -
we've used it for years and highly recommend this cost-effective and
comprehensive service to our clients and business partners.
Keyword
Saturation: Search engine
"spiders" or "bots" are automated software applications
that constantly roam the web to assess what is called "keyword
saturation" via web site content (pages) to identify how a site should
be listed in a search engine database. They typically look for 3-7% usage of
keywords versus the text on a specific page - you must adhere to their
standards if you want to achieve keyword rankings for your selected
keywords. And, to further complicate matters, top tier search engines all
have different rules for keyword saturation - we highly recommend and use
this software application to help us ascertain and setup the correct keyword
saturation for our client's web sites: http://www.se-optimizer.com/
Optimized
Content: Highly optimized
content is still very important as far as search engines are considered -
the more search engine optimized content on a web site the better. Search
engines prefer content that is thematically grouped, loads fast, is textual
with minimal graphics, is highly optimized for keywords (keyword saturation
fundamentals are addressed) and incorporates one or two of your primary
keywords for a specific page in the page title.
Site Maps
Essential: Site maps are
frequently overlooked when search engine ranking processes are deployed. A
site map not only serves as a quick reference and/or navigation guide for
anyone visiting your web site but it's also used by search engines to
"crawl" (the action a spider or bot takes to review your web site)
your web site to find pages and links. Make sure you include a basic site
map in your optimization plans, it's very important to help search engines
navigate through your site.
-- Lee Traupel has 20
plus years of marketing experience - he is the founder of Intelective
Communications, Inc. http://www.intelective.com
, a marketing services company which provides strategic and tactical
marketing services exclusively to small to medium sized companies. Reprinted
with permission from Intelective Communications
May 13, 2003
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