Preparing Your Site To Market OnlineIs your site ready to compete on the Web?
Preparing your site for marketing via the search engines means more than just stuffing your Meta tags full of keywords and submitting it to several directories. It really is not that easy anymore. But what is the first step to prepare a website for the rigors of online marketing?
What is the site's primary source of traffic?
Website traffic comes from two places --- online sources and offline sources. Ideally, traffic will come from both online and offline sources. If your primary source of traffic is to be online traffic, then website optimization is essential. Marketing via the search engines demands an optimized site.
Step 1: Look at your site the way the search engine does.
Search engines, much like people, like websites to be a source of relevant information particular to a certain topic. They want to get in and find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Search engine crawlers have an easy time navigating through sites with clean HTML code. This is what we mean when we say we "optimize the code" of a website. The more coding "hurdles" there are, such as lots of sloppy HTML, too much JavaScript, or an entire site done in Flash. . .the harder it is for the search engine crawlers to navigate through the code of a site.
Step 2: Clean up your code
Clean code is not only easier for search engine crawlers to get through, but it also helps speed up your site. People are not patient, particularly when it comes to the Internet. People are always one click away from leaving your site if it takes too long to load or if they don't find what they want. Search engine crawlers are kind of the same way. If the code is too messed up, they won't get far, which means your site does not get thoroughly indexed (or ranked well).
Step 3: Check your links
Test the links on your site to make sure they actually go to the right places. Dead links can hinder the user experience as well as the crawlers, so make sure they actually link somewhere.
Step 4: Do your keyword research
It is worth the time to spend researching the keywords that people would use to find your site via a search engine. The best advice is to look past the most general terms and focus on the "niche terms". Niche marketing is all about finding the terms that people are already searching for that most specifically point to your site. A great place to start the keyword research process is the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool. It is free and it is easy to use. To get more in-depth with keyword research, we suggest WordTracker. Wordtracker charges a small fee to use the service for a day, but it is well worth it.
Step 5: Make sure your copy contains your keywords
After you research the terms, make sure your copy - that is, all the text of your site, particularly the first few lines and the last few lines, each contain the relevant key terms targeted on that particular page of your site. DO NOT OVERUSE the keywords. The search engines and the users see that as spam, and that certainly doesn't help attract either one to your site. The general rule of thumb is that keywords should fall within the text naturally.
Step 6: Write good Meta tags for each page
Meta tags, particularly the TITLE tag, should be unique for each page. Consider each page an opportunity to capture potential search listings for a different keyword or keyphrase. Don't spam your tags. Focus on a keyword/keyphrase per page, and write effective and enticing Description tags. The Title and Description tags often are what show up in search engine results pages, so if yours are effective and more relevant to the user, chances are they click on your site!
We recommend using the keywords tags, image alt tags, and other similar Meta information. These are not the most significant factors in optimizing a website, but they certainly don't hurt to have them in there. Make them as useful and descriptive as possible without wasting too much time creating them.
For more help with preparing your website to market online, please contact us for more information. We are always glad to help you boost your business!
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