If you ever had a #1 ranking for a competitive keyword you will know in monetary terms just how valuable search engine marketing is. I am a Search Engine Marketing Expert and I feel that this is where most other website designers fail their clients miserably. They are excellent “techies” and can create the most stunning websites with flashing buttons and good looking graphics.
They can create websites that Fortune 500 companies will be proud of. But when they create websites for their clients they often neglect the Search Engine Marketing part. The marketing element is usually the last one to be considered.
The old adage “build it and they will come” is not true especially on the Internet.
No, Google Does Not Automatically Index Your Website. Once You Have Your Website You Have To Market It!!
Obvious marketing techniques involves printing your website name on brochures, letterheads, business cards and in all your print and other media offline advertising. This is a crucial step in telling your existing and potential customers where they can get more information from you.
Then off course you need to do search engine marketing online. The best place to do this is with the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and others, as 85% – 95% of your website traffic is going to come from them.
They are getting harder and harder to get listed on and listings change all the time. It is a full time job just to stay informed about new changes and the only guarantee is that their algorithm will change and your website’s ranking, along with it, good or bad…
Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing is the most popular and also the most competitive form of advertising as every single business out there in your market (including your competitors) want to be in the top 10 listings for Google. Obviously not everyone can, but there are two ways in which you can “optimise” your website to ensure that over time at least, your website will have a chance to be in the top 10.
The funny thing is, if you really want to rank well, these rankings are not free at all! What most people do not consider is that EVERY DAY thousands of competitors are entering the market for your products and services. This means ALL of them want to rank on the first page. This also means that it is becoming harder and harder to rank well for search terms and phrases related to your product and services. A focused and dedicated Search Engine Marketing strategy can achive top rankings for you.
It now takes much more effort and time to rank well for your search terms in the search engines than a year or three ago. And time and effort = money. It takes specific techniques and search engine marketing strategies to get your website to the top of the search engines, most of these techniques are labour intensive and labour = time + money. So even though “directly” yes, the traffic you get from the search engines are “free”, indirectly you are paying for that traffic through the time, efforts and search engine marketing techniques you follow to get those top listings.
Search Engine Marketing Is Labour Intensive And Expensive
There Are 2 Factors To Consider When Trying To Rank On The Search Engines
# 1 On Page Factors In Search Engine Marketing
The first factor is to design your website with the search engines in mind as they will analyze your website content and will index you accordingly. This is part of your search engine marketing strategy at the website design level already.
First and fore most you will have to identify the keywords that people use to search for your particular products and services and incorporate them into your website. I do this when I design your website for you. I focus on the keywords that is going to help your search engine marketing.
Search engines also LOVE fresh and new content to be added to your website regularly. This show them that your website is actively providing new industry specific information and is adding to the Internet’s knowledge base.
The search engines make use of a robot script called a “spider” to visit your website daily and check your website’s content and index it accordingly. If you can offer new and fresh content to the “spider” every time they visit your website, you will entice it to visit more often.
The websites with the most search engine spider activity wins! The more they crawl your website the more the search engines will love your site and give it higher priority.
Off course your website should also be technically correct with no coding errors and search engine friendly structure and HTML coding. I build this into your website when I design it and check these before I do any search engine marketing.
Please read my page about Website Content for a more detailed description about the content of your website.
# 2 Off Page Factors In Search Engine Marketing
The biggest part of search engine marketing has nothing to do with your website itself. It depends on outside elements or “Off Page Factors” as we talk about in the industry.
The most important of these is to have as many relevant incoming links from other websites to your website with your keywords in the anchor text.
For every link that you receive from another website that is relevant to your industry / website topic, you will receive a vote of confidence from the search engines. Every vote helps to establish your website as an “authority” on your topic and will help to rank your website higher accordingly.
I cannot over emphasize the importance of incoming links when it comes to search engine marketing. I have seen websites with nothing other than 1000’s of links rank in the search engines for their chosen keyword. In some cases it is THE ONLY factor that allows a website to rank well. In my experience, having good quality incoming links is almost 70% of the success of high rankings and it is crucial for your search engine marketing.
Depending on how competitive your keyword is, you could need thousands of links just to rank on the first page. I can tell you from experience if you want to rank on the first page for something as competitive as “cape town accommodation” you will need an aggresive and expansive search engine marketing campaign with a lot of links, patience, time and elbow grease…
Sadly this is where most website owners fail. You need BOTH on page factors such as search engine friendly website design, fresh content AND off page factors off page factors such as relevant links to your website from other websites to have any chance of ranking highly in the natural search listings and to conduct successful search engine marketing.
