You may have this many times before, but without traffic to your website, you may as well not have a website at all. You may also have heard this, but it still rings true and that is that by just creating a website and submitting it to the search engines like Google, does not mean it will show up well in the search engine results pages (SERP’s).
The fact is that no matter what business you are in, there is likely 500,000 to a million or more websites competing with yours for the same keywords. In order to stand out from them and actually get a good ranking in the SERP’s, you need a proper web marketing strategy.
Such a strategy is best handled by the experts, but if you don’t intend investing in the services of a web marketing firm, you can at least improve your chances of showing up in the SERP’s, by following some simple strategies, which will be summarised below:
Proper Website Design:
Your success stats with proper website design. During this phase of your web marketing strategy, you must already make your website as search engine friendly as possible. This means that each page must have a title, containing the keywords and the name of the website. Keep the title short, to make it look generic and not like you forced the keywords into it.
Each page should have its own, relevant title and keywords. Be sure to include the keywords you are focussing on in the text of each page, but once again, make them generic and as part of your text. The best way to write for search engines, is to write for customers, therefore keep it natural.
Make sure that all your pages are linked with proper text links. Website crawlers cannot read pictures (unless you place alternative text to name the picture and you should always, also do this) and if all your links to your other pages are picture buttons with no normal link text, the crawlers will not be able to crawl from one page to the next and so crawl the whole website.
A simple trick is to create your good looking buttons, but just to include text links to all your pages at the bottom of each page of your website. This will make it easy for the spiders to crawl.
Content Pages:
Search Engines love big websites. This may seem stupid, but it is true. The more pages a website has that contain topical written text, the more important or valuable the search engines consider a website to be and will increase its rankings accordingly.
Not all websites are academic websites though and you may not have that much content to put into your website. A simple way to overcome this is to write articles. If you have a website, you are probably knowledgeable about the topic of your website, so start writing articles about it.
The more, the better, just make sure that you don’t repeat articles and try to keep the content as differently as possible. Create a different page for each article and an index page that contains links to each and every article. This will once again enable the spiders to crawl to all your articles.
Links:
A very important thing for search engines is links. By links I mean links back to your website from other websites. The best kind of links are one way links, in other words site A links back to your website, but your website doesn’t link back to site A.
What it also important is that the site that links back to yours, should be of a topic similar to yours, as those links enjoy higher esteem.
Link building is difficult and there are various ways to get links. One is buying them, where you go to a site that specializes in links (link farms) and actually buy your links. The search engines have caught on to many of these sites and don’t value their links that much anymore.
Another way is to publish the articles you wrote to article directories. Article directories list articles that are relevant to a topic in their directories. Many of them allow a short bio, which can include a link back to your website.
The problem with these directories is that you often have to publish your articles one at a time, because of all the editorial requirements.
Another way to get links is to submit your articles to blogs. This works very well is you use a system like My Article Network. There you write the article once and it is submitted to all the relevant blogs that will accept the article. This is way to build links to your website very quickly.
One very important thing to remember with your link building is to make sure that you use the correct anchor text. So, for example, if you have a website that specializes in motor parts and site is called all4cars.com, it will not be worth your while to use your website address as the anchor text for your links.
The reason behind this is that unless you are a well-known commercial entity, people looking for a website about car parts, will more likely type car parts in as a search phrase in the search engines, than all4cars.
You want your website to be listed when a search related to the topic of your site is done. So even though your link will be to all4cars.com, the text you will most likely use is car parts.
Fresh Content:
Search engines love fresh content and they rank sites that are frequently updated better than those that are not. Articles are one way to keep your content fresh, but blogging is yet another way. Get yourself a blog and add it to the URL of your website.
To get regular fresh content to your blog, you can once again make use of My Article Network. The service not only allows you to post to other blogs, but also allow other bloggers to post to your blog. In so doing, you are assured of regular fresh content to your blog. Don’t worry, you have the option to either accept or reject articles and so you don’t have to fear that your blog will be riddled with junk articles.
Keyword Research:
This really ties in with your anchor text, but perhaps it needs some further explanation. Let’s take the example of all4cars.com that I used above. If this website deals in car parts then they would be looking for keywords related to that topic. A simple keyword search might reveal that there are 40,000 searches per month for the phrase ‘car parts’. A simple Google search might reveal that there are 1,250,000 search results for that phrase.
This means that there is a lot of competition for these keywords, which in turn means that you will have to work very hard to get good search engine rankings for that phrase. For this reason it might not be the best keywords to use. Say for example that our website sells only Honda parts. A simple keyword search might reveal that there are only 12,500 searches for that phrase per month, but also that there are only 250,000 search results for that term.
This already improves your odds significantly and you have the ability to rank well for those keywords. You could also find that there might be different phrases, like ‘car parts Howard County’ that could get a good number of searches per month, but much less competition than the main keywords (please note that all of the figures above are hypothetical). It would be even easier for you to rank well for these keywords.
Simply going for generic search terms, with lots of competition is really a bad idea. Instead, try to define your niche and focus on terms like that. While there may be fewer people searching with those terms, your site will actually perform well in the search engines and the added advantage is that you will get more targeted traffic, meaning that you will only attract people looking for car parts in Howard County (which is what you want anyway!)
These few golden rules will help any DIY web designer to get the most out of their websites. These are simple tips that if followed consistently will significantly improve your rankings in the search engine wars.
I will not lie to you, it does take a lot of time and effort and in the end you may want to invest in the services of a professional web marketing service that will be able to devise, implement and manage such a strategy for you.
Rian Schoeman
SilverFox Web Design
Internet and Business Online
internet marketing, search engine marketing, seo, web design, web marketing, website design, website optimization