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Web Strategies #19
Search Engine Strategies For Any Marketing Plan And
Every Web Site
Are you confused about search engines and
what you should be doing to improve your search engine
ranking? Search Engines are in the business
news so much you may find it hard not to wonder what
all the fuss
is about and if you aren’t missing out on money
making opportunities.
Tod and I take a pragmatic stance on search
engines. The land of search engines is impacted and crowded.
It may or may not be worth the time and money for
you, a small business, to elbow your way up to the
bar.
Clearly, using search engines is both an
art and a science. It requires you have
a lot of patience, persistence and more persistence
heaped onto some
study and trial and error to get those high rankings.
Pursuing high search engine results can be a component
of a full marketing plan. However, most of our clients
realized, when they developed such a plan, that search
engine results aren’t all that crucial to their
business success.
We recommend that you take the authentic
route and offer lots of valuable content that is
clearly titled. And then let the search engines find you. Regardless
of what ranking you get with Goggle, do try one or
more of the many online and off line ways to get
traffic to your site. I listed a number of these
in last months article on promoting your web site.
(You can read it on our site.)
However, all that said, there are several
simple things you and all web site owners should
do to help
search engines find you. These are the most basic
and most reliable search engine optimization techniques.
New readers: Take note, the text on your homepage
and website is what the search engines are reading
and use to find you. If you have graphics and not
words, search engines are seeing nothing.
For each page on your site you will prepare:
A Title Tag
A META Description Tag
A META Keyword Tag
What seems to count these days
is the title tag, the actual content on your web
page and the links to your site. If you wish to emphasize
a particular key work it should appear in all of
these places; text, title, description and keyword
tag.
Title Tag: When people get their
search results, it’s the words in the title
tag that show up in the link on the search engine
results page.
Your title tag will include your most important key
words and will show your company name right
after those words; it will omit most filler words
such as 'and' and 'the,' etc
Ours reads,
< HEAD>
<
TITLE>Almost Everything Communications, Web Design
and Development in Albany, CA</TITLE>
< HEAD>
A few tips: Choose the most relevant key phrases
from the copy to use in the title. There
is room for 60-115 characters in your title tag in
most search
engine displays. Use initial caps as it looks clean
and all caps look like SPAM. You can use a word twice,
but don’t place them next to each other. And
it probably isn’t a good idea to use any words
more then twice.
Description META Tag: Most search
engines show the description below the title. The
description is one or two sentences that describe
the text on this web page and uses the same key words
and key phrases. You can write up to 225 words and
they may be indexed but only about 60 will be seen
on Goggle.
< HEAD>
<
META NAME=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=”effective
small business web sites, free marketing and Web
site advice, what to look for in a web designer”>Meta
Key words: Here's what a list of keywords and phrases
look like for us. The trick with key words is to
pick words that best reflect your business and also
words you believe people are searching for when they
need a business like yours. And the words you actually
use in the text of the site
Effective small business web sites
What to look for in a web designer
Web design in Albany, CA
Web sites for business
Web developers
You can get help creating keyword phrases
by asking your clients or customers what words they
would use if they were searching for you. Look
for similarities in their replies. If they all say, "small
business web sites," you know you have a winner.
Read on below if your are curious or interested in
essential information on search engine strategies
for e-commerce sites.
___________________________________________________
Do you sometimes think about starting an
e-commerce site? Perhaps writing a couple
of e-books or offering teleclasses or products for
sale to people all over
the country or globe?
If you are considering a foray into heavy duty e-commerce,
you’ll be interested to hear that some e-commerce
sites are built from the keywords up.
That’s
right; it’s the opposite of what most small
business owners typically do.
First, you do a lot of keyword research and
analysis then you design the site. You or
a hired search engine marketing consultant selects
keywords that will bring
targeted traffic to your site. Then
you use the chosen keywords to write the copy, design
the navigation and write all the headings.
__________________________________________________
So we've given you a basic overview of how to prepare
your Web site for Search Engines. Since these techniques
are free and don't take too much time, we recommnd
them for every Web site.
For more information on bringing online traffic
to your site, see our article 10
Ways To Promote Your Web Site Online.
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