War of the Words
A war is being waged on the Internet – a constant battle between Web sites for
better positioning on top search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Live.com. A
higher position on the results page means greater visibility for your company
or product. Greater visibility, in turn, leads to more site traffic, which can
result in an increase of sales and generation of new customers.
In fact, a recent survey conducted by iProspect shows that 68 percent of people
conducting searches click on a listing within the first page of results, but
only 8 percent ever get beyond the third page of results. So how can you build
your brand with better online visibility and increased traffic? The key is a
diverse mix of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) techniques, which can be either
organic or through paid advertising. By dedicating resources to SEM, companies
can see enormous ROI.
Pay Per Click
One of the more popular SEM methods, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising allows
companies to pay for only those ads that Web users click on. Most widely
offered by search engines like Google and Yahoo!, PPC ads can take a variety of
formats – from banners to skyscrapers to simple text links – and appear in the
“Sponsored Results” or “Sponsored Links” section of a search results page.
Because your ad will only appear when a Web user searches for a predefined term
that you pick, the trick is to determine the most relevant keywords.
Compounding your keyword strategy is the fact that many companies end up in a
keyword bidding war: the higher you bid over other companies on the same
keyword, the higher position your ad receives.
Search Engine Optimization
Evolving constantly as search engines change their rules and algorithms, search
engine optimization (SEO) is the process of modifying a Web site to promote
organic rise during keyword searches across all search engines. So how does it
work? Search engines use spiders to search or “crawl” through your Web page for
matches to search terms. The spiders compile all the information found within
your site – including words, image tags, links and code – and rank the
search-term relevancy of the pages based on an algorithm. And as marketers have
gotten smarter, search engines have, too. Gone are the days when you could
stuff keywords into the code of your site in the hopes of appearing in popular
searches. Search engines are sophisticated enough to determine whether the
visible content on your page matches the coding on the backend.
Getting Started
The first step to improving your site rank is generating a list of relevant
keywords for your company. Good research is important in this phase, too. You
want to make sure of two things: that people are actually searching for those
terms, and that there is room to break into the results of those terms. Think
of qualifying keywords the way you think of qualifying sales leads. There will
be hot, warm and cold keywords. Just make sure you have a diverse and relevant
list. These keywords are the ones you will bid on in a PPC campaign and also
the ones you’ll include in your Web site for SEO.
Demystifying Keywords
When selecting keywords, it’s important to identify the ways customers (or
potential customers) might search for your products or services online. For
example, if you are a travel agency, keywords might include “cruises” and
“cruise lines.” Likely, those terms are highly competitive, so they might be
part of your “cold keywords” list. Don’t overlook combinations like “cheap
cruises” or “Caribbean cruises.” Looking for further alternatives, consider
using: “inexpensive cruises” or “bargain cruises”. Finally, try out the key
words in a search engine to see how many results come up. “Cheap cruises”
yields over 13 million results on Google, but “inexpensive cruises” generates
around 600,000 results and “bargain cruises” returns around 300,000. Fewer
results mean less competition and higher rankings for your site.
There are also online tools that help you determine how many people have been
searching for those terms. This is important because you could pick a less
competitive phrase like “bargain cruises,” but if it’s only searched for an
average of 50 times a month, it might not be worth the effort. You should also
consider slight modifications to the phrase. For our “bargain cruises” example,
we might also incorporate “bargain cruise” and “cruise bargains.” The best way
to sort through it all is to consult an agency with SEO expertise like Brady
Communications. (See what we were able to achieve for ourselves with the search
term “marketing
communications firm”: first result out of 15,800,000!)
More than Words
Effective use of key words is the most-used SEM and SEO practice, but there are
many other ways to improve your results status. Linking your Web site to others
is another way to promote higher rankings. In fact, according to a top-10 list
of ranking factors distributed by SEOmoz, the second most important factor to
higher search rankings is global link popularity, or how many times other sites
link to yours.
It’s a good bet that your customers are already blogging; you just need them to
blog about your site. Programs like
Twitter, reddit and
Technorati offer tremendous opportunities to generate links from blogs
to your site. Technorati, for example, indexes more than 1.5 million blogs
daily. Tapping into this type of resource is a nearly fool-proof way to
increase traffic to your site and help improve your search ranking. Google’s
separate search tool for blogs is making blog links increasingly important to
achieving a high page rank. You can also tap into free, reputable information
sites like ezinearticles.com
and articlesphere.com
by posting articles containing your keywords and linking to your site.
It’s All About Your Site
In the drive to improve your page rankings through link building and blogs,
don’t overlook the most important component: your company’s Web site. A site
full of relevant and engaging content is equally as important as high search
rankings. While search engines may bring you customers, you still need to keep
them interested with a creative, well-designed and easy-to-navigate site that’s
always being refreshed with new content.
Remember that wars are not won overnight. Don’t expect to immediately ascend to
the top of the rankings. Instead, shoot to be on the first page of results and
work from there. Keeping your site relevant and ranked is an ongoing battle,
but solid SEO techniques are great weapons to have in your marketing arsenal.