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The Basic PrincipleThere are two types of search engine: the deep engine, like Alta Vista and Infoseek, which sends out a robot to your site and saves the info from your page itself, and then there's the standard engine (also known as "directory") which doesn't use any info from your page, only the info which you give it by way of an online submission form. The most important of all search engines is Yahoo! and it's absolutely vital to take extreme care when you submit to this one. Building A Keyword ListBefore you touch anything, you have to decide which words are best suited to the topic of your site. Think carefully because the key is to match the words your potential visitors are likely to type into a search engine. Users tend to be fairly general with their initial searches, then they narrow it down. So, if you have a pet shop the keyword 'pets' is going to be more powerful than 'dogs'.You can choose between a short, powerful keyword list which is likely to put
you high up but with only a limited number of words, or you can have a long list
which will put you slightly lower, but with a broad spectrum of keywords.
Preparing Your Page
Submission Time
Doing It The Easy Way
Others Quotes:
KeywordsIn order to take the right steps towards a better position on
the search engines, you must first identify exactly what your website is
offering. Once you have a good idea of what that is, you need to cut down your
idea to just a few words, literally. A search engine doesn't use a full-page
public relations newsletter to index sites -- it uses words and short phrases.
If you are not sure about what words or phrases best describe your site, look at
it from the user’s perspective. How would they find your site? What search words
or phrases make sense? The importance of these choices cannot be emphasized
enough.
The fact that most people do not query search engines on single words such as “Books”, or “Fish”, works in your favour. Users are more likely to search for something more specific like “Cook Books”, or “Game Fish”. The first step, then, in choosing the right keywords, is to make them specific. You can also be more specific in your keywords by narrowing down your geographic location. For example, if you're a dentist in Western Australia, you would be most interested in attracting website visitors from the Western Australia. Western Australian Internet traffic would also be more likely to visit you, rather than a dentist in another state. So you would be best off picking keywords like:
The problem with using
acronyms like "WA" is
they mean other things in other places. Combined with the internet shrinking the
world, acronyms = problems. No searcher or web author in their right mind should
use them. WA is used by more people in Washington State than Western
Australia. DON'T USE ACRONYMS,
especially in domain
names unless it is VERY VERY FAMOUS such as
www.cnn.com or if you connect it with another unique keyword. Eg Not
www.wasm.com (this could represent anything globally) but rather
www.wasm.edu.au (because there is only one WASM in au) or
www.waschoolmines.com (hopefully there is no school of mines in Washington) or
www.westernaustralianschoolmines.edu.au to be sure. It's also very keyword
rich, which the good search engines love :-) Just the mention of this Western
Australian School of Mines example in the body text of this page will be picked
up by the search engines because this code: Link PopularityBy submitting your site to link directories with 4 Web Marketing software, you can increase your Link Popularity and slowly gain similar credibility, as more pages across the Web take notice of you and link to your site. This leads to site popularity which leads to better position on search engine results pages. The chart below show 4 Web Marketing just in the most popular 100,000 web sites on earth.
Your site's ranking is almost completely dependent upon links to your site, backward or reverse links, reduced, to some degree, by the total number of links to other sites on that page. A link to your site will have the highest amount of impact on your page ranking if:
Want to find which sites and how many are linking to yours? or Want to find out how popular your site is. Google on 1 May 2003 was the 5th most popular site on the www. It's now the 3rd. Here's a sample Site Popularity Ranking Report:
You can add yourself and competitors to an emailed to you Site Popularity Ranking Report. Your site popularity is partly dependent on links to your site from other popular sites. 5 Strategies For Effective Online Branding
By Joe LePla
Your Web site can be the most effective brand-building device in your business arsenal. That's because a Web site can do a much better job of building relationships than any other form of marketing communication with your customers. But what's effective on the Web? After three years of watching the "worldwide" Web branding experiment, I've developed some guidelines that can take your customer relationships to new levels. Be True to Your BrandMany companies use "gimmick appeal" to attract site visitors. This includes such things as games, contests, and screen savers that have no connection to what the company does or its style of doing business. These gimmicks are similar to offering coupons or discounts � they can cause a brief spike in traffic but don't deepen customer loyalty. Be Relevant and EngagingIn general, visitors to your home page are not very interested in reading about your company structure or why you are No. 1 in the market. Instead, by identifying and clearly presenting the information they are looking for, you can provide visitors with an experience that rewards them for the time they spend on your site. They also would like to experience the unique business style or personality of your company. Does your Web site reflect your tone and manner, your point of view, and what makes you unique? Provide Branded Interactive ValueA relevant and engaging Web site falls under the larger concept of "branded interactive value." Site visitors want to know how you are going to add value to their professional or personal lives. For instance, several companies have affiliate logo graphics placed at the bottom of their home pages that click through to the affiliate's Web page. By affiliating with other services, companies create a customer bonding opportunity. Unfortunately, most logos click to information that has little relevance to building the value of a company's brand. A great example of an affiliation that builds a brand relationship between a company and an affiliate can be seen on the Dell Computer home page. When parents click on the GetNetWise logo at the bottom of the page, they go to useful and compelling information on safe Internet practices for kids, which includes a safety guide, how to report trouble, and sections on Web sites for kids. The "branded" in branded interactive value means that whatever you provide on your site for visitors is in alignment with your brand strengths. Add Brand-Relevant Sponsored Content to Your Web Arsenal"Sponsored content" offers something of value that is not directly related to your product or service. Here's how Web marketers use sponsored content to raise awareness about their brands. Miller Brewing Company turned its long-term Super Bowl sponsorship into a sponsored-content win by creating a linked site in conjunction with ESPN Internet, called Superbowl.com. While the site is about the Super Bowl, it is chock-full of Miller's brand imagery. The result was 8 million unique visitors in a single month vs. the fewer than 250,000 visitors Miller received at its own Web site. Because of Miller's long-term brand association with professional sports, this site helped to reinforce the connection and encourage consumption of its product during sporting events. Use the Real World to Enhance Your On-Site Brand"Off-site/on-site branding" uses the real world to build Web brands. Recreational equipment retailer REI recently reported that it is selling more through its Web site than in all its stores combined. But a major source of online sales was through its in-store kiosks. healthshop.com used runners dressed in healthshop.com outfits to hand out packages of vitamin C drinks to San Francisco customers. The packages were printed with details on how customers could enter an online contest for a sweepstakes drawing. Customers could also send their friends to the same site so they could have a chance to enter too. Thirty runners delivered 125,000 packages over several days, which resulted in a response rate that far exceeded the typical 3-in-1,000 banner ad click-through rate and also helped the company build brand awareness. Off-site/on-site branding does not require a huge ad budget. Consider trading banner ad space on your site for kiosk space in your store, walking though a favorite park or busy city street with sandwich boards, or using other low-cost guerrilla advertising tactics to point people to your site and enhance their understanding of your brand. Effective online branding does not require big budgets, just an understanding of what brand attributes you are trying to build. By making every Web transaction brand-relevant and providing your customers with brand-based value, you will increase the depth and stickiness of your customer relationships.
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