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Search Engine Optimization |
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Why don't I have more visitors? |
| Most Web traffic originates
from search engines. The rest comes from links,
directories and email. If you don't have referral links, you miss out on
some traffic. If you don't have search engine listings you miss
out on a lot of traffic. Not having a good search engine
listing is like having fancy billboard and putting it on a back
woods hiking trail
Many companies offer to list your web site with hundreds or thousands of search engines for a moderate fee. The problem is, 96% of all search engine traffic comes from the top 25 search engines. Most of these Search Engines prefer hand submissions. Further more listing a site with a search engine does not mean that it will receive a high rank or for that matter even be accepted. Preparation is the key to getting your site ranked highly within the search engines. As an example, performing a single word search for car on Google generated 7,340,000 listings. When was the last time you looked past the first couple of pages of search engine results for an item? The chart below from Nielsen//Net Ratings shows the most popular search sites in the United States, as based on audience reach for June 2002. Audience reach is the percentage of US home and work internet users estimated to have searched on each site at least once during the month. For June 2002, there were an estimated 120 million total internet users online in the US at work or at home. Only "search specific" traffic is counted toward the figures below. This means that only visits deemed to be search-related were counted in the totals. That helps prevent non-search traffic at portals (such as visits to get email) from polluting the data. A panel of more than 60,000 home and work surfers was measured to estimate these figures. Because a web surfer may visit more than one service, the combined totals exceed 100 percent. US
Web Audience Reach KEY: MSN=MSN, YH=Yahoo, GG=Google, AOL=AOL, AJ=Ask Jeeves, IS=InfoSpace; OVR=Overture (GoTo), AV=AltaVista, NS=Netscape, LS=LookSmart, LY=Lycos; DP=Dogpile. |
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How can I increase my website's visibility? |
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If you want to be found in the search engines, it is important that you add search engine optimization to your to do list. Even the best advertising copy is nothing without the proper exposure. Search engine optimization-or SEO for short-is the process of making your web pages "search engine friendly." SEO is a relatively new marketing industry. The search engines are constantly in flux, so SEO techniques that worked yesterday may not necessarily be successful tomorrow. One of the frustrations of search engine placement is that your rankings are constantly changing. As a result, it is exceedingly important to keep up with changes in the Internet, and the search engines in particular. You may also want to consider paid placement with your web site advertising dollars This generally takes two forms, paid inclusion and pay per click exposure.
You've heard the old cliché: Content is king. Well, it's true! Although the Internet is graphic-rich, it is still a text-based medium. Information is what your visitors are seeking. If your web site doesn't present the information your customers want in a clear and concise manner they will find it at your competitor's web site . Search engines need copy in order to index your web site in their directory, They in turn use that information to serve up relevant results to their users. Remember the web surfers are the Search Engines' customers and the Search Engines goal is to provide a relevant product to keep the surfers coming back. If your home page consists solely of a Flash movie or graphic images , there is nothing for a search engine to index. Flash is cool, but not when your web site doesn't come up in search engine results. How do you write keyword-rich copy? The first thing you need to do is identify the keyword phrases that are important and relevant to your business and incorporate them into your web site. Describe your company's products and services? Get inside your customer's head. How would your visitors describe your company, products and services? What search terms would they use to find your web site? Although the answer may seem easy, it is very important to take some time with this one. A good place to start your keyword research is by looking at your log files. What search terms are your visitors currently using to find you? Research the popularity of those terms. The importance of choosing the right keywords can't be stressed enough. If you target the wrong terms, your traffic will suffer and you will have lost valuable time. Remember, even though your site may rank number one for a seldom used term, if no one is searching for that term, you won't have generated any traffic. Another consideration here is generating the right traffic. You need traffic targeted toward your products or services. There are a number of handy tools available online to help you begin building your list of relevant keywords. Overture (formerly Goto.com) offers a Search Term Suggestion Tool on its web site that will not only tell you how many times a particular keyword phrase was queried in the past month, it'll also present you with a list of alternative terms to consider for your search engine optimization campaign. Once you have identified your keywords, you will need to integrate them into the body of your web page. Your sentences need to be intelligible and grammatically correct. Your web copy will be read by human beings, as well as the search engines. If your web copy doesn't make sense, your visitors will hit their back button. Bad web copy will defeat the whole purpose of your search engine optimization campaign.
The most important tag in the header section of your web page is the title tag. The title tag is displayed in the bar at the top of your browser window--above the toolbar. Many webmasters do not use the title tag properly. For example, their page will be titled "Home" or "Welcome," or worse yet "untitled," because they don't include a title at all. The search engines place a lot of relevance on the words contained within the title tag, so be sure to include your targeted keyword phrases when writing your title tag. This tag should be limited to 60 characters, so choose your words with care. The next important tag in the header section is the description meta tag. This tag is used to describe your web page. Like the title tag, many of the search engines will extrapolate this information to summarize your web site. Again, be sure to include your targeted keyword phrases. The third and least important tag in the header section is the keywords meta tag. Because of abuse by unscrupulous webmasters, the keywords tag is ignored by many of the search engines. Even so, some do use it, so it doesn't hurt to include it. Like your title and description tag, choose your keywords carefully. Do not include keywords that are not included in the body of your web copy or irrelevant to the theme of your site.
A few years ago, people were being advised to join "link farms" to increase their link popularity, Today that is frowned upon and can actually be detrimental to your quest for higher rankings in the search engines. The emphasis today is more on the quality of the links pointing to your web site than the quantity of links pointing to your website. Many of the major search engines use link popularity to gauge the relevancy of your site in their search results. Plus, links are what makes the web go-round. Many webmasters have the notion that links are bad because they are sending visitors off of their web site. Although this is true, links to and from web sites that complement yours help to build credibility and set the stage for making your web site an authority in your field. Much has been written about the importance of getting links from directories like Yahoo, Looksmart and the Open Directory Project, because they are reviewed by human beings. If you want a link in the first two, however, it will cost you money. A listing in Yahoo! and Looksmart is considered "paid inclusion." Your marketing dollars will be well spent, though, because listings here will not only generate increased traffic, it will add greatly to your web site's link popularity.
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Once your web page is fully optimized, it is time to submit it to the search engines. Although there are hundreds of search engines on the Internet, only a handful are truly important. We have put together a whole page of Search Engine Information just to help you. We call it our;
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| Here is a list of
some of the variables that affect Search Engine rankings.
1. Keyword density If you would like an estimate of what we can do to increase your traffic please contact us at info@cybersiteservices.com
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Check your web site's popularity. Use this tool to find out who links to your web site. |
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