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Does Your Website Need Search Engine Placement?
by Dave Davies
http://www.stepforth.com
For many, the value of their websites can be measured in
visitors, for others it is the amount of revenue that the
site generates. Regardless of how you measure the success
of your website, you are going to have to bring visitors
to it that are looking for the information, content and/or
products that you are providing. So how do you do this?
For many businesses the yellow pages is a first choice for
promotions and marketing. A standard yellow page ad runs
for about $1,200+/year for a smaller ad and serves only a
local market. You further have to consider the cost of ad
development, which can often run into the thousands of
dollars as well.
While this may be an essential form of advertising for
many businesses which serve only local areas, it is
certainly not the only one.
On the Internet there are many forms of advertising that
have and are being used to bring traffic to websites.
>From banner ads and sp@m email to PPC and natural search
engines there are countless methods for promoting your
website online. So how do you choose which marketing
tactic to utilize?
One thing to consider is that over 80% of all Internet
traffic comes from search engines with Google currently
responsible for the vast majority of that. With such an
overwhelming amount of traffic coming from a single
identifiable source it makes sense to put a lot of weight
on what traffic from this source can mean for your
website, and for your business.
In this article we will explore the difference between
sites that should consider search engine placement as a
viable choice in their marketing strategy, and those that
would benefit little from top placements. As well we will
look at ways to insure that you are maximizing the effect
and potential return on investment of your search engine
placement campaign should you choose to go that route.
Who Should Consider Search Engine Placement
An ethical search engine placement firm will tell a client
honestly if search engine optimization will benefit their
website. Of course, not every company is ethical and
further, how do you know until you have undergone search
engine optimization, whether it will benefit your
website? By this point you have paid the firm and they
have done their job whether it helped you or not.
There are a few things you should consider before you
apply search engine placement tactics to your website, or
consider hiring a search engine placement firm. I
include "apply search engine placement tactics to your
website" as, even though it may be "free" to do it
yourself you can detract from the overall visual appeal of
your site if not done correctly, and also it is a very
time consuming process to both learn and perform.
Questions You Should Ask Yourself:
What do I stand to gain from higher search engine
traffic? As search engine optimization has a built in
cost of either time and resources should you choose to do
it yourself, or through the direct cost of money should
you hire a search engine placement firm, you have to
insure that what you hope to accomplish will be at least
equal to and preferably greater than the cost of time and
money it will take to do successfully. For more
information on this you will want to read the section
below "So You're Going To Market Your Website On The
Search Engines ~ Now What?" for tips on establishing
whether there is truly enough traffic to be had to make
your efforts worth it.
Can I compete? The short answer to this question is
generally always "yes" however there are many factors to
consider. While any site, with enough work, can rank well
you do have to consider whether the effort will be worth
it. For example, if you own a small computer store in
Michigan that repairs computers and troubleshoots software
issues, it is theoretically possible for you to rank your
website well for the term "Microsoft Windows". To do so
would require an ENORMOUS amount of both time and money.
And so you have to consider, is it really worth investing
years of time and money into this one ranking? The answer
is "probably not" but that doesn't mean that search engine
placement would not be beneficial for you, just that those
keywords are not worth targeting. There are suggestions
for choosing the right keywords below.
Do I make money from my website traffic? This question
isn't the end-all-be-all however it's certainly relevant
if you're considering hiring a search engine placement
firm to optimize your site. If you plan on "going it
alone" you may want to put in the effort for no money in
return simply for the "fun" of it, however if you're
planning on spending your hard earned money on a search
engine placement firm you have to make sure that it is in
your economic best interest to do so. This may be from
either direct product/services sales or from the sale of
advertising on your site.
If, after answering these questions to yourself you have
determined that search engine placement is indeed a good
choice for your marketing strategy you will now have the
task of determining exactly what tactics will produce the
greatest Return On Investment for your efforts.
So You're Going To Market Your Website On The Search
Engines ~ Now What?
Now that you have determined that search engine placement
is indeed an avenue of marketing that can produce
beneficial results for your site and for your business,
you have to decide on a "plan of attack". Many SEO firms
will "help" you determine keywords to target, and some
will even build links for you from "valuable" sites. In
many case they may be entirely truthful but how do you
know?
The choosing of the keywords to target is probably the
most crucial step of the entire search engine optimization
process. This will determine the success and/or failure
of your promotions. Even if you attain all the top
placements that were targeted, if you target the wrong
terms these rankings will produce little or no results.
So how do you determine for yourself which keywords to
target?
Without getting into anything too technical there are a
couple of great resources out there to help you isolate
the keywords that you should target.
The Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool
Advantages - The Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool is
free and produces a large number of results for related
searches.
Disadvantages - There are two main disadvantages to the
Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool in determining your
keywords. The first of these is that it puts everything
in terms on the singular and further will correct
misspellings where you may want to know how many people
searched for a misspelled term. If you run a shopping
site that sells gifts you will not be able to determine
whether the main searched phrase was "gift" or "gifts".
The second major disadvantage to the Overture Search Term
Suggestion Tool is that it doesn't give you alternative
search phrases that are related but that you might not
have thought to punch in ("presents" for example). Which
brings us to the second tool.
WordTracker
Advantages - WordTracker addresses all the disadvantages
noted about the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool. It
differentiates between singular and plural and will allow
you to search for misspellings. Further, it searches a
thesaurus and will make a number of suggestions for other
terms you may not have thought of but which may be related
to your industry. It will then analyze the variety of
terms that you have searched and chosen and actually make
recommendations on which keywords to target based on the
number of competing pages and the specific search engine
you are targeting. It will also give you a predicted
number of searches per day for each phrase.
Disadvantages - The only real disadvantage to WordTracker
is that it has a cost. There is a free trial on the site
which you can use though the results it produces are far
lower in numbers and it does not give you information on
all of the major search engines. Certainly worth checking
into even if you only try the demo mode (not a download ~
this is an online resource).
So you now have a list of possible keyword phrases ~ now
what? The next step is to determine whether you can
compete with those currently holding the top positions
and, more importantly, whether it will be economical to do
so. The first place to look when you are trying to
determine this is the search engines themselves. Let's
assume for a second that you have determined that there
are a good number of searches for your product and that
the main keyword phrase you would like to target is "acne
cures". The next step is to run a search for "acne
cures". Most people are interested primarily in their
Google rankings and so you would run that search on Google
producing the following results:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-
8&q=acne+cures.
The site currently holding the #4 position is
www.approvedcures.com. Take a look at the site. There
are two major things that you will first be looking for:
Is this a large site with a lot of content related to the
search phrase? In this case the answer is "yes". They
have a very large site and all of it is related to the
topic the search was for.
How many incoming links do they have? You will now want
to find out what sort of link popularity you will be
competing with. Links are not the end-all-be-all of
search engine optimization, if fact it is just one of a
large number of deciding factors, however the links help
determine your Google PageRank and this PageRank is a
final multiplier in determining your position. Because
the number of incoming links is easily determined it is
something you should look into. To determine the number
of links simply enter into the Google search
bar "link:www.domain-in-question.com". In this case it
would be http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-
8&oe=UTF-8&q=link%3Awww.approvedcures.com . They do not
have a large number of incoming links and thus, this is
not going to be a significant factor in determining their
ranking.
And Now You're Ready For Search Engine Placement
At this point you should have a pretty good idea as to
whether search engine placement is a viable choice for
your website promotions, which keywords you should target,
and what competition you will be facing.
Assuming that your website needs to be optimized, you will
now be faced with the choice of doing it yourself or
hiring a search engine placement firm.
If you will be doing your own optimization I would highly
recommend reading an article by the CEO of StepForth
Search Engine Placement entitled "A 10 Minute Search
Engine Optimization". It can be found on the StepForth
website at http://news.stepforth.com/2003-news/ten-minute-
optimization.shtml.
If you will be hiring on a search engine placement firm I
would recommend first submitting your site for a free
website review off of our homepage at
http://www.stepforth.com. There is no obligation and it
will give you a very good idea of what areas need to be
addressed.
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