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Search Engine Marketing Strategies, Tips and Information

Following are some basic rules that will help your web site be more Search Engine Friendly. Search Engines will notice and give your site higher relevance and ranking for your keywords. The higher the relevance, the higher search engine ranking you will receive.

Following these rules will help more potential customers find your web site, which is your ultimate goal.

1. Define the Purpose of your web site business-

Decide exactly what you hope to accomplish with your website. Develop some specific goals for the web site and make a step-by-step plan for how you will attain your goals. What is the primary purpose of your website? To inform your customers about your service or products. Will you sell products or services from the web site? Are you using the site to attract customers to your brick and mortar store?

Having clear goals in mind will help you or your web designer to develop the necessary pages at your site and will assist you and a marketing professional to develop a strategic plan for marketing your site. This will become your blue print for success on the web.

2. Determine your target market -

• What is the average age of your intended visitors?
• Are they male, female or both?
• What is their social or economic status?
• What are they looking for?
• What is their problem or need?
• Where are they located?
• How can you help them?
• How can you help them BETTER than your competitor?
• What words or phrases might a visitor use to search for your product or service?

3. Keywords and Keyword Phrases -

Determine at least 20 to 30 keywords or keyword phrases that uniquely identifies your product or service. Be specific – If you only offer service in a particular city or state, use those words in your keywords and phrases. The more specific the better, and try to use keywords that your visitors are most likely to use when searching the web. If you don't know, ask others what words they would use to search for your product or service. Take a look at what keywords other similar web sites are using. If your keywords don't work well, don't keep using them. Change them when necessary.

4.Write Compelling Web Content -

Search engines love text! It provides the best way for them to define what your website is about. Textual content deserves your time and attention because it can make or break your success on the web. If you are not a good writer, do yourself a favor and hire someone to help you. The textual content at your site should be useful and interesting to keep visitor's attention. This is more important in web advertising than in traditional advertising because of the short attention span of web surfers. Be sure to use your best keywords in your marketing text. Create unique text and content for individual pages at your site. This helps the search engines index all of the pages at your site correctly. Position your most important information, (including important keywords and text) near the top and the bottom of every page. Search engines typically index the first and last 200 characters on web pages.

5.Take advantage of html tools -

There are many useful features that are built into html that assist the search engines in indexing your web site. Use meta tags, heading tags, subject tags, title tags, and alt tags with all images. When possible, use keywords or descriptive names for your images and include image alt tags to further describe products or services. Using alt tags also make your site more accessible for site impaired visitors.

6.Easy Site Navigation -

Navigation is very important. It helps visitors and search engines determine how to get to all of the content and pages at your website. Include plenty of relative text-based and navigation links on all of your pages. Unless there is a compelling reason not to, use text for your links rather than graphics. There are numerous techniques that will make navigation links look like graphics. Consider using color or rollover techniques to enhance plain text links. Try to use the same navigational structure on all of your important pages. Being consistent on this will assist your visitors in browsing your website and search engines in indexing your web site. Incorporate text links at the bottom of every page. If you have many pages, create a site map that contains a listing of all your pages, that is linked to from your home page.

7.Linking Strategies that work-

Ask other quality web sites to link to your website. Remember that sites that are related to your business are better than ones that are not. Create your own unique descriptions to go with your logo or text link and ask your linking partners to use them. Use your most important keywords in the description. Be specific rather than general in your keyword selections. Google in particular gives a lot of relevancy to the number of incoming links for a site. Don't be tempted to link to sites that are free-for-all links, particularly if they have nothing at all to do with your product or service.

If you link to sites that use unethical practices, your site may be penalized as well.

Take the time to search for quality link sites that will enhance your own search engine ranking. Consider networking with other people that you know and develop a community.

8. Don't Do This!-

Don't be tempted to use unethical search engine strategies or trickery. Sooner or later this will come back to haunt you. Your web site could even be banned from listing if you do these things. Following are a few unethical strategies that are frowned upon: Gateway pages or mirror sites, hidden text (using the same color for both page/table background and text), keyword stuffing and hidden links.

Regardless of the purpose of your web site, your goal should be to provide excellent content and information that is related to the business you are promoting on the web.
If you do this correctly, the search engines will notice and so will your visitors.

If you still need help or do not have time to incorporate these search engine tips and tricks, Final Webs is happy to provide you with a FREE QUOTE for SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING