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Services: SEO Information & Articles
Is Your Site Optimised?
by Richard D S Hill
Organisations need to optimise their search engine marketing (organic
listings, general advertising and pay per click) to acquire more
customers or members, sell more online and for many other reasons.
There are nearly 1 billion people with Internet access. Almost 550
million searches are conducted worldwide on the Internet every day.
A searcher is proactively requesting information. They are already
looking for what you offer. They are a live prospect.
When looking at the search results page, most users look for a
number of specific items, at least one of which must be present
to capture a click through. These items include the key phrase in
the title or description, product information and trusted brand
names and vendors.
Nearly 60% of users have a search engine of preference, but will
use another engine if they're not satisfied with the results from
the first engine. So, although users may give Google as their engine
of preference, they may actually use another engine, such as Yahoo
or MSN, for a significant percentage of their searches.
There are a number of things that are very important in optimisation:
Optimized page text. Every page must be optimized for a few key
search phrases. These are phrases that people actually use when
searching for information related to that page. Writing a unique
and compelling title for every web page and including target phrases
in each page's title, description and keywords meta-tags are also
important.
Crawler friendly navigation. Making sure a crawler can easily navigate
your entire site. This is often accomplished by providing a secondary
text-link navigation scheme or site map. Reducing variables in page
URLs is very important for dynamic sites.
In bound links from important sites. Links to your website from
important sites (such as the most popular directories and other
relevant sites) will boost your popularity ranking.
Search engine friendly website design. Excessive use of design
features that can cause problems for crawlers (such as flash, frames,
and dynamic content) will negatively impact your search engine visibility,
as will ‘heavy’ pages that do not call scripts etc.
or pages that use languages (e.g. JavaScript) that search engines
cannot read.
Once a site is optimised it needs to be refreshed and changed and
kept up to date. In general search engines like ‘new’
content so continuing optimisation is essential.
The optimised site can now serve as the basis for an effective
Pay Per Click campaign as it will have helped to generate the relevant
keywords and phrases to be used. For a PPC campaign the following
approach is essential to optimise results:
* Audience – who are they? What would they use to search
on? What keywords / phrases would they use?
* Offer – what can we do to distinguish our offer from the
competition? We have a maximum of about 30 words in which to make
the offer, so it has to be good and state what’s in it for
the searcher?
* Product – what is better about our product. See the constraints
in offer above.
* Creative – there aren’t really any pictures in PPC
so how else can we be creative?
All of this however is wasted unless an ebusiness optimised site
backs it up. This means:
* Thinking of the customer – and thinking how they think
* Making finding product and price easy
* Making terms clear and payment simple
* Ensuring in stock and short delivery timescales
* Making communications clear – mail, phone, email
* Testing on an ongoing basis - test, track and try, test, track
and try.”
Richard Hill is a director of E-CRM Solutions and
has spent many years in senior direct and interactive marketing
roles. E-CRM http://www.e-crm.co.uk
helps you to grow by getting you more customers that stay with
you longer. We provide practical solutions that pay for themselves.
We help you to make sure that your marketing works. Article
Source: http://www.articledashboard.com
Contact us to receive more information on our SEO
internet marketing and web site promotion services.
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