Marketing Your Web Site - Top Ten Things to Do

Today, being on the first page for your most popular keyword phrase is like having the most memorable prime time television commercial in 1973.

Essentially, that's where the power of advertising is going. It's all about Search Engines. And Searching is only going to become more important over the next ten years. If you can get on that coveted first page organically, well then, more power to you! I know you probably have read other articles about writing SEO copy and how it relates to achieving high search rankings, there are plenty of them to go around. But some of the articles are complicated; some are too long, others boring. Still others don't explain that great SEO copy is rarely effective just on it's own - in order to get those high rankings (which is the goal after all), you have to do other things too. So, we decided that what most people really needed was a "down and dirty", easy to understand, ten step method. Here are the official ten steps in order:

1) Check your Competitors

Who are your competitors? Do you know? If you don't, you may want to go online and do a search for your product or service. Who is on the first two pages? That is your target. Those are the companies that you want to compete with because right now, they are getting your customers. Take a look at their website. Notice the copy. Analyze their business. Are they successful? What are they not doing right? Look for the holes. You're going to meet the needs of their customers (that they are not fulfilling) so they become YOUR customers. Remember this list will change so you need to check at least once a month to see who your latest competitors are.

2) Research your Keyword Phrases

Remember, Keyword Phrase research is critically important. It can also be a little tricky. Do you know what keywords or keyword phrases your customers search for when they look for you? Are you sure? Are you thinking like your customer who knows nothing about your products, services, lingo, or company? Or are you thinking like someone that knows all the jargon and would select those terms instead o terms that Average Joe would use. See what your competitors are using. You can do this by right clicking on their home page, selecting "View Source" and then checking their Keyword Meta Tag. Next, go on to Overture.com (Now Yahoo), click on "Visit the Advertiser" section, and use their Keyword Selector Tool. Its great – and its free. You can also use Wordtracker.com, but it does have a fee.

3) Content Is King

When it comes to the Search Engines, content is king. This is where so many people fail right off the bat. They think that because they heard a quote somewhere that people only read the top paragraph on a site, or they just scan the headlines on a page, or they get bored easily (all of which are true), that they need to keep the content on their pages to one paragraph, because, after all, no one is going to read it anyway, right? Wrong! The Search Engine Bots will read all of your content. We like to say that most pages, especially your key pages: HOME, ABOUT US, PRODUCTS, SERVICES etc. should have at least a 3000 character count. You can find out your current count per page by copying and pasting the content in a Word Document and checking the character count (not the word count) under Tools>Word Count>. This document is over 6000 characters…so that tells you your web pages need to be about half this long in content. That doesn’t include buttons, graphics, navigation etc.

4) Write Good Copy

Now it's time to start to create good copy. And if you can't write, you can hire a website copywriter to do it for you. The bottom line is to write about benefits, not features. Don't tell them how great your company is. They will discover that for themselves when you overwhelm them with your service and deliver the perfect product that meets their every need. Make the copy to the point and snappy. Make it sure it has impact, and asks the potential customer for their business. Make sure your keywords and key word phrases are filtered appropriately but widely throughout your pages.

5) Integrate Your Keyword Phrases

After you figure out which keyword phrases you want to use on your site, you need to integrate them into the copy of your site. Your Home Page and Services page are the most important pages to use them on. Essentially, you want to them to make up 5% of the total words on the page. It's not that hard actually. You can get a bit repetitive; because people really DON’T read everything on each page…in fact the place to get heavier is at the bottom of the page…that is the least read text. DO NOT make a run on list of keywords as your bottom paragraph…that is cheating and looks like your are obviously trying to spam the Search Engines - you could get de-listed from the search engines. Definitely DO use them in your headlines and sub headlines. That will get you extra points, so to speak.

6) Check your Links, Build if necessary

Do you have any inbound links pointing to your site? If not, no amount of awesome copy is going to get your site high rankings. Links are very important. And even more so for Google. Go to www.linkpopularity.com and see what you have. Also check your competitors. If they have more than you, you need to get some high quality links. You can either do that yourself or hire someone to do it for you. It can be time consuming and expensive. But you have to do it. It makes you look important to the search engines. A good way to do it is to make sure you are listed on directories, including DMOZ and industry related sites. Go to www.incominglinks.com to see which ones you should be listed on. Then write articles and submit them to article submission sites. That could potentially give you hundreds of links for free.

7) Use Go Rank's Analytical Tools

GoRank.com is a fantastic free resource for SEO. They have a Keyword Density Analyzer, Link Popularity Analyzer, Top 10 Keyword Analyzer, Research, News and lots of other great stuff. It will help you in your SEO copy efforts.

8) Submit to the Search Engines

After you've ensured that your website copy and all the other important SEO considerations have been completed, it's time to submit to the free Search Engines. Do it manually. Go to the search engine and do it yourself. Or you can pay someone to do it for you. You (they) may have to resubmit a few times, but eventually, your site will get noticed.

9) Tweak the Copy as necessary, Add New Content

After your site has been up for a while, go back and take a second look. Ask friends and customers what they think of it. Can anything be improved? You'll be surprised what you may hear. If something isn't working, fix it. Make it sound better. The other thing that you should also be doing is adding content regularly. Build free resources into your website. This will make your customers and potential customers happy, and it will make you appear to be more important in the eyes of the search engines. Adding articles to your site is a great way to give your customers new, free content. Write about things that they would find interesting. Change something on the your homw page monthly…this makes your site appear to be fresh and used…this gives you extra points.

10) Partner with a Great SEO Firm

You may want to also consider partnering with a great Search Engine Optimization firm. There are probably a hundred very good ones out there. There are also 1000 bad ones. Stay away from the ones that offer a guarantee, or that they will submit your site weekly (spamming) to ALL the search engines! Ask them if they use: door way pages, gateway pages, same font color as background color, keyword lists on pages, and things like that. All of those are spamming techniques and will get your site barred from the search engines permanently. Call us at 316-686-2284 or visit www.2computerchicks.com for more information!

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