Web site Marketing and search engine optimization
Marketing Your Web Site. You wouldn't put a bill board
in the desert, so why are you hiding your web site?
Too many companies spend too much money developing a really nice
web site that no one will ever see. Before starting any web site
design or re-design make sure you've allocated at least half of
the budget to getting the site optimized in the search engines.
For those selling a service. There are a few steps you need to
take. The first step is to create meta-tags with a description
of your site and keywords that are relevant to the content on
your site. The keywords and content should stress the service
you provide, why a potential customer should use your company
for this service and how to contact you to buy this service. A
meta tag generator will help you to create the properly
formatted code for you web site based on keywords you select.
These can be found on google or msn by searching with the
keywords "meta tag generator". You'll then need to submit the
site to the major search engines like Google and MSN. For Yahoo!
you have to pay a yearly fee of $299 to get listed. There are
dozens of search engine submission services that will perform
these services for you at a very reasonable price.
When you've completed your submissions you can expect an
increase in traffic but it's going to take some time. Anywhere
from a few weeks to a few months is not out of the ordinary. To
increase traffic more quickly you'll need to use a service like
overture or Google adwords. These services allow you to place
small ads for your site whenever someone does a web search that
includes your the keywords you've purchased. You probably only
offer your service to a limited area so you'll want to make sure
you include this area (City, state, town or region) in your
keywords. That way you won't be paying for clicks and visitors
to your site when you do business in California and the visitor
is from Texas.
For those selling a product. The process is essentially
the same. The difference is you're selling to a much bigger
audience. Sounds great right? More potential customers equal
more sales. Not necessarily. You've also got a lot more
competition and much more pressure on your prices. I'd
recommend starting out selling regionally. Your own backyard
doesn't have to be the starting point but it may help with
shipping costs. When you've got that system ironed out you can
expand geographically and still control your web advertising
costs by including the locations in your keywords searches.