Unlocking the Keys to Your Web Site Traffic - Web site promotion
and search engine strategies
Introduction
It is estimated that up to 60% of new traffic to your Web site
will come from search engines. This means that unless you are
already so well known that people will be using your name to
search for your site, you need a search engine strategy.
Thousands of new Web sites are created daily, so the axiom
"Build it, and they will come" does not apply.
Effective Web site promotion requires a serious and continuing
investment of time and resources, whether you do it yourself, or
hire a professional. It is not a one-shot deal, but an ongoing
process, meaning you should evaluate the return on your
investment. You can collect a vast amount of crucial information
about your traffic, and make strategic business development
decisions, in ways that are unprecedented in the real world.
Setting your goals
We've all met the person who boasts of "thousands of hits a day"
on his Web site, and maybe we felt a little envious. But let's
debunk the hype . . . .
It's important to distinguish between individual visitors, and
"hits". The latter refers to every piece of your site that is
downloaded, and this includes all graphics files separately.
Thus, one visitor viewing your home page, which contains text
and four images, will generate five "hits". If that visitor
explores your site further, he or she will generate more hits,
but it's still the same user.
You want to ask yourself whether you want every visitor that you
can get - which could be thousands of indiscriminate,
unqualified people, or whether you would prefer 20 highly
qualified decision makers per day, looking for exactly what you
provide?
There are no right or wrong answers, but you should have goals
for the volume and quality of traffic that you would like, so
you can measure results (more on this later!)
Designing keywords
The next step is to identify some keywords and key phrases that
will differentiate you. Imagine if we all used "professional
speaker" as our main key phrase. How many of us would show up on
top of the search engines?
Furthermore, there are too many results for the typical search.
So, visitors will be combining "professional speaker" with
something that narrows down what they are looking for - perhaps
"customer service" and "banking", or maybe a location, such as
"teambuilding" and "Chicago". You will discover the keywords
that work best for you when you run a log analysis - for now,
make your best guess.
Think about the topics you offer, which industries you
specialize in, which locations you serve, and anything else that
sets you apart. Make sure that your keywords are in the language
that your clients use, and not industry jargon - I have never
seen the phrase "keynote speaker" in actual searches.
Then, build these into a set of keywords and phrases. Because of
the frequency of most single words, phrases often work better in
narrowing a search. Include your name, common misspellings of
your name, and any other key element of your site. Use both
singular and plural forms, and mix capital with lower case
letters, except for proper names (some search engines are case
sensitive and will exclude lower case searches for words that
you have capitalized).
As an example, here are the key words and phrases for my site:
Philippa Gamse, Phillipa, Games, CyberSpeaker, internet speaker,
internet seminars, Internet marketing programs, internet
marketing speakers, search engines, online marketing strategies,
Web site promotion, traffic logs, internet consultant
Not an exhaustive list, but a good start ;-)
When you have the keywords and phrases, use those to build:
1. a page title containing your most significant keywords. It
doesn't matter if the title doesn't read well - it's the piece
that appears in the colored bar of the browser at the top, and
very few people see it. Contrary to popular belief, titles are
for search engines, not people!
2. a brief "knock their sox off" description. This will be
displayed in the search engine results, and will attract
visitors to come to you. Most search engines display 2 lines or
less, so wording such as
"Welcome to My Company - a full service provider of . . ." is
probably most of what you'll get - and you haven't said anything
yet! So keep it pithy, and include the keywords.
Now - do this for every significant page of your site!
Your site is (or should be) more than your home page. The spider
search engines that index every word on a page allow you to
submit multiple pages. So do it! This increases by many times
your exposure, and the angles that you can use to promote
yourself.
For example, I have an article on my site about choosing an
Internet Service Provider (if you want to read it, check out my
list of articles). Many people searching for this topic find
this piece as their entry point to my site. If they want to find
out more about me, they can follow the navigation aids back to
get more information.
Reviewing and updating your pages
When you have your keywords, key phrases, titles and
descriptions ready, it's time to insert them into every
significant page of your site. You may need help from your Web
designer to do this.
First, you need to incorporate these elements into the header
record for each page - in special places called "meta tags".
These tags, which aren't visible to visitors, are used heavily
by several of the major search engines.
As an example, the header record for my home page looks like
this:
Internet speaker, Internet marketing speaker,
internet seminars, online marketing programs
Also, make sure that the text of each page includes the main
keywords again - but don't spam - that is, repeat them
incessantly. At best, the search engines will ignore more than
about 7 occurrences of each word, at worst they may even exclude
your site.
While you are reviewing your Web site pages, look for any hidden
roadblocks for the search engines that your Web designer may
have unwittingly introduced. These can include:
* Frames: the separation of the screen into different sections.
Several search engines will not go inside these.
* Java: a programming language used to create "cool" animation
effects, and other applications on your site - again, the search
engines will not work with Java script.
* Images: pages that contain only graphics with no text, (even
if words are part of the graphic) will be passed over by the
search engines unless you include alternative text tags for the
images.
Note: there are big differences between the various search
engines as to what and how they will index. My suggestions here
will help you well through the basics, but for much more
detailed information, check out "The Webmaster's Guide to Search
Engines".
Submitting to the search engines
Now it's time to submit to the search engines.
By the way, they all (currently) accept your listing free of
charge - they raise revenue from the advertising banners at the
top of their pages.
You may have already received some unsolicited e-mail (not from
me!) offering to submit your site to 500+ search engines for a
seemingly very low price. My advice would be to avoid these
services, for several reasons:
1. Most of the 500 search engines will be obscure (such as
"Fred's Cool Links"), with few people ever visiting.
2. These services will submit your site to all the engines on
their lists indiscriminately, whether or not it is applicable.
Worse, some of them may be adult-oriented.
3. The services use software to submit your site automatically,
which means that they do not take the time to ensure that you
appear in the optimum category within each directory. Also, some
of the search engines are now rejecting automated submissions.
If you decide to do your own submissions, these are the ones
that I recommend using:
Alta Vista; AOL Netfind; Excite; Google; Hotbot; Infoseek;
Lycos; Microsoft Network; Northern Light; Webcrawler;
Be aware that the search engines take vastly differing amounts
of time to list you. Alta Vista and Infoseek are usually very
fast, while Excite and Lycos can be delayed by several weeks.
You should also get yourself listed in the major directories -
these are reviewed by human editors, so make sure that your site
is ready for close scrutiny! These include:
Looksmart; Snap; Yahoo!
If, and only if, you are selling product directly from your Web
site via a secure server, you can apply for Yahoo!'s Business
Express Service. This costs a one-time fee of $199, but seems to
virtually guarantee you a listing - and Yahoo! is still by far
the highest trafficked directory.
And, if you are willing to pay per click (visitor to your Web
site), check out Goto. This search engine is arranged on an
auction system - you bid per keyword or phrase (bids start at
$0.01), and the highest bidder's site is displayed first. Your
account is debited by the amount of your bid when someone clicks
on your listing. Again, this site is controlled by human
editors, so the results are pretty clean.
Traffic analysis - evaluating results
Once your site is promoted and starts appearing in the search
engines, you can evaluate your traffic. Your Internet Service
Provider (ISP) should provide your site's usage logs, which give
you incredibly useful information. (And if they don't, take your
business elsewhere!)
You will need a good analysis tool to break down this data (some
ISP's and / or professional Web site marketers provide this
service as well). I currently use Hitbox, which is excellent.
The report will show you how many individual visitors came to
your site, as well as the hit count. You can see which pages of
the site are the most popular, and which pages draw little
traffic. Maybe this is because you haven't made them enticing
enough in your links.
Armed with this analysis, you can intelligently review your site
structure and content. For the purposes of this discussion on
search engine promotion, look at the sections on search engines
and keywords (you can find these by using the navigation links
in the left-hand frame of the report):
"Top Referring Sites" "Top Referring URL's" "Top Search Engines"
"Top Search Phrases" "Top Search Keywords"
These charts and tables show you which search engines (or other
Web sites that link to you) are driving the most traffic to your
site, and what keywords and phrases people are using to find
you, broken down both by individual search engine and overall.
Here's where you start getting some great feedback. You may have
been fairly sure that you knew the keywords that your markets
would use to find your site, but you could be wrong! With this
information, you can adjust the titles, keywords and
descriptions in your pages, and then resubmit the site. This
ongoing process helps to improve your position in the search
engines where you may not be so well placed.
This also provides wonderful market research on your audience.
Rita Risser's company, Fair Measures, provides legal training
for managers in the area of employment law. Her Web site is an
extensive information resource, attracting over 6,000 visitors
per month.
Rita told me that her logs showed that many visitors were
searching for a specific topic that was a total surprise to her.
But there was such demand for this subject that she decided to
write a book on it.
If you view the Webtrends report while online, you can click on
the most popular search strings and perform that actual search.
This will show you how your site appears, and also what other
pages are being returned. So if your competition is ahead of
you, it may be possible to look at their promotional techniques
and work out how they do it!
Conclusion
Take your Web marketing seriously. The Web affords you the
opportunity to track the results of your marketing investment in
ways that you never could with traditional advertising. You can
learn something about literally every visitor to your site.
Get serious about your Web site marketing; set your goals,
invest in an ongoing strategy, and then become even more
successful!
Copyright, Philippa Gamse, 2000