BlogForward : Money

Author: Dave Davies

Introduction
For many, the value of their websites can be measured in visitors, for
others it is the amount of revenue that the site generates. Regardless
of how you measure the success of your website, you are going to have
to bring visitors to it that are looking for the information, content
and/or products that you are providing. So how do you do this?

For
many businesses the yellow pages is a first choice for promotions and
marketing. Generally this is due in large part to the fact that most of
us grew up with the yellow pages being where we looked when we needed
to find a business and so it is what we think of first. A standard
yellow page ad runs for about $1,200+/year for a smaller ad and serves
only a local market. You further have to consider the cost of ad
development, which can often run into the thousands of dollars as well.

While
this may be an entirely profitable form of advertising for many
businesses which serve only local areas, it is certainly not the only
one.

On the Internet there are many forms of
advertising that have and are being used to bring traffic to websites.
From banner ads and sp@m email to PPC and natural search engines there
are countless methods for promoting your website online. So how do you
choose which marketing tactic to utilize?

One
thing to consider is that over 80% of all Internet traffic comes from
search engines with Google currently responsible for the vast majority
of that. With such an overwhelming amount of traffic coming from a
single identifiable source, it makes sense to put a lot of weight on
it; considering what this source can mean for your website, and for
your business.

In this article we will
explore the difference between sites that should consider search engine
placement as a viable choice in their marketing strategy, and those
that would benefit little from top placements. As well we will look at
ways to insure that you are maximizing the effect and potential return
on investment of your search engine placement campaign, should you
choose to go that route.

Who Should Consider
Search Engine Placement An ethical search engine placement firm will
tell a client honestly if search engine optimization will benefit their
website. Of course, not every company is ethical and further, how do
you know until you have undergone search engine optimization, whether
it will benefit your website? By this point you have paid the firm and
they have done their job whether it helped you or not.

There
are a few things you should consider before you apply search engine
placement tactics to your website, or consider hiring a search engine
placement firm.

Questions You Should Ask
Yourself: What do I stand to gain from higher search engine traffic?
Conducting a search engine optimization has a built-in cost of time and
resources should you choose to do it yourself, or through the direct
cost of money should you hire a search engine placement firm. You have
to insure that what you hope to accomplish will be at least equal to
and preferably greater than the cost of time and money it will take to
do successfully. For more information on this you will want to read the
section below “So You’re Going To Market Your Website On The Search
Engines … Now What?” for tips on establishing whether there is truly
enough traffic to be had to make your efforts worthwhile.

Can
I compete? The short answer to this question is generally always “yes”,
however, there are many factors to consider. While any site, with
enough work can rank well, you do have to consider whether the effort
will be worth it. For example, if you own a small computer store in
Michigan that repairs computers and troubleshoots software issues, it
is theoretically possible for you to rank your website well for the
term “Microsoft Windows”. To do so would require an ENORMOUS amount of
both time and money. And so you have to consider, is it really worth
investing years of time and money into this one ranking? The answer is
“probably not” but that doesn’t mean that search engine placement would
not be beneficial for you just that those keywords are not worth
targeting. There are suggestions for choosing the right keywords below.

Do
I make money from my website traffic? This question isn’t the
end-all-be-all, however, it’s certainly relevant if you’re considering
hiring a search engine placement firm to optimize your site. If you
plan on “going it alone” you may want to put in the effort for no money
in return simply for the “fun” of it, however if you’re planning on
spending your hard earned money on a search engine placement firm you
have to make sure that it is in your financial best interest to do so.
This may be from either direct product/services sales or from the sale
of advertising on your site.

If, after
answering these questions to yourself you have determined that search
engine placement is indeed a good choice for your marketing strategy,
you will now have the task of determining exactly what tactics will
produce the greatest Return On Investment (ROI) for your efforts.

So
You Are Going To Market Your Website On The Search Engines … Now What?
Now that you have determined that search engine placement is indeed an
avenue of marketing that can produce beneficial results for your site
and for your business, you have to decide on a “plan of attack”. Many
SEO firms will “help” you determine keywords to target, and some will
even build links for you from “valuable” sites. In many case they may
be entirely truthful but how do you know?

The
choosing of the keywords to target is probably the most crucial step of
the entire search engine optimization process. This will determine the
success and/or failure of your promotions. It is important to keep in
mind that top placements are not worthwhile if they produce zero
results; either because you targeted placements with little traffic or
irrelevant traffic. So how do you determine for yourself which keywords
to target?

Without getting into anything too
technical there are a couple of great resources out there to help you
isolate the keywords that you should aim for.

The
Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool Advantages – The Overture Search
Term Suggestion Tool is free and produces a large number of results for
related searches. Disadvantages – There are two main disadvantages to
the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool in determining your keywords.
The first of these is that it puts everything in terms of the singular,
and further, it will correct misspellings (misspellings, when
discovered, can be goldmines). If you run a shopping site that sells
gifts you will not be able to determine whether the main searched
phrase was “gift” or “gifts”. The second major disadvantage to the
Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool is that it doesn’t provide
alternative related search phrases that you might not have thought to
punch in (“presents” for example).

WordTracker
Advantages – WordTracker addresses all of the disadvantages noted about
the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool. It differentiates between
singular and plural and will allow you to search for misspellings.
Further, it searches a thesaurus and will make a number of suggestions
for other terms you may not have thought of but which may be related to
your industry. It will then analyze the variety of terms that you have
searched and chosen and actually make recommendations on which keywords
to target based on the number of competing pages and the specific
search engine you are targeting. It will also give you a predicted
number of searches per day for each phrase. Disadvantages – The only
real disadvantage to WordTracker is that it has a cost. There is a free
trial on the site which you can use though the results it produces are
far lower in numbers and it does not give you information on all of the
major search engines. Certainly worth checking into even if you only
try the demo mode (not a download – this is an online resource).

So
you now have a list of possible keyword phrases … now what? The next
step is to determine whether you can compete with those currently
holding the top positions and, more importantly, whether it will be
economical to do so. The first place to look when you are trying to
determine this is the search engines themselves. Let’s assume for a
second that you have determined that there are a good number of
searches for your product and that the main keyword phrase you would
like to target is “exercise equipment”. The next step is to run a
search for “exercise equipment”. Most people are interested primarily
in their Google rankings and so you would run that search on Google
producing the following results:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=exerci
se+equipment.

The site currently holding the
#1 position is www.nellies.com. Take a look at the site. There are two
major things that you will be looking for first:

Is
this a large site with a lot of content related to the search phrase?
In this case the answer is “yes”; they have a very large site and all
of it is related to the topic the search was for.

How
many incoming links do they have? You will now want to find out what
sort of link popularity you will be competing with. Links are not the
end-all-be-all of search engine optimization, if fact it is just one of
a large number of deciding factors, however the links do help to
determine your Google PageRank and this PageRank is a final multiplier
in determining your position. Because the number of incoming links is
easily determined, it is something you should look into. To determine
the number of links simply enter into the Google search bar
“link:www.domain-in-question.com”. In this case the resulting page
would be found at
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=link%3
Awww.nellies.com. They do not have a large number of incoming links (as
of Nov 19, only 11 links) and thus, this is not going to be a
significant factor in determining their ranking. This is good news; now
conduct the same research for the rest of the top 5 placing web sites
so that you have a broad concept of the competition. This additional
research is very important since there are occasions where a site will
appear in the Top 5 for seemingly no reason (especially with Google
these days).

Now You Can Make an Informed
Decision At this point you should have a pretty good idea whether
search engine placement is a viable choice for your website promotions,
which keywords you should target, and what competition you will be
facing.

Assuming that your website needs to
be optimized, you will now be faced with the choice of doing it
yourself or hiring a search engine placement firm.

If
you will be doing your own optimization I would highly recommend
reading an article by the CEO of StepForth Search Engine Placement
entitled “A 10 Minute Search Engine Optimization”. It can be found on
the StepForth website at http://news.stepforth.com/2003-news
en-minute-optimization.shtml.

If you will be
hiring on a search engine placement firm I would recommend first
submitting your site for a free website review off of our homepage at
http://www.stepforth.com. There is no obligation and it will give you a
very good idea of what areas need to be addressed.

About the author: Dave Davies is the Marketing Manager for stepForth Search Engine Placement