Four online marketing essentials
Knowing the things we know about the value of search engine marketing and the dynamic and seemingly complicated SEO process, where does one start? Four essential elements are key to earning higher ranking: rich text content, keyword density, links and submission.
A thousand words are better (than flashy graphics that get in the way)
At its very basic, search engines work in a text-based world. When search engine “spiders” (robots or thingymajigs sent by search engines to your site for indexing purposes) drop by to read the content of a web site, they look at text content. So, make sure your website has plenty of it. The right kind of content is relevant and consistent with the overall website theme. More importantly, it should be unique, that is, not borrowed or copied from other websites. This also ensures your website content is interesting to your visitors.
Search engine robots or spiders do not just ignore the eye candy – images, movie clips, or Flash animations– so compelling to human eyes. Wrongly placed, these visuals can actually get in the way and “trap” spiders, obstructing them from doing their job of indexing your site.
Keywords and keyword density
It is essential that a good optimisation campaign identifies and uses the right keywords. No SEO effort gets anywhere without the right mix of key word relevance and density.
“Relevance” means knowing the words and phrases customers use to search for products or services in your competitive space. For instance, tourists looking to dine out in Sydney would most likely enter the key words “restaurant in Sydney” and search engines like Google, would return results that regularly mention one or the other (or both).
A good way to shortlist relevant key words is to put yourself in the place of the shopper and ask how they might find what they need using common terms. Try to avoid jargon that may be specific to your industry, but unfamiliar to your potential customers. Then, keep building your key words list using tools available through Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing.
HOT TIP! Aim for at least 4% keyword density. Key word density is the number of times relevant key words appear on a webpage in relation to the total number of words on that page.
Links
Whether placed prominently or not, links back to a website have a multiplier effect. The more links you have pointing back to your website, the greater the chance search engines will count your website as popular or authoritative. Gaining good link popularity is not easy and can take time, especially when you consider that Google rewards link exchanges from other relevant and credible sites that are already ranking well in Google.
Do inform the Search Engines
The worst thing that can happen is to have performed the best possible website optimisation and sit back passively waiting for the search engines to find your finely-crafted web site. At our last count, there were over 108 million unique web pages in existence.
So do submit your website to Google or Yahoo for indexing (the links provided will take you to the submission page). Simply, follow the prompts and enter your web address. You may also be asked for a keyword-rich three-line description of your website. Then you are done! That is their cue to send the search robots out to visit your site for indexing.
Once these vital steps are behind you, you can confidently expect to be indexed well by the various search engines even as you move on to even more sophisticated SEO measures.
… and finally, choose your domain name carefully.
While domain name selection is not technically part of the optimisation process, we do encourage you pick a search engine friendly domain name for your site.
In one of our previous posts we mentioned marketable domain names as meeting six key criteria (listed below). If you had to compromise on any of these criteria, we would recommend not to omit #5 (based on product/service key words) as this could impact your search engine ranking the most.
A marketable domain name is:
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Memorable
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Registered in a popular extension (.com preferably)
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Easy to spell
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Brief (one or two words maximum)
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Based on product/service key words (this helps with search engines)
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Consistent with your brand (low price, premium brand)
Don’t forget to pass on successbox.com.au to friends, colleagues and business associates whom you believe would benefit.
November 8th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Thanks.
Information was useful, concise, and easy to understand.
November 8th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
The supplied information is greatly recieved, as new managers we readily accept help, advice and suggestions on how to market our resort
November 8th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
Nice work Melb IT. More of this please.
November 8th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Always helps to know how to climb the Google search engine!
November 9th, 2007 at 7:07 am
The information was very clear, concise and helpful. Thank you.
November 10th, 2007 at 12:54 am
This covers the basics, but I wouldn’t worry too much about the keyword density. Latent Semantic Indexing is coming (if not already here). Write naturally, not artificially. Also get your keywords into the title tag and the H1, H2, heading tags.
Also, use permalinks for your URLs. For example http://www.successbox.com.au/four-online-marketing-essentials/ is much better than http://www.successbox.com.au/?p=90 for SEO purposes.