Search Engine Marketing
So, you have your shiny new web site, and your web stats package in place. Now all you do is watch and wait for the traffic to come flooding in, right? Wrong!If you adopt this approach, then unless you are very lucky, you are likely to be sorely disappointed. Raising the profile of a site in the search engines and driving traffic to your site takes time and effort. And it’s not a one off, either, you will need to put lots of TLC into your site to make it as successful as possible.
Here we look at some of the key specific tasks you can perform to give yourself the best possible chance of getting traffic to your site - for free!
- The most important aspect of your web pages, in terms of driving traffic, is the title tag of your pages. Yet many ignore this. Think about it - when you type in a search phrase in a search engine, the first thing you see is the title of the page, and it is often based on the relevancy of this that you decide whether to click or not.
Therefore, rather than have one generic page title across your site, make sure you make the title of each and every page relevant to the specific content of that page
- Make sure that the right searches are coming through to your search engine. To do this you first need to identify the searches you would like to come through to your web site. For instance, if you sell shawls on your site, you might want searches like ‘buy shawls’, ‘buy pashminas’ to come through to your site, and depending on the nature of your product ‘cheap shawls’ or ‘quality shawls’.
Once you have a list of the keywords you would like to drive traffic to your site, you should re-write the copy of your site around these terms. Don’t go overboard, just make sure you mention the key terms wherever you can. In this way you will increase the keyword density for these phrases, and increase your ranking for those terms in the search engines and help drive more traffic to your site.
- Submit your site to the search engines. It may sound obvious, but many people do not submit their site to the major search engines which can be done for free, for instance via the Google submit URL tool. Also submit your web site to DMOZ, as these listings are used to drive the sites in some other search engines and are highly valued links, because it is a human edited directory and therefore harder to obtain listing, and may take more time.
- Once you have implemented changes to your site, you should monitor the impact over a series of months. Check whether the traffic to your site increases, and if so, what searches people are performing to reach your site. Any good stats analysis tool should let you see the actual searches that are being performed to reach your site. Over time, adjust the keywords you target and see the impact this has on your site.
- If you decide to pay to get yourself to the top of the search engines in the paid-for listings, one of the best programs is the Google AdWords program. You only pay when someone clicks through on your link, ensuring you are more likely to get a warm lead. It is also very easy to set up and can be done in 15 minutes.
To discuss the optimization of your site with Clarity Media and find out how we can help you, please do contact us.
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