Let's end this year at #1
Posted on December 31, 2008
Filed Under: Internet and web sites.
See Also:
google
sem
engine
indexing
yahoo
msn
adobe
search
flash
swf
seo
2008 if nothing else was dramatic. Businesses that survived found themselves facing new challenges. Finding new venues to attract customers was not one of them. The internet had developed into a myriad of ways where adventuresome businesses could sift out gold. Of course, with every gold mine, you have a few lucky people walking out of the mine with gold, and hundreds of others making their gold by selling mining tools. Search Engine Marketing continues to grow into a massive business, attracting everything from hard-core data analysts to snake oil sales men. Unfortunately, many of the SEM companies I have had the pleasure of working with, fell well into the later category.
Of course, the internet does not have to be a siphon for your marketing dollars. In fact, there are many tools available as free services that can help dramatically improve your visibility on the internet. Advertising on Google, Facebook, MySpace and the gamut can provide useful leads and generate revenue, but appearing well in the actual search results (often referred to as organic rank), provides feed of pre-qualified customers that continues well after your ad campaign is over. Here are a few tools that can lead to a higher appearance in these organic rankings in the most popular search engines:
1. Even if you use a CMS, make sure that the description meta tag is different for each URL in your site. For best results, the description tag should explain what can be found on that page. This can be done by summarizing
2. Google Webmaster Tools are open to the public. This toolset not only allows you to tell Google about your pages, it also explains what it found when it indexed, and where your problem areas are. It also includes helpful guides explaining how their bot crawls websites, and details the best way to communicate with it.
3. Don't sacrifice richness and interactivity in your website for marketing. Thanks to collaboration between Adobe and the search giants, Flash (SWF) files are just as capable of being added to Google's index. Better yet, Google has released an Analytics plug-in for Flash as native AS3 to allow tracking of usage through SWF files.
4. Incoming links are as important if not more important than your actual content. If you don't have partners are suppliers that can add you to their site, start a blog or generate press releases. The blog route is the easiest to get started as it has substantially less restrictive controls on content quality (my writing for instance), but does need more regular attention to be useful. Your blog authors need to be aware of basic SEO concepts, but entry is otherwise unrestricted.
5. News aggregation sites are a blessing and a nightmare. While they can provide some incoming links and a meager amount of traffic, only the power users seems to really be able to make use of the platform. The positive side is if you can associate with one of those power users, you can almost guarantee more traffic than your servers can handle. High in the list of popular news aggregation sites are Digg, Reddit, Technorati and Yahoo Buzz.
6. Google Trends. Having trouble understanding which of those millions of words you really want to target on the internet, in comes Google Trends. It's hard to explain better than Google, so I won't try. Google says this service is:
"With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most."
7. Social network -- presence pages. Over a year ago, Facebook opened it's tight community to the internet, in a big way. It began allowing search engine robots to index public content. MySpace was of course always an open book. Both of these platforms provide a means to not only communicate with the millions of users on their networks, but also a way to let the search engines know where you are. There are also an immense number of other ways to capitalize on these platforms, but that is outside the scope of this article.
8. Google Analytics. See a theme? From the "do no harm company" comes a way to evaluate your every performance, in a platform that will record, report and remember everything you need to know to make your site #1. While it now integrates with your Adsense account, it goes well beyond. Breaking your traffic down into categories including web browser and platform, referral source, and even geographic location. It also includes features that help you compare and contract page results to allow you to fully understand the consequences of your design choices on end users.
Hopefully these tools can start you on your way to understanding the medium we lovingly refer to as the internet. It is a tool, and in the right hands can lead to your every success.