Optimize your site in Google
Now that you have a website (or two or three), you need to optimize your site to be seen on search engines, such as google. This topic on itself is vast. You need to organize your page in a way that has a lot of words that are reflected in your keyword and description meta tags. Also, the title of your site should have your keywords in it as well. You can submit your site to many search engines and social bookmarketing sites. Do this in your spare time. It is another way traffic comes to your site. But you shouldn't focus on this, as most of your sales will come through the relationships you make.
One powerful technique is to put your site on Alexa.com. As your traffic builds, Alexa will give it a rank. This rank can be put on your site to show others that your site is popular. Popularity is a driving factor. Therefore, you won't be submitting your site to necessarily get direct sales, but rather as a tool to show others that it is powerful. You want these visitors to contact you with questions. If you have questions that are asked frequently, consider putting up a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page. This allows your customers to get answers without having to contact you. But, you want them to contact you! Therefore, answer the most common questions in your FAQ, but always refer them to your contact page.
Lab and Excercises
Step 1: Submit your site to Google
Google, by far, is the most popular search engine. It accounts for 90% of internet traffic, and is not one to be ignored. You can also sign up for adwords to get more traffic, but this is a paid model. However, one technique is to limit your budget to a monthly allowance, and configure google adwords to stay within this range. This way you can control your costs. The more you pay, the more traffic you will get.
WARNING: One thing to be weary of, however, is submission software packages. These packages are well known to google, and will probably have a detrimential effect on your SEO ranking. Don't use these!
Step 2: Get your site linked to by other popular sites
The best way to get your site ranked highly is not only with submissions, but by also getting backlinks. You have already started this (without knowing). You put your link on all your social networks! These social networks are crawled regularly by google, and your site already has a lot of back links. Remember, google is a popularity search engine; the more sites that have your link on it, the more popular it must be, and therefore the higher ranking it will acheive.
Step 3: Focus on your page content
Google indexes the text and images on your page. In order to get highly ranked in google, you need to focus purely on your content in your pages, not on your site. Each page that google indexes is a separate entry. Therefore, you need to focus your attention on your content. the first thing you need to do is understand what your content is about, and how people might find it. Come up with your keywords and description (metadata) first. These two parts of the content are stored in the html body of your page, in the <head> section. Here is an example:
<title>[A keyword rich title for your page</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="[enter a list of search terms or phrases that people would search for]" />
<meta name="description" content="[An informative and keyword rich description]" />
These tags need to be placed between your <head> and </head> tags of your page. If you are using a content management system for your website, there should be options for changing the metadata for an article or content item. Each page should have relevant entries in these three metadata fields.
Once you know your keywords and description, write your article using as many of the keywords as you can within your page. Go back and tweak your keywords and description. Remember, you must think like someone who wants to find your page, not the page author to come up with appropriate values in these two fields. The title is equally important. Try to put some of your important keywords in your page title. Your title is actually indexed at a higher level than the description. Don't just put in a generic title, it won't get people's (or google's) attention!
Step 4: Prepare a Social Media marketing strategy
What you want is traffic. You have heard that if your site is in google, then you will get traffic. Sorry to burst your bubble, this just isn't the case. "If you build it, they will come", right? Nope. You need to spread the word. By having a properly thoughtout marketing plan on how you are going to get your name and products/services out there, you need to focus on providing value to people, making relationships, general business networking. The more people you talk to, the better traffic your site will get. This is where the social media sites come in.
Sites like Facebook and twitter aren't just for teenagers or family members anymore. They are viable marketing vehicles to allow you to interact with your prospects. Further, these sites are absolutely loved by google. In the old days of the internet, if you didn't have a website, you were "old school". Now, just having a website is "old school". If you aren't hooked up with twitter, facebook or linked in, you are in the dark ages. A companies website is actually quite meaningless to a lot of people, unless they are already interested in your products and services.
Using the social media sites, you gain an incredible advantage of extending your reach, putting your links to your site on your profiles (which will in turn improve google's ranking), and start networking. In the old days of marketing, companies thought that if they put an ad in the paper, or on television/radio, that would build their business. This is still true, but is on the decline. The days of mass marketing are coming to a close. People have been so bombarded by useless ads they just tune out, so far so that your window of opportunity to catch their attention using "push style" marketing is about 2 seconds. Unless you are extremely creative with your punchy titles or graphics, you have a challenge ahead of you.
A better, and far more effective way of getting customers now is to get to know them. The world is changing. Business are focusing on better customer service (yet their phone system is a robot??). Customer service means that you cater for your customer's needs, not your own. The social networks are an incredible way of doing just that (if used right).
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