This article is part 1 of 3 in a series written by Matt Walker, VP Technology Services for the SBA Network. You may contact him at mwalker@sbanetwork.org with any questions on the issues raised.
Facing an ever changing economy, businesses are spending more resources online now than ever before. As with the economy, the techniques that are most effective online are also evolving on a constant basis. Many businesses find themselves facing diminishing returns for their online marketing efforts.
If this describes your business, there are three areas on which to focus to see improvement:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Pay-Per-Click Marketing
- Internet Viral Marketing
When your prospects are looking for information on the Internet, they most likely start with a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. When they enter what they are looking for, they are presented with a list of websites that match their criteria, and some ads that are targeted toward their search terms. The three techniques mentioned above can help make sure that your site is one that attracts visitors.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making changes to your website for the purpose of making search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) rank your site higher for a specific term. As a brief example, if you search on Google for “small business coaching”, there are 724,000 possible results. Our website ranks 9th out of these possible matches, due to our SEO efforts on this term. For a more specific search such as “small business coach southern california”, we are ranked 2nd out of 452,000 results.
How did we achieve this? There are five major areas on which we’ve spent our efforts:
- Getting and Staying Listed
- Optimizing Content
- Engaging Link Partners
- Testing
- Statistical Analysis
Warning- the below content may be too technical for some readers. If this is you, don’t feel bad- you can e-mail me for answers to any questions you have about these techniques at mwalker@sbanetwork.org. We are also presenting a hands-on Internet Marketing Workshop on November 7th in Long Beach, CA. At this workshop, we will be teaching how to implement these techniques. Contact Cory Halbardier atcory@sbanetwork.org to get more details about this event.To get your site listed and keep it listed, your site needs to be found by the appropriate search engines. For the most important search engine (Google), you can start by listing your site in the Open Directory that Google uses to seed many of its searches. Go to www.dmoz.org, find an appropriate category, and use the submission form on the site to ask for its inclusion. To keep your site listed, on your website you should have an XML sitemap- this is a file that lists all the pages you wish to have Google index and how recently they have been updated. To learn more about the use of site maps and Google’s guidelines, go to: www.google.com/webmasters/tools
Now you should focus on optimizing your content. Your pages should discuss the terms for which you are trying to get ranked. Relevant content will make your site rank higher than sites with content that doesn’t closely match the search terms. One area to make sure you address are the title tags used on your pages. These should be unique, descriptive, and reflect the content on the page. The page title is what a potential site visitor will see first when your site is listed on a search engine, and influences your site rankings.
You also need to engage in a link building campaign. Having other websites link to yours is how search engines decide the importance of your website. Google uses these links to assign a “page rank” to each page in its index. The more inbound links you have, the higher your site will be listed in search results. Having sites with high page ranks link to your site helps more than sites with low page ranks linking to yours. There are thousands of resources you can find online to help you find link trade partners, paid inbound links, and automated software to manage the link building process. Your link building campaign should be ongoing for as long as your site exists. Inbound links are generally considered the most important factor in having a highly ranked site.
If you’ve done a good job on these 4 tasks, you should have some traffic coming to your site. Now you need to analyze that traffic to discover trends about your site. Statistical analysis can show you which pages on your site attract the most visitors and which are indexed the most by search engines. You can then use this knowledge to fine-tune your efforts on the other pages on your site, helping improve the search ranking for every page you maintain.
Next week we’ll explore Pay-Per-Click Marketing, and how it can be used to attract prospects to your website.
For detailed advice on any of the techniques mentioned, or for an analysis of your website and some specific recommendations on what you can do, please contact Matt Walker atmwalker@sbanetwork.org.
For more information about the Internet Marketing Workshop being held November 7th in Long Beach, go to: http://www.sbanetwork.org/classes/upcoming_classes.asp or contact Cory Halbardier at cory@sbanetwork.org.