Search Engine traffic has always been and continues to be one
of the best ways to drive qualified traffic to a web site - it presents
information about goods and services when the interest level is high
and it can be acted on immediately. Up till now opt-in e-mail marketing
has been an effective complement to search engine ranking campaigns;
but the never-ending deluge of Spam is rapidly ruining the
effectiveness of opt-in e-mail and helping to add luster to the value
and cost-effectiveness of search engine traffic. Unfortunately, the increasing popularity of search engine
ranking methodologies is helping to raise the barriers to entry - as
more businesses, ad agencies and SEO firms concentrate their efforts on
creating highly optimized web sites, the competition for keyword
rankings and qualified traffic is increasing significantly. The rules
are changing rapidly and if you expect to succeed you must deploy a
sophisticated methodology that blends technology and processes. Here is
a list of five bottom line requirements that must be adhered to if you
expect to generate qualified traffic:
Link Strategy: The web is maturing and search engines are
putting more and more emphasis on link popularity or page rank or "PR"
in Google's vernacular; i.e. the number of web sites pointing back to
your own. If you are to be successful you must develop and deploy a
systematic process to establish links to your web site with others that
are in your market segment and setup an outbound "link to" resources
page via your own site. This takes an investment of time and resources
- typically you need between 400-800 links back to your web site to
achieve a good "page ranking." Here is a link to an excellent detailed
article on setting up an effective link popularity strategy:
Website101.com
Keyword Fundamentals: Keywords are the fundamental building
blocks of any search engine ranking campaign - many/many companies
waste significant resources optimizing for keywords that are either
wrong; i.e. not targeted for their market or there is too much
competition and rankings will never be achieved. You must utilize
keywords that are targeted for your market and find those that can
effectively drive page 1-3 rankings - WordTracker Wordtracker.com
has rapidly emerged as the defacto industry standard technology tool
for researching keywords - we've used it for years and highly recommend
this cost-effective and comprehensive service to our clients and
business partners.
Keyword Saturation: Search engine "spiders" or "bots" are
automated software applications that constantly roam the web to assess
what is called "keyword saturation" via web site content (pages) to
identify how a site should be listed in a search engine database. They
typically look for 3-7% usage of keywords versus the text on a specific
page - you must adhere to their standards if you want to achieve
keyword rankings for your selected keywords. And, to further complicate
matters, top tier search engines all have different rules for keyword
saturation - we highly recommend and use this software application to
help us ascertain and setup the correct keyword saturation for our
client's web sites:
Se-optimizer.com
Optimized Content: Highly optimized content is still very
important as far as search engines are considered - the more search
engine optimized content on a web site the better. Search engines
prefer content that is thematically grouped, loads fast, is textual
with minimal graphics, is highly optimized for keywords (keyword
saturation fundamentals are addressed) and incorporates one or two of
your primary keywords for a specific page in the page title.
Site Maps Essential: Site maps are frequently overlooked when search engine ranking processes are deployed. A site map not only serves as a quick reference and/or navigation guide for anyone visiting your web site but it's also used by search engines to "crawl" (the action a spider or bot takes to review your web site) your web site to find pages and links. Make sure you include a basic site map in your optimization plans, it's very important to help search engines navigate through your site.
Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of marketing experience -
he is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc.
