6 Step SEO Program

6 Steps to SEO

Website Marketing Training:

‘Tis the season to be holding onto our marketing pennies, and spending them as wisely as possible. In many cases, you’re in a position where you are cutting, if not completely eradicating your Advertising expenditures. In many cases, it is perfectly understandable, but like all businesses, online or otherwise, we are striving to get people in the door, and a great place to do that (outside of road-frontage for brick and mortar businesses), for a very reasonable cost, is the through the internet.

Internet marketing is often called "Search Engine Optimization". It is essentially the act of helping your website to "talk" to search engines (like Google or Yahoo), so these search engines understand what it is your website is trying to say...For instance. If you sell tennis shoes in Indiana, you want to ensure Google knows exactly what you do, and this training is designed to help you to start doing just that.

Search Engine Optimization will help you to start tweaking your website to what these search engines want to see. These techniques take a little time and effor if you want to start them yourself, but they will help you to capture a greater number of prospective clients and maximimize your website exposure.

So, you have a website (or maybe you don’t). Perhaps it looks stunning; Perhaps not.

The important question here is, what kind of traffic are you receiving from the website, and are there some areas of opportunity that you can take advantage for little-to-no expense?

This doesn’t mean your web-designer has done anything wrong.

Their job is to design, and that is their specialty.

Our specialty is to get your website in front of people through proper marketing.

Granted, if you are not happy with your current website design, whether in appearance or (more importantly), delivery of your message, Simplified Marketing Solutions has diversified with graphic specialists that can offer website creation and design at a very reasonable cost.

 

First, let’s look at why it is important to take a serious look at online marketing for generating website traffic:

1. Did you know that the Internet is still growing at a phenomenal rate…As a matter of fact, the online “audience” is growing faster than online advertisers per “The Economist” Magazine – November issue. Online advertising will still pick up over this recession for the sheer fact that it is less expensive, and can provide stronger results.

2. Did you know that 80% of Americans have physically made a purchase online?

1. (50% of purchases even happen while people are at work!)

3. Did you know that Internet Advertising costs pennies on the dollar in comparison to traditional “analog”, or direct means, such as newspaper/radio/mailers, etc…

1. We would certainly not say that traditional means of advertising is “bad”, but it is important - better yet, critical - in this day and age to get the “low hanging fruit first. In this case, it is most certainly in online marketing.

4. Did you know that you can physically“Target” a specified area you wish to advertise?

1. Let’s say you are selling a product in a defined territory. Lawnmowers in Elkhart In. perhaps? You don’t want customers from California calling you in New York, and you certainly can minimize that by targeting specific marketing areas.

1. This can be done a few different ways, and we will go into more detail later on…

So, in summary, you can rest assured that 75% of the potential buyers in your area are on the internet, and likely looked there first. Whoever shows up first gets the first opportunity with the customer, and that should be your business.

 

Step1 - Domain Double Check

1. Check your title, or domain name. You Web Address, such as "Simplified-Marketing-Solutions.com, is commonly referred to as a Domain Name, a URL, or a website address. Search engines put a massive amount of weight (or significance) on your web address. Basically, it is just about the most important thing search engines have for matching the right search to the right website.

   For instance: Let's say you sell lawnmowers, and own a company called Bobs Quality Lawnmowers, in Elkhart Indiana. Let's examine assume you choose a website, such as this:

1. “Bobsqualitylawnmowers.com” (all one word) - A search engine like Google would not understand that this one long word "bobsqualitylawnmowers" is acually three, seperate words. Where would it know to put the spaces? Unless someone typed the whole thing into Google as one solid word, chances are you are losing a tremendous amount of potential exposure, just due to this...

1. This solution to this is actually very simple…Separate with dashes (you may have to buy a new $7.00 domain name for the year, but well worth it…

Bobs-quality-lawnmowers.com would now be seen as three separate words (dashes are seen as spaces in search engines), and one “phrase”. In other words, now a search engine will see “Bobs” “Quality” and “Lawnmowers”. It will also see “quality lawnmowers” as a phrase within your website name. Very important to the website marketing process... A prospect will be much more likely to find your name this way.

To maximize your search engine optimization techniques, it is actually better to take “Bob’s” out of the site name entirely, and use something like the city or state you are in, such as “Elkhart-quality-lawnmowers.com”, but if that is part of your business name, you may not be in a position to be able to change it.

 

Step 2 - Add Content

Repetitive Content is extremely important for increasing traffic and website marketing. It is also important to have that content written in legible sentences. If you do business in Elkhart, IN. and your business is Bob's Quality Lawnmowers, you want those specific words and phrases (and similar ones, such as push mowers, riding mowers, riding lawnmowers, lawn cutting equipment, lawn maintenance, etc...to repeat several times throughout the page, and subsequent pages you want to attract people. Make sure you also have repeating content relating to the Brand of lawnmowers you carry as well. It is also very important that you have the “area” (city, state, counties, regions) you sell lawnmowers in listed several times throughout the page.

Here is an example of the type of content you may want appearing throughout one of your webpages.

1. Example: “Bobs quality lawnmowers have been selling quality lawnmowers in the Elkhart, and Elkhart county area for several years. Our Elkhart lawnmower and push mower customers have been pleased with our quality riding mowers, and push mowers. Our John Deer mowers have been sold from our Elkhart store for 10 yrs, and our customers have been pleased with the quality, and service you can only get from Bobs quality lawnmowers! Our customers have recommended us to several of their Elkhart friends and families. We use our John Deer model riding lawnmowers at our home, and we work with only the most quality lawnmower manufacturers…” This is just an example, and certainly overdone, but notice how many times those “keywords” came up on this “web-page”. Now, if someone types in “Elkhart quality lawnmowers”, the search engine will notice you have those specific words re-occurring several times throughout the page, and will put more “weight” on it, likely putting you in a much better position…

2. Caution: do not smash content together, or it will cause a negative impact on your site. It needs to be in legible sentences, and their is a fine line between too much content redundancy, and not enough. Search engines are likely to literally trigger a red-flag on keywords that are pressed to close together. The example above was certainly pushing it…

 

Step 3 - Updates and Specials

1. Updates and specials:

1. Search engines check your website approximately once every couple months. It is good general practice to get in the habit of changing, or updating website content. Content updates are important, because search engines send "robots" (commonly referred to as "googlebots") through your site to check for changes, and updates. If you don’t have new content when these googlebots come through your site, or information has not changed, that is okay the first time. If you continue to let your site sit idle, they will begin to notice that nothing is happening, and they can downgrade your ranking until you are seen as a dead-site. Traffic to your site will slow in conjunction with that.

2. The good thing is that this process also works in reverse…If they see updated information, then this may help your ranking to continue to increase, resulting in increased website traffic.

2. One consideration is to develop a “specials” page, newsletter page, updates, or something to that matter. Even letters from happy customers, as that can get larger over time as you collect letters of recommendation. There are numerous things you can do to ensure that your website is being updated. Every few weeks or so, just change em’ up, or add to the information. Your web-person should have no problem adding or changing a few paragraphs or pages occasionally.

3. It is also important to understand that this takes time for search engines to physically see what is going on.

 

Step 4 - Pictures and Alt-Tags

1. Pictures and Alt-tags:

   1. Pictures are a critically importance for customers that are visiting your site. It ads credibility, distinguishes you from your competition, showcases your product offering, etc...Pictures give your customer a reason to buy, or at least, visit your location (if you are running a brick & mortar business). You must ensure you are showing your inventory online. Don’t worry about your pics if they weren’t professionally taken, as many of your competitors are not willing to take the time to post their own pictures anyway, which give you an advantage. Not only that, but you are almost always better off showing a "weak picture," than no picture at all. It all comes down to advertising, and you answer many questions, with a picture!

   2. Important Note: Search engines don’t read pictures. There is no value to your pictures on search engines unless they are “alt-tagged”. This is a huge area that a great many web-designers miss. I will explain below what it is and why it is important, but first, take a quick look at this example…

   3. Here is an example of Alt Tagging:

   1. Often, when customers are searching for "Mobile Homes", this website seems to appear nationally, and consistently. One of the reasons (among many), is that they take advantage of "Alt Tagging" their pictures. Look at the this Screen Shot:

   

   Notice when I put my cursor over the picture of the grill w/the food, a yellow banner popped up that read “quality modular home lifestyle”. These “Alt-tags” allows a search engine to physically “Read” a picture, and understand what that picture is all about. The reason this is important, is because this means you can place more "content" on a page, where a traditional picture is just taking up room! Now you can find a place to add phrases like Mobile Home, Modular Home, Quality Home, Manufactured Housing, Quality mobile home, etc…That is a big deal, and a big opportunity to get more repetitive phrases into your webpage. Notice the above "Alt Tag and look closely at how many relevant keywords they entered into that one small section. Try not to repeat the exact same phrase to the letter, too often. Change it up, just a little each time between pictures. Search engines will often discard exact duplicate writings...

 

Step 5 - Inbound Links

Inbound links are basically having larger websites “linked” into you. Although there is certainly debate as to whether this truly helps your “rank”, (although most still feel it does), it is true that these larger sites can help you generate more traffic.

Many Directories offer free listings on their websites to entice you to list with them. Many of the more prominent directories, such as yellowpages.com, superpages.com, etc...Are very good for getting your company noticed. Although many of these directories used to submit your links to search engines, many do not do that anymore for a variety of reasons. It is still important to get listed in those directories to promote "exposure" of your site to the millions of people that are directed into viewing those directories.

It is important to understand that there are many companies that you can pay to "auto-submit" your site to multiple directories. In many cases they promise 800+ directories at a time. Although this sounds enticing, we highly encourage scrutiny. Many times these are auto submissions to "link-farms" which may deteriorate your site ranking. Non of these autosubmissions may have anything to do with the type of product you sell or service you offer, so you may often end up throwing loads of money out of the window for services such as this.

Step 6 - Tracking

a. Where do people find your business?
b. What pages do they frequently visit, and what pages do they traditionally stop visiting?
c. How many visitors have visited before, and are re-visiting?
d. When do you normally get the traffic?
e. How many “hits” do you get per day, per month, per hour?
f. If you knew where people left your site, you would know which pages are “causing them to lose interest”, and you would know what tweaks to make to ensure they go to your “contact page”…

This is all very important information, and did you know you can get it for free.

How valuable would that be to your business?

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