YOUR BEST PROSPECTS ARE SEARCHING FOR YOU!

You’ve built a great Website. It’s strategically sound, professionally designed, and quickly meets the needs of various types of site visitors. Congratulations! Now what?

A recent Forrester Research report estimates that 80% of overall Web site visits begin in a search engine or directory service. Why is this so significant? Because it means your prospects are no longer waiting for you to find and sell to them. Instead, they are finding you, and your competitors, instantly via Google, Yahoo!, MSN and other search engines. In this new environment, by the time your phone rings, or you receive an online inquiry, your prospect has often already decided that yours may be the best company for them. Their business is now yours to lose. This concept is so important that it needs repeating. Today’s consumers buy, they do not wait to be sold!

Every minute of every day, the Web is teeming with millions of searches, people actively looking for products, services or information. Getting these motivated searchers to your site can obviously have a dramatic impact on your bottom line. The best part is that, aside from any investment you may choose to make in professional assistance — it’s free! As your website begins to become effectively optimized for high search engine rankings, the increased traffic won’t cost you any more, no matter how many new visitors you attract.

The results of optimization efforts can be accurately measured and tracked, allowing you to test different strategies and tactics, and quantify the results to a high degree, including ultimate conversion rates and outstanding, measurable ROI. You’ll be able to compare how your site performs against your competition. And you’ll be able to measure your ROI with precision, making Search Engine Optimization perhaps the most powerful marketing tool ever.

But the fact is that few Internet searchers ever read beyond the first page of search engine results. So what steps can you take to help your site consistently occupy a top position in the search engine rankings for searches related to your business? The answers can be both stunningly simple and mind-numbingly complex.

WHAT’S IN A WORD? UNDERSTANDING HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK.

People communicate with each other in a variety of ways. But we all search the

Web using the same basic communication tool: words. And understanding how the various search engines match up Web pages with the keywords their users enter is the first step in optimizing your site’s performance results.

Search engines use automated software programs known as “spiders” (because they “crawl the Web”) to find Web pages, which are then evaluated and ranked. While their methods and mathematical ranking algorithms differ, what’s important is what they all have in common. Their spiders can’t see Flash animations, they don’t react to colors or graphic design, they can’t watch streaming video, — so they focus on the words on the Web pages they “crawl,” as well as how those words are structured within the body of the text, and the HTML code of the page. What words are used on the page, whether they’re part of a link to another page, how unique they are when compared with other keywords, and how often they appear on a particular page. While I have deliberately oversimplified this description of a complex process, the takeaway idea is this: both content and context matter greatly when trying to achieve high search engine rankings.

So where do you start? Keyword research can show you what terms your competitors are using, and whether or not they would also be effective for you. It can also help you build a list of potential keywords to incorporate into the text of your site, and most importantly, determine which words and phrases will be most profitable and effective for you. Beyond the words themselves, how you use them — in headings, titles, links, subheads, etc. — and how they relate to the other words on the page also has a direct effect on their importance in a search engine’s ranking of your web pages.

A full knowledge of the most effective keywords and phrases for your industry and how to use them can also help you determine their value in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing (more on this later), comparing overall search volume with the relevance to your target audience, again to ensure maximum ROI.

Example: If you owned a barbershop, it’s logical that potential customers might search the keyword “barbershop” when looking for you, right? But how would you weed those customers out from people searching for information on the popular “Barbershop” movies or TV series? Or those seeking information on barbershop quartets? If instead you optimized for less obvious terms such as “haircut” or “hair styling,” you’re results would probably be more appropriate.

A complete understanding of the most effective keywords and phrases for your particular industry and a list of the words and phrases your prospects are using to search for you are a crucial first step that can bring literally thousands of new visitors to your site.

Part 2 in this series can be found here, be sure to subscribe to this feed to stay up to date. If you would like to learn how MetroCreate can help you increase your website's exposure via SEO, send us a note today