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How do I do it? Very thoroughly, and there are many steps involved. There's an organized compendium of SEO knowledge on my site. Feel free to browse through that, or read below for a summary of the steps involved in bringing more traffic to the average web site.
Consultation
First we'll discuss your particular situation - what has been done so far, your budget, etc., and determine the most effective strategy for your site. I offer a free 15-minute consultion to potential clients, and usually engage in a longer discussion once they have signed on.
Monitor site traffic
You should monitor your site traffic to see how many visitors your site and each page in it are getting, how long they're staying, whether they're returning, and what search terms they're using to find you. This last point is important from the outset because it will help us to develop the key word phrase list we'll need to increase your site traffic. Many hosting services include free regularly-updated reports on your site traffic. If they don't, I'll set up (or encourage you to set up) a service such as WebTrends Live, HitBox, or WebStat. Google Analytics is a great service and it's free.
Develop Key Word Phrase List
We need to know what words and phrases your potential site visitors might use to find you. Each page in your web site, and each additional page we may create to attract visitors, should be focussed on (optimized for) one or two key words or phrases. You will also need this list in order to register with the pay-per-click services. For a more detailed discussion of this topic, see my "Key Words" article.
Two categories of search engine marketing
There are two general categories of search engine marketing:
- "Pay-per-click" services, and
- Organic search - the "free" listings on the main part of the search results pages.
The first gives your site a quick (but potentially costly) traffic boost, while the second, if handled correctly, will yield long-term free traffic. We'll consider them in that order.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Services
Pay-per-click services allow you to bid on relevant key word phrases. If you bid high enough and you ad is written so as to attact clickthrougs, your listing will appear above your competitors' listings when someone searches for one of your phrases. Your account is debited only if the searcher clicks on your ad and arrives at your site.
There are hundreds of Pay Per Click services. Most of them are worthless and many are total rip-offs. The two biggest legitimate ones are:
- Google's AdWords program results in the green ad boxes you see near the right border of your page when you search in Google. Minimum bid, 5¢. These ads are also fed to:
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- and over 50% of the Media Metrix Top 100 that show advertising—sites that reach over 80% of U.S. Internet users
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- Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) - Yahoo!, AltaVista, Lycos, Infospace, AskJeeves, c|net and others derive their top listings from the top three (and in some cases the top four or five) YSM listings. (YSM no longer feeds AOL, which now uses Google's AdWords. For an up-to-date chart of search engine alliances, click here) Minimum bid, 10¢.
Although these two pay-per-clicks yield the most traffic, the bidding may be too competitive for some sites. I've seen bids as high as $20 or $30 per clickthrough, although that's rare. Often, a keyword which is going for $4 on one of the above will be going for 25¢ or less on one of the PPCs listed below, or a keyword going for $1 may be going for 2¢-3¢. You won't get as many clickthroughs on these, but at least you'll be able to afford those you do get. On the other hand, if your key words are relatively obscure, like "flow meter calibration," or regionally specific, like "Seattle bathroom remodeling," you may not get enough clickthroughs on the lesser PPCs to use up your initial deposit, while you may be in the #1 position in YSM and AdWords for the minimum bid, and get a fairly decent stream of traffic.
- Miva - Supplies top listings to Dogpile, MetaCrawler, c|net, Infospace, and Mamma.com. Minimum deposit, $25; minimum bid, 5¢.
- Kanoodle - Supplies c|net, as well as 10,000+ minor search services. Minimum deposit, $50; minimum bid, 5¢. Kanoodle now supplies political and financial PPC ads to CBS MarketWatch.
- Enhance Interactive - Supplies listings to Excite, Verizon, Webcrawler, NBC, and metacrawler. Minimum deposit, $50; minimum bid, 3¢.
There are other issues to consider with PPC, such as click fraud and content match. For a more detailed discussion on this topic, see my article on pay-per-clicks.
Conversion Tracking
It's easy to spend a fortune on pay-per-clicks, so if your site sells products or you can assign a value to a conversion, such as a newsletter signup, you will benefit greatly by tracking your ROI (return on investment). This is done by tracking visitors to determine what key words they clicked on and whether enough of them are purchasing your products to more than pay for the PPC expenses you're incurring. This is called Conversion Tracking. There are various ways to accomplish it. I sometimes use a service called Atlas OnePoint which allows you to track conversions, cost-per-acquisition, and ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) by keyword, position, and search engine on over 22 PPC engines. This service allows you to manage your PPC campaigns and bids from a central interface, and shows you how each keyword – by position – is performing for you in each search engine. Thus you can save money and increase sales by knowing which keywords are working for you and which are not. If this sounds like an ad, it's because I lifted some of Atlas's ad copy and revised it a bit. Goodle Adwords and YSM each offer a free conversion tracking service.
"Organic" Listings
You don't have to pay Google and the other search engines to be included in their listings. But you do have to pay me - or someone ;-) - to do the things that will ensure that your site is found when someone searches for one of your key words. Or do those things yourself. These include:
Optimize existing site pages
I optimize the existing pages within your site and the links between them (usually without changing their appearance) so that they'll rank higher in the search engines. No one page can be optimized for all key words on all search engines. Usually, a page should be optimized for no more that three key word phrases. If none of your pages suitably represent some of your important key words, new pages should be created to do so.
Increase Link Popularity
Google and other search engines attach great importance to link popularity. If a site related to yours, itself well-placed in the search engines, links to your site, especially if the link contains your primary key word phrase, your search engine rankings will improve significantly, especially for that phrase. It's nearly impossible to rank well in Google or stay in the Yahoo Search Engine at all if you don't have good link popularity. Google prioritizes their crawl based upon the number and quality of links pointing to a page. It appears that when you submit a page via Google's submission form, all that does is count as a "link" for purposes of crawl priority. Googlebot (Google's spider) should get to you eventually because there is now a "link" to you, but it would get to you faster if it found more of them (i.e., links to your site). It is also likely that Google will explore your site more deeply (index more of your pages) if your link popularity is strong.
Some webmasters seem to think that the more links you have pointing back to your homepage, the higher your ranking in the search engines. In reality, it is the quality and relevancy of the links pointing back to you, more than the quantity of links, that matters. Websites listed at the top of the search engines do not always have thousands of backlinks pointing to them. They may have only a dozen or so quality backlinks.
One way to get backlinks is to set up a themed reciprocal link directory on your site. This means that you link to sites related to yours in exchange for their linking to you. Reciprocal linking should be thoughtful and intentional, and with your end users (not the search engines) in mind. If you request a link swap with an unrelated website for the sole purpose of "building up numbers" you are engaging in a misguided task. If I were to create such a directory for you, I would not contact potential link partners in a shotgun fashion. I always stay focused on quality, relevant websites for your links or resources pages.
Although reciprocal linking still works, some SEO authorities suspect that such links may be devalued by the search engines, because they are usually set up to boost search engine rankings. A great way have web sites link to you without having to reciprocate is to write and distribute articles. Many of my clients have been doing this lately with my encouragement and assistance, and with good results. Web sites are looking for content, and hundreds of directories have arisen which organize and archive articles that any site may use to augment their content, in exchange for a link to the author's site. I have a group of professional writers, who are also old friends, available to write articles for this purpose, as well as to write copy for your site if you need it. My job is to distribute these articles. I used to use Article Submitter Pro for this, and it has evolved into a pretty good piece of software, but I have found that it is much more efficient to use a service called Article Marketer. More about each of these on my SEO Software Review page.
Want to see who's linking to you or another site? Use this search string in Google:
www.yoursite.com -site:www.yoursite.com
Directory Submissions
There are many free and paid directories. The free ones tend to have low Google PageRank but over time, they may develop respectable PageRank and it's worth getting a link from them. When this happens, they very often switch to a paid model, and existing sites are grandfathered in. I use a service to submit to free directories. I maintain and continually refine a list of the best paid directories. I submit to these for many of my clients. It can cost as much as $1800 in fees to submit to all of them, plus my time, so many clients spread this out over time and include it in their monthly budget. If this is beyond your budget, we can consider submitting to the most important ones. The most important is:
- Yahoo!
It used to be that sites in the Yahoo! directory were displayed prominently in Yahoo's search results. But now Yahoo! shows results from its spider-fed database. In a round-about way, a Yahoo! listing is still valuable, because it tends to boost your rankings through improved link popularity, which should boost your rankings in Yahoo! Businesses must pay an annual fee of $299 to have their site included. If that's small change for your company, go ahead and submit to Yahoo!, but there are cheaper ways of building link popularity. Non-profit sites can submit for free, but may wait months and still not be accepted.
The most important free directory, which I would submit to rather than use a service, is:
- The Open Directory Project is very important as it is the directory used by Google, AOL Search, AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, Netscape Search, etc. Here are some tips on submitting to the ODP, or DMOZ, as it is sometimes called: With DMOZ, I don’t worry too much about which category is going to get the most traffic. I don’t think that’s possible to determine, and the main value of being in DMOZ is the legitimacy it confers upon your site and the resultant ranking boost in Google and other SE’s. So I just try to find the most relevant category. If there are several, then I look at a couple of criteria. Does the category have an editor? (You can check this at the bottom of the page.) If it doesn’t, the submission will come to the attention of the editor in the category next up in the hierarchy. If you have to move several steps up the hierarchy to find an editor, chances are that editor is going to be swamped, and may not attend to your submission for a LONG time. Another consideration is the PageRank of the page and the number of links on it. You want to favor pages with higher PageRank and fewer links. But again, relevance of the category is the primary consideration. If your site isn’t relevant to the category, the editor isn’t going to appreciate your submitting it there and may reject it.
Your Yahoo and ODP listings will have a very important impact on your link popularity, which is critical to achieving high rankings in Google.
Build additional keyword-optimized pages
Pages optimized to rank highly for a particular key word or phrase are sometimes known as "doorway" pages. This term now has a negative connotation, as search engine specialists and others created millions of nearly-identical pages, often hundreds for a small web site, which cluttered the search engine databases. Consequently, search engines now attempt to detect such pages and penalize sites for using them. Search engines like pages with genuine, unique content. If your site does not contain pages suitable to optimize for some of your important keywords, you or I can create new content pages or I can recommend a copywriter, and then I can optimize these pages for specific key words.
Conclusion
This was an overview of some of the most important point. There is a mind-boggling list of things to consider, and not all apply to every site, so each project is unique.
Maintenance Program
There are several important tasks which should be performed monthly in order to get the maximum benefit from your investment in search engine optimization. Click here to read about these.
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