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Who Will They Find
If They Don't Find You?

This paper discusses how you can get the most from Search Engines, and how you can help your website gain more visitors, and start working for your business.

This paper may be freely redistributed in its entirety without change or modification. This paper may not be sold, passed off or otherwise used for commercial gain by anyone unless specifically authorised in writing by a director of NETsposure. NETsposure will not accept responsibility for any effects, good or bad, resulting from the implementation or use in any form of any ideas discussed herein.

Why Website Promotion Is Important

As use of the Internet becomes more prevalent throughout businesses and consumers alike, designing a website that is easy to find requires careful planning, detailed knowledge of Search Engines and the necessary information for meaningful research, but is this work necessary?

Once you have made the investment to create a website, you should look to maximise the return that investment gives. Just publishing a website is no longer enough to start attracting more interest, but creating the right website, targeted to catch people interested in your services can produce significant increases in business.

Currently there are over 625,000,000 Internet searches conducted every day world wide or putting it another way, 4¼ billion searches each week. Even if your offering caters for only 1000th of 1% (or 0.00001 %), there are 43,750 searches conducted each week looking for your products or services.

Half of these will be for the American market, which may not be suitable if your products or services are UK only, however even if this is the case, this still leaves 21,875 relevant searches.

Traditional marketing often involves publishing your services or products on a broad scale hoping to find a small percentage of people or businesses who may want what you are offering. By making sure your website is well promoted you can tap into a significant share of over 43,750 people a week who are actively seeking to find you, or your competitors, so who will they find if they don't find you?

The return on investment a good optimisation and promotion programme can provide far exceeds the return you could achieve from almost any other marketing activity.

Website Promotion and Search Optimisation

Well managed website promotion converts your website to a powerful marketing tool that can attracted thousands of people each month, who are specifically looking for the services and products you provide, and can give you an edge over your competition. A successful campaign will consist of the following stages.

Keyword Analysis

Whether you're looking to launch a new website, or increase the visibility of an existing one, the key to a successful website promotion campaign is effective keyword and key phrase selection. Successful keywords need to meet three criteria:

they need to be relevant to the page content
they are words/phrases that people actually use during Internet searches
they are specific enough to ensure relevancy to the search and prevent your pages being lost in a very large list of unrelated search results and ensure a high relevancy to appropriate searchers

You will need to select suitable keywords for each individual web page and research these to identify which ones are used during live Internet searches. You should also gather information about how many pages from other websites are listed for the selected keywords to identify how much competition there will be for top place ranking.

Website Ranking Analysis

For existing websites only, it then helps to understand where it is currently ranked for the chosen keywords. Searches should be conducted using all the primary global and appropriate regional Search Engines and should uncover the following information:

How many pages have achieved 1st place, top 5/10/20 or top 30 ranking
The results page they were listed on
The keywords that were successful in finding them
Which web pages were not found
Where possible which pages are not listed at all
they are specific enough to ensure relevancy to the search and prevent your pages being lost in a very large list of unrelated search results and ensure a high relevancy to appropriate searchers

This will provide the benchmark against which the success of the campaign can be measured, and is also a good indication of the level of ROI you can expect before starting.

Content and Layout Optimisation

For each page, up to three keywords should be selected, and the content then needs to be designed to effectively emphasise the focus on them. Since it is pages that are listed by Search Engines, not websites, each one is an opportunity to maximise the whole website's visibility; Web page content needs to be maximised for both readers and Search Engines, it's no use being found if the users can't clearly understand what you're offering, and it's no use having the best copy ever produced if no-one can find you to read it.

Once the content has been created and/or optimised, you will need to review and modify the page layout and technical design as they both play a vital role in ensuring your pages are gaining the best possible rankings. Suitable use of paragraph headings, emphasis tags, and the structure has an important role to play in helping the search engine understand the main points for each page.

Link Management or Link Building

Link management, when managed correctly, is an important step to increasing your website ranking and traffic. This process builds the number of inbound links from other 3rd party websites to your own. This not only increases website traffic organically, by people following those links, but it also is counted as a 'vote' for your website and some key Search Engines (like Google) place a lot of importance on these.

The danger is that all too easily excessive back links can be perceived as being part of a link farm and possibly result in your website being banned from some search engines . This is why a professional link management program will protect your website's integrity while adding value to the readers, increasing your traffic and increasing your link popularity and so your website ranking. It will also help your website smooth out the fluctuations resulting from changes in Search Engine algorithms which are used to determine the result ranking.

Submission and Validation

The final stage of your website marketing program is to make sure that your pages are submitted to any targeted Search Engines or Internet Directories that do not yet list them, and resubmitted to others to help ensure they are re-indexed. Depending on the nature of the site, and if there is a need to see quick changes in rankings, paid inclusion programs are available from some Search Engines. These programs are explained in the next section.

Paid Inclusion

Paid Inclusion provides the option to speed up the process to get a website listed on some of the main Search Engines used today. Not all Search Engines offer this service however some do most notably Inktomi which, following its acquisition by Yahoo, has been providing the results for all Yahoo Search results since March 2004. Paid Inclusion programs enable the Search Engine Indexing process to be speeded up and ensure that your website will be frequently re-indexed throughout the year; they do not, however, have any impact on how your web pages will be ranked as this is determined based on what was searched for, and how relevant your web pages are perceived to be. Paid Inclusion programs are best used in the following circumstances

New Websites
When a new website has recently been launched these programs will significantly speed up the time for a website to gain initial listing in the search engine indexes and can mean the difference between 3-5 months and 2 weeks delay.

Revamped Websites / Sites with Dynamic Content
In the case where an existing website has been reworked to actively promote products or services using the Internet, these programs represent a great way to get the new content re-indexed quickly and accurately. This is also very beneficial for ensuring sites with dynamic content (i.e. product catalogues held in a database) are frequently re-indexed.

Search Engine Marketing

This activity sits alongside a standard Website Promotion campaign as it offers the only way to 'buy your way to the top' using Pay-per-Click advertising and XML feeds. These techniques are beyond the scope of this document, please refer to website promotion for more details.

Measuring Success

It is then important to track the effect all this has on the ranking of your website. You should regularly review the ranking of your website for your selected keywords. Website Promotion does not give instant results and it is a gradual process of monthly reviews to get up the rankings. Fluctuations up or down should be expected on your route to the top, and for the most part ignored. If you see your pages' ranking start to descend on a persistent basis then this is an indication that something is not right, this could be many things including receiving penalties from search engines that, for whatever reason, rightly or wrongly perceive your not being ethical in your approach to high rankings.

Monthly Website Traffic Analysis

You should also review traffic reports from your website server for all visits to your website, and gather detailed analysis about all aspects of it, including specific information that helps fine tune your website marketing, including:

Which Search Engines your visitors came from
The keywords that were used to find your website
Which were the first pages viewed by your visitors
When each Search Engine last indexed your site
How long your visitors stayed at your site

This information can be used to identify which keywords and pages are the most successful, and which are not. Further optimisation can then be directed at these pages to increase your visibility. These statistics, in particular 'visitor duration', can also be used to check the relevancy of your site and its content for the searches used to find it.

Conclusion

For any business or organisation that is looking to grow by using the web as a marketing tool it is vital that a planned approach to Website Promotion is used. You can no longer rely on chance to get listed near the top of search results and this should form a key part of your marketing strategy.

For more information about this or any other Website Marketing issue please see website promotion or contact .

Who will they find if they don't find you?™

Who Will They Find If They Don't Find You?