Website Marketing Success Secrets

The secret to website marketing success is really very simple. Create pages on your site that give real people what they want and at the same time, give the search engines what they want.

Simple? yes. Easy? No!!

First let's consider what people want. And not just any people, either -- YOUR people. Your clients, your prospects, your referral partners. What do they want?

INFORMATION!!

And where do they look for that information? Online, of course. And if you provide the information they need, they will keep coming back.

Online searching is a phenomenon that is growing daily. For example, Google gets well over 200 million queries a day, and it is just one of many different search engines.

Making the People Happy

So let's say someone searches and finds your site. What information should you be providing so they won't quickly click away? What will make your website "bookmarkable?"

There are several general things you should consider:

• Your pages should load quickly. If a webpage hasn't loaded in 6 or 8 seconds, many people will click away.
• Your pages should be easy to navigate. Your visitors should be able to easily find what they are looking for.
• You should have live links. Make sure all the links on your pages go where you intend them to go. Check them regularly, particularly if they link outside your site.
• Your information should be current. If you mentioned a holiday special and the holiday is over, change the information.
• Your information must be valuable to your target market. Yes, you can sell on your website, but in the long run you will do better if you work on building a relationship first.
• Decide on your "voice." What image are you projecting? Upbeat, formal, politically correct, casual, authoritative, or companionable... YOU have to decide, but then stick with it.

These are some of the basic technical and content issues you should consider when you begin planning for website marketing success. These are areas that will make your human visitors comfortable. Now let's look at your non-human visitors...

Making the Spiders Happy

Search Engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista and MSN, have a process they use to rank websites. In the most basic of terms, they use "spiders" to "crawl" around the Internet, taking note of what's happening... For example, who is linking to whom, what changes have been made on different sites, and who is getting more and longer visits.

It is a complex process, and the results are evaluated with constantly changing mathematical formulas. Then when you Google a term and get the results, the ones the spiders liked best appear earliest on the list.

The process for getting your website to rank very high is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, and is very complex. There are, however, some basics that anyone with a website can and should do, and just paying attention to these few tips will improve your page rank.

• Do your keyword research. Identify keywords that are profitable. In other words, look for keywords where the demand (the number of searches) exceeds the supply (the number of sites supplying that specific information).
• Use your meta tags. Make sure you are using your primary keyword in your page title, description, and title.
• Use a limited number of solid keywords. Don't call everything you mention on the page a "keyword."
• Use the "alt" tag for your pictures and graphics.
• Use your keywords in your text -- at the beginning, near the end, and somewhere in the middle.
• Use text links -- link to other pages on your site and to other sites.

Including those basics consistently on all your pages will make the spiders happy, and you will reap the benefit by gaining a higher ranking in the Search Engines. It probably won't happen overnight (if it does, let me know!!) but it will get you started on the road to website marketing success.