by: Debbi Cunnington
Most effective search engine marketing strategies consider a few key aspects of search engine optimization.
1. The target market: It's important to make certain that your key words target the market you wish to visit your site. Having an extremely high ranking on a certain key word that brings tons of visitors to your site, with very few sales (low conversion rate) is not effective search engine marketing. Make certain that you target your visitors.
For example, if you are selling antique brass buttons, that is a very specific item for a specific market. You could try to use the key word 'buttons' but you will get a much wider variation in the quality of your visitors. Someone searching on 'button' could be looking for nearly anything related to a button. Whereas, if you target your key phrase 'antique brass buttons' you may get fewer visitors, but they will be extremely targeted. Effective search engine marketing is all about targeting your market.
2. Keyword Effectiveness Index: Definition (courtesy of WebCEO) - The Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) compares the Daily World Searches with the number of competing Web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are good enough so you can use them while optimizing your site.
Keywords with the highest KEI combine attractive popularity and less competition. It means there are all chances you will get a high ranking, if you use these keywords for optimizations.
Basically, the KEI is based on the number of daily world searches and the number of competing sites. The higher the KEI of a key word/phrase, the better it's use on your web site.
For example, the phrase 'web design' has over 35,000 daily world searches and over 17 million competing sites (stats courtesy of WebCEO). While 'web design' is clearly a great search term based on the number of people typing it into a search engine, the fact that there are already over 17 million competing sites using that key phrase make it a poor choice. It's possible that some of those 17 million competing sites will dump 'web design' as a key phrase, which will increase the KEI in the future. That's why effective search engine marketing involves monitoring and changing your site's content and key phrases as necessary, to get your website ranking position as high as it can be!
3. Meta tags & web site content: Once you've chosen your key words/phrases, it's time to add those to your site. The first place to add your key word is the title of your page. Many web sites choose to make the title of their page the name of their business, and that's a poor search engine marketing strategy. The first meta tag that the spiders 'see' is the title. It should contain your key word and omit any 'stop' words, such as 'and, or, the' etc. These words are typically omitted from search engine results and should also be omitted from your meta tags.
Other meta tags you must consider are: classification, description and key word. Google relies heavily on it's own algorythm, which takes into account back links and the validity of the back links, as well, and optimization for that engine must take those links into consideration for effective search engine marketing.
There are other design 'rules of thumb' that should be considered, such as:
Java script
Alt tags
Image names
File and folder names
Text descriptions
There are many more items to consider, but this should get you started thinking about search engine optimization for your business.
Contact Cimmeron Studios for more information about increasing your website ranking position and effective search engine marketing.