It's All Geek To Me - July 18th 2003

Things are changing fast in the search engine world and it sure looks they will continue to do so, especially when you consider some of the recent mergers and acquisitions.

The one thing all businesspeople should know about engines is that what used to be impossible to buy is now for sale - you can just buy your way into any engine you'd like.

This issue discusses the steps you can take and what you should be working on to make sure your site is getting the traffic it needs to drive your business. This, like most marketing efforts, is a never-ending task.

If you have an idea for something you'd like to see here in the future just send me an e-mail at ross@kisscomputing.com.

A few months ago we published a newsletter about the death of the meta tag and how this phenomenon is affecting everyone’s search engine position. In this issue, we’ll follow up on our previous article and offer you some concrete tips that you can put into use today to start increasing the number of people who are coming to your website.

More Traffic = More Sales

First, let’s get ourselves motivated a little. I know its July. I know its 4 million degrees outside with 1200% humidity. I know the last thing you want to think about is “website search engine position analysis and enhancement”. But unfortunately for you, the dog days of summer are the perfect time for working on this. Your competition is off enjoying their vacation, and if you act now you can slip right under their noses to claim those top positions. So perk up, turn on the A/C if you have to, and get excited about more leads, sales, results, or whatever it is you’re looking for from your website.

Step 1 – Where am I now?

For those of you who keep a close eye on your statistics (and I know you all do ;-), you probably have noticed a distinct decline in your traffic over the last 6 months or so, particularly if you are not involved in any ongoing internet marketing efforts. If you don’t regularly monitor your statistics, you’ve got some catching up to do. I recommend going back and reviewing the last 3 months of traffic at a minimum.

In every statistics report there is an abundance of completely useless information. Here’s the short list of what you need to look at in these reports for our purposes today:

1. Number of Unique Visitors per month – this is sometimes referred to as “sessions” depending on your statistics package. Please note that this is NOT hits.
   
2. Top 10 Referrers – sometimes called “referring urls” this will look like a long list of web addresses from other sites, not yours.
   
3. Number of Visitors from each of the Top 10 Referrers

If …

• you have less than 1000 visitors per month - or -
• you don’t have any search engines on your list of Top 10 Referrers - or -
• the number of visitors coming from the search engines in your list of Top 10 Referrers is less than 50 per engine per month

…then you urgently need to work on your search engine position right now.

Step 2: Find the weakest spot and start there

Search engines are stupid. They can only list your site if they can “see” what your site is about. What search engines can “see” is text – that’s it. So, if its really critical that you come up when someone searches for “red socks” and the phrase “red socks” does not appear several times in your home page copy, then you should start here.

Go through the pages of your website and determine what they are about; then rework the copy to tie into certain key phrases, repeating those phrases up to 4 or 5 times on a given page.

Step 3: Let the engines know you exist

If you’ve never listed your site with any search engines, and no other websites link to your site, then a search engine has no way of knowing your site exists. Even when you’re already listed in some engines, we’ve found that regular re-submission of your site to the search engines will increase your rankings over time.

Make sure your site has been submitted to all the major search engines at least once. If you have never paid money for search engine listing, you are probably not listed in any of the big engines. If it has been more than 3 months since you paid money for search engine listing, its time to redress this issue.

The good news

In a mystical land far, far away website owners paid obnoxious geeks for countless hours of tedious website optimization. Everyone shivered at the thought of meta tags and portal pages, and all was not well.

We are entering a golden age of search engine placement where all things are possible. The once antagonistic search engines have decided to make friends with all us website owners. How’d they do it? By letting us pay to be listed in their search engine.

Any amount of website traffic and desired search engine placement, for any keyword, can be purchased. Paid Inclusion and Cost Per Click advertising has revolutionized internet marketing for the better. Want to be #1 for “cape cod” on Yahoo? No problem, just buy it.

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