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Drive
Holiday Sales
With Search Engine Visibility
© 2002
by
Paul J. Bruemmer
With the 2002 holiday season fast approaching, it's
important to ensure that your site ranks well in major
search engines. Jupiter Research predicts $13.1 billion
dollars in online sales for November-December. This figure
is 17 percent higher than 2001 holiday sales and represents
32 percent of online spending for the entire year!
The Jupiter report also suggested shoppers will start
spending early this year, up to four weeks before
Thanksgiving. So it's wise to ensure good search engine
visibility to take advantage of the holiday selling season.
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Shoppers
Use Search Engines
Studies of online buying patterns consistently reveal
that the online sale begins with a search engine listing.
Jupiter found that 55 percent of e-commerce transactions
originated from a search engine link. The 10th GVU User
Survey reported 84.8 percent of users find Web pages through
search engines, and 85.7 percent of these are searching with
intent to buy.
How good is your search engine visibility? If it's
lacking, here's what you can do to ensure being found by
online shoppers during the holiday season.
The
Road to Search Engine Visibility
There are two ways to achieve good search engine
visibility, one is through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising,
and the other is through search engine optimization (SEO)
editorial listings.
PPC Advertising: You'll get instant traffic, but
it can prove costly, depending on the popularity of your
keywords. PPC campaigns also require constant tracking and
tweaking to ensure a decent ROI. Here's how to get started
with a PPC campaign.
- Keyword bidding usually starts at $0.05 per click with
a $50 minimum. Create an account online, write your ad,
and voila -- you're listed. You only pay when people
click. Sounds easy, right? But that's only half the
battle You must have a good offer on the landing page to
close the sale.
- When writing your ad, editorial rules vary for
acceptance. Google allows 25 characters in the title and
35 characters each in two lines of description. Overture
limits the number of characters in the title to 40 and
in the description to 190.
- There are copywriting guidelines as well. Google
doesn't like a generic call-to-action like "click
here," so be specific. Overture
likes to see the search term in the title and
description, but doesn't like superlatives, exclamation
points, and unnecessary caps. Both Overture and Google
want your landing page to be relevant to the terms in
your ad.
- You can set a fixed monthly budget for your PPC
campaign. If you exceed your budget before month end,
your listings will drop and reappear next month. Compare
revenues with and without PPC to see if additional
expenditures are warranted.
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SEO Editorial Listings: This takes longer but is
the most cost-effective and longer-lasting approach to
search engine visibility. You can speed up your campaign
with paid inclusion programs (some guarantee a listing in 48
hours) and directory submissions.
- Keyword Research. Start by identifying the
words that your target audience will use to find you by
performing keyword research on the search engines and by
examining your Web logs. Most people use 2 to 5 words in
a search query. WordTracker
is an excellent tool for keyword research and offers a free
trial. Also useful is the Overture Suggestion
Tool.
- Copywriting. Use your strategic keyword phrases
several times in your Web page copy, but don't overdo it
and don't repeat the same word consecutively. Your most
important text is that in your title tags and in the
visible text at the top of each page. This is the first
thing your audience reads so it must be compelling for
customers and keyword-optimized for search engines.
- Site Design Tips. Ensure that your site is
legible with good navigation and consistency in layout.
It should load quickly and permit users to find
information easily. Navigation is particularly important
for both customers and search engines. Search engine
spiders can benefit from a site map (a list of links to
all the important sections of your site). In sum, search
engine spiders like keyword-rich text, navigation that's
easy to crawl, and quality content that attracts
in-bound links.
- Directory Submissions. Submit first to the
directories, namely Yahoo!
and ODP
(Open Directory Project). This is advantageous because
search engine spiders crawl the Web to index sites from
directory databases. LooKSmart
is also an option with PPC pricing.
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- Paid Inclusion. Take advantage of paid
inclusion programs to speed up visibility. You can
submit pages selectively (those you want found), and you
can remove and enter new pages as you see fit. Another
advantage is 48-hour refreshes to reflect site changes,
so you can monitor the impact on traffic and conversions
as you update your site. Popular paid inclusion programs
are offered by AllTheWeb, AltaVista, AskJeeves, Inktomi,
and Lycos.
For instance, Inktomi offers Index
Connect for larger sites with CPC pricing and Search
Submit for an annual fixed-fee depending on number
of pages submitted. This provides good reach with
partners like Overture, MSN, HotBot, LookSmart, About,
Lycos and others. Inktomi also provides good reporting,
with keyword and click-through data from sources like
MSN.
- Manual Submissions. Submit manually to major
search engines like AllTheWeb,
AltaVista,
AOL
Search ( through ODP), AskJeeves,
Google,
Lycos,
and MSN
(through Inktomi or LookSmart). Each engine has its
guidelines, which should be followed closely. Maintain a
record of the dates and details of your submissions.
- Verification. Monitor your listings, which
should start appearing in four to six weeks. If you're
not listed in six weeks, re-submit and check monthly
until you can verify your listings.
- Link Popularity. It's important to have a
number of quality sites linked to yours. This is
accomplished a lot easier if your site is well designed
and displays relevant content. Seek links from sites
offering information of interest to your target
audience.
Track
and Tweak Your Campaign
Track your costs for PPC and SEO editorial listings. As
your campaign progresses, you'll find that many of your
"free" listings will reduce the need for PPC
listings. You might find that an Overture or Google PPC
listing appears in addition to a regular editorial listing.
So cancel the PPC ad, you don't need to appear twice. Once
in place, the editorial listing can last forever. That's the
advantage of SEO over PPC. It takes longer to establish, but
is worth more over time.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Paul J. Bruemmer paul2@web-ignite.com
is the CEO of Web
Ignite, a search engine marketing company founded in
1995. Web-Ignite earned a top grade in the Buyers' Guide to
Search Engine Optimization Firms and has helped promote over
15,000 Web sites. Client testimonials report traffic
increases of 150 to 500 percent. Bruemmer's articles have
appeared on ClickZ and other publications
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