You've heard content is king. Believe it!
Hire ContentXperts to shape and mold your website content into words that work for you and excite your customers about your products and services.
Please do not fall for the $29.99 specials that promise to submit your site to 1000 search engines.
It simply can't be done correctly for anything close to this price.
SEO takes time and patience. It takes monitoring and tweaking.
It takes study and research, follow-up and connections, understanding fads from true workable solutions.
The last caution is that SEO does not happen overnight. It usually takes up to 4 months for a new website to receive much of a ranking at all and even then, it's usually not a "top" ranking.
What you look for is that your site is indexed by the search engine within about 3 months and then that it steadily increases in ranking over the next several months.
First and foremost, when you receive spam (unsolicited)
email promising
top rankings for your website in every major search engine - press the
delete key! People who send Spam are not professional businesses with whom
you want dealings.
Secondly, the "Snake Oil" guarantee is impossible, therefore it cannot be honored. Search engines are fickle creatures. Everything can be done right to optimize your site and the site can still not receive top rankings while poorly optimized sites occasionally receive far better rankings than they deserve.
Next to avoid are those promising to submit your site repeatedly (such as monthly) to over 1,000 search engines. Why? Because these types of businesses use automatic submission techniques which are frowned upon by most legitimate search engines and directories. In addition, repeated submission of a site can and is often considered "spamming the search engine".
Websites can are are banned for using this technique. Last under this category is that your site doesn't need submission to over 1,000 search engines. The majority of users don't even know about the existence of these so-called search engines.
You want your site ranked by the major search engine and directory players which are currently Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Open Directory. There are also some search engines and directories that cater to specific subject matters such as technology, legal or the outdoors. Your site should only be submitted to these types of search engines if the web site fits the subject matter.
Has your site been a) optimized with meta data (keywords, appropriate pages titles, key descriptions, appropriate classifications etc.) and b) hand submitted to the top search engines? Did you then target directories that cater to your product and submit your site to these directories? Did you verify that your content matched your Meta data?
Meta data no longer plays the important role it once did in search engine rankings, but it can assist your ranking in some search engines and more importantly you can control the description of your site by providing the correct meta data.
Most Important Search Engine Secret: Content!As we've preached all through this site, content is the most important aspect of a web site and the most important aspect of good search engine rankings.
A competent search engine optimization specialist does not bother with trying to play tricks on the search engines. Rather, they spend their time optimizing the content on your site to allow people interested in your products and services to find your site. The competent SEO researches what words people search on when attempting to locate your products and services. They then optimize your pages for these keywords and phrases. Not all pages are optimized for the same keywords and phrases.
Many unscrupulous people will concentrate on promising you traffic. The question here is, what kind of traffic. Are you merely interested in seeing how many people can be fooled into viewing your website; or are you really interested in people wanting your product or service to find out more about your company?
Traffic to your website that has no interest in your products and services merely wastes your server resources. It may also give your company a bad name since people are annoyed when they are looking for one thing and fooled into going to a site that's not related.
There are many other things one can do to ensure good marketing of their site.
Ensure your site has a good navigation system and a reasonable download time. There is no point in getting anyone there if they can't figure out how to navigate or don't want to wait to load your site and thereby read your message.
These issues are far more important than having the latest and greatest in design. Of course a professional design is also very important since the design itself leaves and impression. Homemade pages with flashing banners and glowing buttons by those who put content on the Web as a hobby speaks poorly when a client is seeking a professional. Your Web site needs to say "professional" in its design.
Keep your content fresh and updated if you want repeat visitors. Teach
your clients and prospective clients to return frequently for more information.
This is like repeat commercials on Television - keep your firm's name before
the prospective customers. Make your product or service a name brand by
implanting it firmly within the target market's mind.
Other marketing areas include:
All of the above marketing points, but in an educational manner. As the Internet grows, users are becoming more and more sensitive to SPAM, whether it be blatant unwanted direct e-mail or articles and list posts merely used as a method of putting SPAM before a larger audience.
Inform people of your product or service when asked for a resource or to provide information in an article that also provides other educational information. This is the proper way to ensure your target market reads and hears your message. By giving, you may indeed receive.
Requests for reprints must include the name
of the publication, a brief description and an agreement to include biographical
information and byline.