I’m going to basically talk about the key points of search engine optimization and how it will benefit your website. The new marketing strategies compared to old marketing strategies are very different. For example with the old types of marketing consist of inside sales, telemarketing, tradeshows, seminars, print advertising direct email and email, things like that.
New marketing strategies are all about seo, pay per click, blogging, buzz marketing, conversion tools etc. It’s basically all online.
Below are some key points and tips of building an online marketing machine:
First I want to talk about organic search engine listings. Organic search engine listings are the listings that show up on the left side of the page. Pay Per Clicks are the top three and right side of the search results. You pay for those. And the cost per click can get pretty pricey. The organic listings which show up on the left are free. The only time you pay is hiring an expert to get you where you want to be. Hiring an seo expert is not a bad thing because they know the ins and outs of search engine optimization. Once you are in the organic spots you stay there as long as you keep up to date with the pages you are optimizing.
25% of people that search on google click on the pay per clicks. This means 75% are clicking the organic results. You are most likely to get a high Click Through Rate (CTR) on organic listings.
There are two types of optimization. On Page SEO and Off Page SEO. On page optimization is the visible content and graphics that you see on the web page itself. The most important thing on your web page is the Title of the page. The title tag is located at the very top of the browser above the file, edit, view etc. The title tag basically tells you the subject of the page. You want to add some keywords in the title. For example: If I generally want to talk about search engine optimization, my title tag will be Search Engine Optimization. Aside from the title tag the search engines also look at the keywords in the URL string. Example: http://www.your-domain.com/search-engine-optimization.html. Notice the keywords. Also notice how it matched the title tag. This is a key point to remember. Next, heading tags such as H1, H2, H3. On every page you build use these heading tags. The first heading tag should always be H1. Heading tags are important because, well, they are the heading, stronger than a bullet point. They are recognized. H1 tags are rather large so you can use css to shrink it down. Page text, bolded keyword and italicized keywords are an import thing to on page optimization. You want to have good clean content with keywords in the body on your webpage. Make sure to add some key phrases as well and bold them or italicize them so they are more noticed.
Meta data still matters for on page seo. The description is good for a higher click through rate. The search engines scan the description and you also want to use the keyword you are targeting in the description.
Now we go to off page optimization. Off page optimization is your site on other sites. For example, you have page rank as an off page optimization technique. Page rank basically is how important Google thinks your website value is form a scale of 0 to 10. Off page optimization also is the number of backlinks you have. The more links that point to your site, the better. But you have to be careful where you go to get links and what the link says to point to you. Carefully choose the website that you want pointed to you. See if sites such as link farms are pointed to them or if they use what is called black hat seo. Black hat seo is a bad technique. Think of it as the dark side of the force. When you have a site pointing to you as a back link make sure the link has the keywords you want to rank for. For example: You don’t want your domain name as the link, you want Search Engine Optimization as the link. This technique is valued more. But notice the backlink has the keyword search engine optimization as the link, title tag, in the URL, and heading tag. Notice how they come together. This is important to SEO.
Start a blog! Don’t go to websites like blogger.com or sites that offer you a blog to run off of there site. Start a blog on your own domain name. Something like this, http://www.your-domain.com/blog. Blog’s always have fresh content and the likelihood of your getting a backlink is better. Blogs are more conversational especially if there’s something good to talk about. Wordpress blogs are free to download and to install on your hosting account. I recommend the word press blog because it is simple, user friendly and allows you download free specialized plugins that are great for seo, social bookmarking which is a another part of web marketing and submitting rss feeds.
You can also make forms more appropriate and appealing to the eye. If you design your web forms well enough, you’ll most likely have more of a conversion rate. What turns people off are long forms. Try to have the basic stuff. You don’t want to have a lot of thing s to fill out because people just don’t like to fill out a bunch of information. Do your best to shorten your forms. Try to use cookies to get more information on your users. This will allow you to understand how they found your site, how many pages did they view and how they stayed on your site. Another tip for web forms is to remove site navigation. This allows people to be more focused on filling out your form mails. You can add a short testimonial with a photo next to the form for more confidence and also adding special offers for users to sign up that day. It is custom for people to add email addresses to forms so next to the email address put a link to the privacy statement so they are more secure. (Make sure the privacy statement opens in a new browser window)
These tips should get you started in developing an online marketing machine. If you have any questions please contact me personally. steve@stevedifabio.com