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Online marketing can seem a bit daunting a first glance if you are not familiar with web jargon or marketing techniques. The first question you may have is ‘How do I get my web site up in the search engines?’, when talking search engines, we are really thinking about Google given that they have such a large slice of the search traffic (of course there are other important search engines like Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc. but for simplicity we will stick with Google).
There are two routes that can be taken, organic listings, where your web site appears in the standard search results and paid listings, where you pay to have your web site listed.
Paid Listings
Let us start with the paid listings, Google offer companies the opportunity to advertise on search results pages, these are usually found towards the top and on the right hand side on the screen, Ads have the words ‘Sponsored Links’ above them to distinguish them from the standard search results. This method of online marketing is virtually instant, once you have set up an account you can be up and running within hours. The Google system is known as AdWords and the basic principle is that you choose your preferred keyword(s) or phrase(s) and every time your Ad is shown and someone clicks on it to go through to your website you pay a charge, this is known as Pay Per Click Advertising. The higher the price you are willing to pay per click above your competitors, the more likely you are to be shown in the top positions or on the first page, some keywords / phrases can be very competitive. Be sure to set a budget before entering into this type of marketing, on Google for instance it is possible to set a daily budget and set periods in the day when your ads are shown. These facilities can be very useful to target your audience, say if you are selling to businesses in your own country / region then you can set your Ads to appear during normal working hours, this will help to maximise your budget, a minimise redundant clicks.
Pay Per Click can be particularly useful when launching a new product or targeting specific products, it can bring results quickly.
Organic Listings
The Organic route can be very time consuming, unless you have a large budget to pay someone else to run it for you like a SEO (Search Engine Optimizer). There are many SEO’s to choose from, individuals to large companies. If your budget does not stretch to SEO’s then there a number of things that you can try to help attract a higher position in the search results. The first thing to remember is that not all search engines are the same so it is difficult for your site to be all things to all search engines. The second is that some search terms / keywords can attract very high numbers of results for instance type in ‘Battery’ into Google and over 100 Million results are available, therefore not every website can be listed on the first couple of pages which is where you need to be.
The general consensus is that you need to optimize your web pages to make them as relevant as possible to your products that you wish to promote. The first thing to look at is your Meta tags on your pages (Meta tags give the search engine any idea of the content of your page / site), you should have a Title, Description and Keyword Meta tags as a minimum, there are other Meta Tags but these are the main three (although it is thought that Google does not use the Keyword Tag but some search engines do, so it is worth adding).
The next item is probably the most important, The Content. You should have plenty of relevant text and include your product / services keywords. Do not over use these words otherwise it may be considered by the search engines as SPAM (an attempt to make your site relevant with the over use of keywords or phases, you may wish to read Google’s submission guidelines) and your site could be penalised or even removed from the search engine altogether. Add text to your page naturally this will ensure that keywords are not over used and it will give the viewer / potential customer a more rewarding experience.
Given that large numbers of results can be generated for certain search terms, it may be worth considering targeting more specific terms for instance adding 2v in front of battery (2v Battery) will reduce the search results in Google to less than one Million. This technique offers a better chance of obtaining higher search engine placements.
It may also be prudent to have a site map, a specific page that lists and links to every page on your site that you wish the search engine to visit. The link to your site map should be located on your home page (or main landing page), many sites have a link to their site map on every page.
Google allocates indexed web pages with a Page Rank value between zero & ten (ten being the highest rating). This system uses a voting system based on links to pages, if a site links to your site it may help establish the importance of your page / site. However it is not just about having lots of any old links, Page Rank takes into account the relevance / importance of the page linking to your page and the content on your page.
Directories and Industry News web sites can help in your quest for suitable links, use these vehicles to add links to your site which contain relevant material relating to your keywords / products and / or services. Add or submit your press releases to news sites, in my cases they will allow links back to your web site.
Power Index offers Companies supplying Power Products two ways in which to add links to your site, one way is to take out a Premium Listing Package, this enables us to set up relevant links back to your web site or a specific page. The other is to add your product press releases and technical articles to the Power Index news area, we allow you to use simple html to add a link back to your site or again a specific page.
One final important point check to see if your web site is listed in a search engine in the first place otherwise all of your hard work could be wasted. On Google there is a simple check that you can do, type in ‘site: then your URL’, for example 'site:www.power-index.com' and hit the search button. All of your pages will be displayed which are indexed by Google. If no search results are shown then it may be that Google does not know about you site, this is easy to fix, go to http://www.google.com/addurl/ and add your site, please note it could be a while before your site is indexed so be patient.
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