Demand Results From Your Website… More of the Iceberg
Once again, this month’s topic is about Search Engine Marketing and how to make your website be your best salesperson. Treat your website like a salesperson, holding it accountable just as you would a human salesperson.
After determining your expectations for your website it’s time to implement the changes necessary to meet those goals. A typical scenario for search engine marketing:
- Your current site is reviewed and evaluated for a number of important factors.
- The site is redesigned using Search Engine Marketing best practices.
- Monitoring and measuring tools are also implemented so that progress can be better tracked.
Monitoring your site’s statistics is key. Based on the site’s performance, keywords, hierarchy, and content will be further tweaked in an attempt to continuously improve the site. Continually measure your ROI and analyze your specific goals, just as you would a salesperson.
Driving Site Visits
Here are a few things you can do on your path to search engine nirvana, as well as a few tools to make the trip a little more comfortable:
- Use social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others to drive traffic to your site and build an online network. Remember, though, from last month’s article, that these services use code that prevents a search engine from following a link to your site from these social media sites. This means that links from social media sites will not improve your search engine rankings, but may increase direct traffic to your site. Twitter is one of the fastest growing of these services, and the next couple tools will help you stay on top of Twitter traffic. Free informational webinar registration now open!
- Twuffer. Use this free web-based tool (www.twuffer.com) that lets you schedule tweets in advance so there’s no need to be at your PC when the tweets are sent out (perhaps a few times a day, if you keep up with it). This tool lets you plan out your tweets in advance, schedule them, and then frees you up for the rest of the day.
- TweetDeck. Use this free downloadable application (www.tweetdeck.com) to sort and categorize your incoming tweets. This tool lets you monitor Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. You can have it watch for mentions of your company and any other keywords so that you will know right away when somebody is looking for a service or product that you sell. This is a definite must-have tool for Twitter!
- Bit.ly. Use this tool (www.bitly.com) to shorten web addresses and track how many people click the links. Since your messages on Twitter, for instance, can only be 140 characters maximum, a hyperlink might chew up much of that space if you tweet a link. Bit.ly lets you shorten these links to a more manageable size and will also track the number of clicks the link gets.
- SeoQuake for Firefox. You do look at your site in Firefox, right? It’s a good idea to have at least two web browsers on your computer. Firefox (free, and downloadable from www.mozilla.com) is a good second browser, especially since it offers the SeoQuake toolbar add-on (free Firefox add-ons are available from addons.mozilla.org) . This add-on adds a toolbar to Firefox that displays at a glance a series of useful measurements to aid with search engine optimization.
I hope you find this article helpful and informative. It is said that nothing worth doing is easy, and search engine marketing is a perfect example of that.