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| eMarketing Tips and Tricks - Jan 28, 2003 |  |
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Check out our eMarketing Tools
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Today's Article: How to Get Listed with the Search Engines Today's
Ask Dr. Ebiz:
Affiliate Program Primer How to Get Listed with the Search Engines Copyright 2002 by Kevin Bidwell This is part of a weekly series on how to create traffic to any website.You can access the previous articles by going to this week's I-Marketer and clicking on the past issues page. There are two kinds of marketing (at least as far as most of us are concerned): active and passive. Active marketing would include eZine advertising, opt-in marketing, PR, offline advertising, banner ads and the like. Basically, active marketing brings you visitors for as long as you "push" it. Passive marketing would include any form of marketing that continues to provide traffic once it is "set up" without any real action on your part. The best form of passive marketing is getting listed well on search engines. In fact, you want to be one of the top five listing for your best keywords. Why is this so great? Think about it: someone who is looking for your product or service sits down at their computer, types in the best keywords for your product and then *BOOM* up pops your site. What could be better than that? BUT THERE ARE SOME COMMON MYTHS ABOUT SEARCH ENGINES. MYTH ONE...There are HUNDREDS of Search Engines The truth is that 90+% of searches are performed on just a handful of engines--and most of those on the top five. MYTH TWO...All You Need to do is SUBMIT While you must submit your site, just submitting will not guarantee you the top position you need. MYTH THREE...META TAGS are the key At one time, this was true. Then things got complicated.
The people running the search engines realized websites were
stuffing unrelated keywords into their meta tags to get MYTH FOUR...Yahoo is a search engine Yahoo is a DIRECTORY. Yahoo's listings (except as I will let you know below) are set based on a real person looking at your site and deciding where it should be listed. MYTH FIVE...It is a WASTE OF TIME to Position on Search Engines Search engines are a great way to get targeted traffic to your site. Those who choose wisely will find it a great revenue source for years to come. OK, so how are YOU going to get GOOD POSITION for your site on search engines? Here are some keys... 1. Pick the right product Use this tool, WordTracker, to check out the competition and traffic for keywords on any product you want to promote. Once you get your results, you can easily tell whether or not you have a shot at a good listing and traffic for that site. If the traffic is very low or the competition is very high, you are probably better off to focus your marketing on more active means. 2. Build optimized "doorway" pages Your MAIN PAGE, as much as possible, needs to be targeted to your most highly targeted and high traffic keywords. In addition to that you need to put up a number of pages that act as "doorways" to your main page--pages that will score well with a particular search engine that will lead people to your main sales page. These doorway pages might be informative articles, product reviews, whatever, but they are designed to get people to your site. How can you prepare these pages? I would recommend using one of these tools: 3. Submit according to the rules Each search engine has different methods for submission.
This is an important step, and you need to make sure that you
follow their guidelines--you don't want to put all the time Many search engines are now charging a fee to have your site evaluated for listing. Understand, this doesn't mean they WILL list your site, it just means they will look at it. Here is what you need to know: If you know you will get a good listing and traffic from keywords on that search engine, go ahead and pay the fee. Even Yahoo's $200 fee is small if it brings you 50,000 targeted visitors in a year. AND SPEAKING OF YAHOO! Yahoo recently made a change that you may not have heard of--they are showing Google listings right along with their directory listings. The only difference is the Yahoo listings have a little "Y" next to them. How does this help you? If you can rank well with Google (for free), you AUTOMATICALLY rank well with Yahoo. 4. Check on your listings and positions often You need to monitor your listings. High traffic keywords are very competitive and there will be people wanting to replace you in the cyber version of "King of the Hill". If you have the right product, you can create a flood
of FREE visitors with a good search engine strategy. Take
the time to do it right, and you could make thousands of dollars
"I'm just a short time away from launching my website and offering a free newsletter to subscribers. I'm confused as to what is the best way to distribute. I want it to be fast and convenient, yet display some creativity. I know plain text is well, just that -- plain. And I know that HTML newsletters have their own set of problems. What are the advantages (and disadvantages) to sending out plain text newsletters with either PDF attachments and/or HTML links?" -- Greg Marshall, TeeBall-To-A-Tee.com Plain text is plain, but easy for you to assemble and send out. Some email programs don't show regular URLs as hot, clickable links in plain text emails. For example, EarthLink Web Access Mail 3.0 and all versions of AOL. (See "How to Make URLs Clickable by AOL Subscribers," Web Marketing Today, 1/7/03, http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt8/aol_links.htm ) HTML is my preference as a publisher these days, since the hyperlinks nearly always work (with the exception of HotMail sometimes). Nearly all email programs now read standard HTML (with the exception of some versions of Lotus Notes), though a few corporations disable HTML. The danger is that with color, fonts, and graphic images, you can create a truly hideous newsletter if you don't have any artistic sense. Do the best you can in-house, and then ask a graphic artist to take a look and add some color and style. Resist the temptation to construct your newsletter with a different table cell for each article, headlines, etc. This can look sharp, but makes your newsletter tedious to assemble for each issue. PDF seems like an answer to people married to their print newsletter. But many recipients don't have Adobe Acrobat reader installed or may decide not to open any for fear of viruses. As a general rule, I'd stay away from emailed PDF newsletters unless the formatting is absolutely necessary to make the information intelligible. Ultimately, the format decision ought to be your subscriber's. If your email listserver can support it, I encourage you to allow people to select either plain text or HTML when they subscribe. I have HTML pre-checked, but allow subscribers to select text if they want. Listservers are increasingly capable of sending out the newsletter in the format selected by your subscriber, rather than just multi-part MIME. Copyright 2002, Ralph F. Wilson . All rights reserved. Used by permission. |
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