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Boost Your Search Engine Rankings with Email Newsletters
By: Andrea Harris
SEO: search engine
optimization. It can make the difference between a website that's
rarely visited, and one that bustles with traffic. Email
newsletters are an excellent and easy way to boost SEO.
Of course, email newsletters
offer many obvious benefits to firms that want to nurture
relationships with their clients. They are an inexpensive,
effective way to keep in touch with your customer base while
promoting your company, your products and services, and
your brand.
Every time you send out a
newsletter, you encourage people to visit your website. But
that's not the only way it can increase your website traffic. If
you choose to archive past issues on your site, you'll find that
they can also attract targeted search engine traffic. Each issue
you post helps your SEO results. With SEO, email newsletters
do double duty - continually benefiting your web marketing
efforts long after distribution.
Think about it. Each issue
focuses on something that has to do with your business, right? So
it's probably full of relevant key phrases that people use in
search engines. A newsletter article allows you to write about a
specific topic in great detail - perhaps more detail than you
would include on a regular page on your website.
Also, articles give you an
opportunity to link to specific pages deep in your website, using
whatever anchor text you want. ("Anchor text" refers to the text
of the actual link. For instance, if you want people to find your
web page about email newsletters, the link "email newsletters" is
much better for SEO than "click here.")
Articles let you optimize
for different spellings or abbreviations of business terms that
you might not be using frequently on your regular pages. The
regular web pages for my client's Athena IT Solutions website are
optimized for phrases such as "business intelligence assessment."
But one of the firm's email newsletter articles ranks well for a
phrase that uses the abbreviation for business intelligence, BI.
In April 2004, searches for "BI architecture" bring up one of
their articles in the #1 spot in Yahoo and on the second page of
Google.
If your website isn't very
large to begin with, adding your archived newsletters will help
bulk it up with high-quality content. Before you know it, you may
find that you're attracting visitors in ways you never expected.
For example, Eye of the Storm Equine Rescue published an email
newsletter detailing their innovative treatment for a
horse disease. Their web stats show that the article page is now
one of the most frequent "entry" pages to their site. Grateful
horse owners who found the article when searching for treatments
have even sent tax-deductible donations to the rescue
center.
You can leave it to chance,
like the equine rescue center, or you can take a proactive
approach and actually optimize your articles for SEO. In addition
to using SEO copywriting practices in the article itself, there
are things you can do to enhance your article page's SEO.
Just make sure that whatever you do for SEO is also good for your
readers.
Use your key phrase in
the title tag.
Include links to several past
issues.
Link to regular pages within your site, where
appropriate.
Link to specific articles from your
regular web pages, where appropriate.
Make a link to
your home page part of every article's boilerplate
text.
List all issues on a Back Issues web
page.
Link to issues on your site map.
Optimized and posted on your website, email newsletter
articles help
turn a lazy website into a hardworking web-marketing machine.
About the
Author:
Andrea is a communications consultant and owner of Minerva Solutions http://www.minerva-inc.com.
She does a little bitof everything, but specializes in SEO copywriting
and helping clients launch and manage email newsletters.
"I've been trying to keep up with all the search engine
changes, but I'm not sure what to think of Yahoo! Now you can: 1)
submit for free, 2) Pay $49.99 plus $0.15 to $0.30 per click, 3) Pay
for Performance (i.e., Overture), or 4) pay $299.00 to submit to
Yahoo!'s Directory. I understand Yahoo! is looking for multiple
streams of income, but what is the best choice for a small business,
especially if it doesn't have an e-commerce site?" --
Patricia Hughes, Hughes Technology Solutions
Your questions would be answered differently for different kinds
of businesses. Here's how I see it:
Submit for free (http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request) is a
no-brainer. By all means submit your website to
Yahoo!, but first make sure that both your webpages and
navigation system are search engine friendly. Your traffic from
"natural" or "organic" searches is the lowest cost traffic you can
find, so it's well worth the effort (and expense) to optimize your
site to receive it. You can learn more about how to do this in my
new e-book, Dr. Wilson's Plain-Spoken Guide to Search Engine
Optimization.
Overture Site Match is Yahoo!'s new
paid inclusion service. They guarantee that your pages will be
included within about 48 hours in the index for AltaVista,
AllTheWeb, Yahoo!, and FAST, but you get no bump in rankings for
your dollars. Costs for 11 or more URLs are $10 each annually,
plus either 15¢ or 30¢ per click, depending upon product category.
I do not recommend this unless Yahoo! isn't listing your product
sales pages and you have already optimized these webpages
to rank high. Even then, many companies won't find this
profitable. http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/bzinfo/prod/marketserv/searchsub.php
Overture Pay for Performance (P4P or
PPC, http://wilsonweb.com/afd/overture.htm),
is a very important advertising channel for businesses
selling products or services on the Internet. Many small
businesses are using Overture P4P and Google AdWords to make a nice living.
Local business should now consider taking advantage of
geo-targeting features that only show your PPC ads to those in
your immediate area.
Yahoo! Directory Express Submit (https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/express/intro/) is a bit
pricey for some businesses at $299 annually. But a paid link from
this high PageRanked site will boost your own site's ranking on
Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines. Do it if you can afford
it. Remember to get a free listing in the Open Directory
Project (www.dmoz.com), though you'll need patience
waiting for a volunteer editor to consider your submission.
Yahoo! Product Submit (http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/bzinfo/prod/marketserv/prodsubmit.php).
If you have consumer products, consider a paid listing in
Yahoo! Shopping. You'll pay 19¢ to 50¢ per click depending upon
your product category ($1.25/click for flowers and diamonds), but
you'll get targeted traffic from people in a shopping mode.
Remember that Google's Froogle product submissions are
free and will give you a bump in Google's regular search rankings.
"Copyright 2003, Ralph F. Wilson. All rights
reserved. Used by permission."
