All
About Search Engines and Driving Traffic to Your Site Web Sites are just one part of your multi-pronged marketing strategy to sell your products and services. A common question people have once they have a web site: "How do I get (more) hits?" (i.e., how do we get more people to visit your web site?); or "How do I get listed on search engines?"
A first step in planning your marketing goals is to decide the goals of your web site (is it informational/reference, sales, just have a web presence, etc., or a combination of those), and whom you want to drive to visit your site-- what are their demographics, how do they use the internet, what jargon/keywords would they be likely to use. This helps create a strategy for marketing your web site. This strategy can be implemented by us entirely, or share some of the tasks with you the client to help save labor costs. It can be as minimal as do nothing (or a half hour of the minimal cost/most effective), or a detailed and extensive plan of action. Note that whatever the strategy, little can be guaranteed on the web with respect to "hits" and search engines. Some of the paid-for search engine listings are quite reliable (however, i find it ludicrous that one costing several hundred dollars will only consider listing your site!), and some of the "free submissions" may or may not eventually get listed. Sometimes it may take several months to get listed because of the backlog of the search engine's requests. But overall it's fairly easy & effective to follow the steps in the strategy I suggest below.
OUR APPROACH A critical part of any successful website is how successful it is in attracting visitors from Google or other searches. There are many solutions available that can cost hundreds (even thousands) of dollars each month. At Sherwood Hosting, we realize that small businesses are very careful about how money is spent. Therefore, we recommend a step-by-step approach to search engine optimization. Here are the phases that we recommend for your site in order to achieve the best visibility for the least expenditures:
We have found that this approach, when combined with a balanced overall marketing strategy, produces positive measurable results and increased site visibility (site success!). Please be in touch if you have any questions, especially before deciding to invest considerable monthly charges in an SEO program! (Unless you're a national-brand vendor, we don't think it's worth it)
MORE ABOUT GETTING YOUR WEB SITE RANKED HIGH There are several techniques to go about driving traffic to your site, and then statistics to be able to view recent and historic web site visitation activity. Web hosting and design services from Sterling Arts/sherwoodhosting.com can provide these services efficiently and cost-effectively, while taking some of the mystery and myth out of web browsing, search engines, and "hits." We try to keep up with the latest trends in what search engines emphasize in their cataloguing algorithms so that we can steer your site's details in this respect for the highest likelihood of "being found" by a search engine. First, let me talk about the various aspects of the issue of your site's keywords (and how these are represented), search engines, and search engine users-- we have to help all three to work together in order to have the greatest possibility for success, and the only aspect we really have control over is your own site.
This page provides information for web page owners who are individuals, small businesses, and non-profits regarding the following topics:
It's critical to have quality incoming links pointing to your site. By "quality" we mean links that appear on content-appropriate web pages and blogs/forums, and not on so-called link-farm pages. It's a lot of work, but you can do it to get your site URL listed in testimonials, forums, blogs, newsletters, etc. The more links the higher your page ranking is. Getting listed with search engines There are hundreds of search engines, indexes, and catalogs (I'll use the generic term search engines for all of these here) on the web; many come and go based on their success/popularity/mindshare and funding. The best strategy is to decide who the viewers are you want to drive to your site, and what is their most likely browsing style, jargon, terminology. It's quite common to receive Spam emails advertising web page submission services— I don't distrust that they would do what they say - it's easy for someone to buy a program that submits a site to the "100 most popular" search engines providing free submissions for getting listed. This is a swarm approach and although it doesn't necessarily focus your efforts, it will likely get you listed easily (albeit possibly slowly). However there's more to search engines than just free submissions to the 100 most popular. Search engine & indexes change their policies, prioritization algorithms, features, etc., frequently and a fairly recently updated understanding of all this is needed. There's a cost range of free-to-expensive for search engine submissions. And a recommend compromise middle-ground, in my opinion.
I just received a spam email advertising a service that does an entire range of these efforts for $895 per year. Again, I trust that they do what they say, however, the difference between a 90% solution (for $200-300) and a 95% solution (with an unknown company) is questinoable— there's no perfect solution. And even to reach 99% thoroughness, you'd have to pay thousands of dollars and then what's the incremental return? Once you've "made yourself known" in the internet world, then monitor your site to see how well you're doing... Also consider listing yourself on alternate kinds of "search engines" such as craigslist.com and stumbleupon.com. Monitor statistics about your web site Web hosting services through SherwoodHosting.com include complimentary "awstats" statistics set up. See my own statistics page excerpt for sherwoodphoto.com. I particularly like this statistics software because it lists more information than you'd ever want to know about, but it's categorized and viewable easily. In this example, it shows what keywords people used to find my site. I have land for sale, photography exhibits, music/concert information/titles, and several businesses. Thus there's a smattering of the various endeavors that are in my web pages. For instance, I do not proactively list my land for sale anywhere, but thru judicious keyword usage, my page is visited by 25-50 people each month, from which I get 4-5 email inquiries. I'm in no hurry to sell, so this level is just right for me. Note that AWSTATS also shows your viewers' ISP (IP address - contact us if you want the back-DNS translation to domain names) so you can tell how your viewers are connecting to the internet (i.e., where they are browsing from); which were your most popular pages visited; real visitor statistics (not just the trumped-up "hits" figure that most companies use which is often a factor of 100 or more greater than real one-person-one-visit meaningful numbers); etc.
Interesting Additional Information:
|