Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Your Competitor's Are Closing In. Where Are You?

By TC Humphrey


Companies give themselves large high fives once they see their Internet site being ranked in the search engines. For those that spend the ongoing learning time, testing time and money involved to get their sites ranked high on the search engines, the profits could be huge.

In order for a web site to be optimized for search engine ranking, it must accommodate certain critical demands to be rewarded with excellent placement within each of the search engines. The search engines, like Google, are your link between your prospect and your website. Any business not listed within the top 30 search results for keywords relevant to their website are missing out on the traffic their competitors are receiving.

There are a few "must do's" for search engine optimization to work for you. Passing over any of them will lessen your results. How your site is laid out, the main key words or phrases chosen for your site, your page titles and usage of your headline fonts, and a lot of good and extremely targeted content. Poorly written copy is also a no-no. It's a fatal flaw to any business. You also need to understand back linking and have a back link game plan. Get as many back links from similar sites to yours and your site will do much better than if you get back links from sites that have no relevancy to what you offer.

One place you never want to fall short on is the copy on your site. Take special attention here. Make sure you have several people read it over. Correct any errors, even if they seem silly to you. If you simply copy and paste your web site text from you're company marketing piece, that's not going to cut it. Don't stuff your web site copy with keywords or phrases unnecessarily. This not only makes it read poorly but the search engines could consider it spam and your site could lose it's positioning in the search engines.

The search engine giant is Google. Google not only gives someone searching much better results but more of them. Google is very particular about wanting relevant keywords on your pages, and the higher the better. Make sure you use your headline fonts well for some of your keywords.

SEO techniques, which worked years ago, don't work the same today. However many of the "best" SEO providers still use these old school means of doing things. Even though they come out with new super cool tools, these gizmos do very little to help the client build a hearty and long lasting competitive edge.

Search engines and directories continually improve upon means to delivering more focused search results. Because these changes are, and forever will be, ongoing, they require continual tracking. Do you understand this? The techniques that gave one website great positioning yesterday could damage its' positioning today.

Search engine rankings won't sell your product. Your web site does that. If you overlook things like branding, customer satisfaction, transparency and traditional marketing methods when you create your web site, it will do no better than if you weren't ranked at all. Internet business is not so different from real world bricks and mortar businesses. If your prospect doesn't feel the love, perhaps your competitor will offer that. And that's where they will buy.

About the Author:

No comments: