Web search engine marketing becomes one of the fastest business strategies online. Most businesses create websites for their captured clients. However, since the global market is broad and big, many business owners hire search engine marketers to improve the online presence of their sites. Generally, this strategy is done to reach out more to other related markets that have not been captured but are showing interests.
There are hundreds or even thousands of ways to promote sites online. Ranking a site to the first page of Google under different keywords may be the common strategies. However, this is not just the only avenue where sites get promoted.
There are still several aspects to consider when business owners like you want to improve your search engine ranking:
Know your niche. What part of the market do you want your products to touch base on? The global market is broad, thus, you need to start on something that belongs to your core competencies. Once you have established your identity and reputation to a certain niche, then that is the time that you can move on to the next related markets. It is not advisable to start by targeting a broad market since your search engine marketing efforts will be saturated; unless if you want to hire a bigger team to handle different marketing strategies.
Create your communication plan. How will you communicate to the world? When your search engine optimization (SEO) specialists do their jobs, what are their communication standards? How will they write their articles, do blog comments, post their forums, and do other tasks? Never allow your search engine specialists to create spamming comments out in blog posts – their comments must all be critical so that they can also drive traffic to your site. Low profile comments are prone to deletion and they cannot even drive traffic to your sites.
Do some keyword research. This is practically one of the basic tasks of any search engine marketer. Researching for the right keywords for your niche is necessary. All the more, it is also necessary to identify few keywords of lesser competition but with quality traffic to start with. The approach can be bottom up or both bottom up and top down. This means that you can target keywords with lesser competition (bottom) going to the keywords with higher competition (top keywords) or doing the two strategies at the same time (bottom up and top down).
Create an online marketing plan. Establish a timeline – starting from the conceptualization of the website up to the ranking of the site on the top fold of the first page of the search engines. Evaluate if you have the budget to do the campaign and how long the campaign would last or evolve. Your marketing plans must be detailed and specific.
Content is king. Search engines like Google always love contents that are not keyword stuffed. Always remember to create contents that can strike both the readers and the bots. This means that the content must encourage the readers to stay to your site but is also search engine friendly. Always write the natural way and do not force your write ups to be so technical.
Create your corporate and personal brand. Since there are a lot of websites and more specifically that there are a lot of competitors, you must establish your corporate or personal brand online. You can do this by creating an identity online and promoting it through social media, online communities, affiliates, and other online sources.
Analyze your top competitors. Know the marketing strategies of your top competitors. Let your search engine specialist track and analyze their web activities and behavior online. This way, you can also benchmark and create better online marketing campaigns to surpass your competitors. Furthermore, you can create further analysis to capture some of their traffic to yours by using ethical community and social media optimization techniques.
Know your site’s purpose. Create a goal for your site and know how your visitors use and navigate it. Plan to create more interaction to your site so that it can lessen bounce rates and encourages the users to visit again. Ultimately, create a site where all the necessary marketing elements are harmoniously mixed together.
Structure your site. Pull in all your data which includes your keyword research, competitor analysis and benchmarking strategies, communication plans, target niche marketing plans and strategies, corporate or personal branding strategies, website functionality and navigation structure, and other marketing elements that you want to put to your site. Then, let your web designer and web programmer do their jobs following all the plans together.
Check the codes. On the technical side, always choose web programmers who can create search engine friendly websites. Web programmers must know all the details especially the functionalities that the site needs. All codes, however, must never delay page load time. The faster a page loads then the better it would be. Most users are irritated visiting websites that have slow page loads; thus, always see the load time effectiveness of your site.
Test the site. Evaluate the site and see if all the elements planned are present. Check your site if they are compatible using different browsers and browser versions. Also, see if the site does not look awkward using different screen resolutions sizes. Some websites looks ruined in some browsers or browser versions, and/or in some screen resolution sizes.
Create further on-page optimization. Tag your site bearing the keywords that you want to rank. Your site must have sufficient internal links especially the links coming from call to action buttons and anchors. Optimize each page with the right keywords but be very careful not to insert too many keywords.
Build links for the site. There are many avenues where you can leave links. However, business owners and search engine optimization specialists must know how to create clean links. SEO’s must never try to spam sites and blogs with comments. Some SEO’s do not know that when they try to leave links to spammed sites and blogs or to irrelevant sites, the link strength of the links they created diminishes. Thus, search engines do not score those spam links that high enough; worse, it can even ban the site.
Do article marketing. One of the best ways to create links and at the same time drive traffic is through article marketing. Sometimes, there are important elements that the website cannot say; thus, complement this with articles. Good articles entices readers and prospect clients, it also builds your reputation online, and lastly, inbound links from trusted article sites have higher link strength since they build good authority.
Create some blogs or contact bloggers. You can create some blogs for your website. Blogs open more doors for you site to be noticed. On the other hand, you can also contact some bloggers to create blog posts for you and post these on their blogs. Therefore, you create more referrals for your site to further increase your traffic and improve your reputation online.
Join forums. Visit some forums especially those that are related to your niche. Learn to communicate and interact thoroughly in forums. Never spam forums by leaving links but not interacting critically. Your interaction in forums must always be sensible.
Maximize the social networking sites and communities. Facebook for a time ranks as the number one most visited site. Google and Facebook are competing for the topmost position in terms of world visitors. Thus, why not go to Facebook as well or with other social networking sites that are mostly used by your targeted niche? If you niche is for health conscious individuals, then find health-related social networks. On the other hand, you can also add friends in other social network platforms like twitter and other micro-blogging sites. They can give you traffic as well.
Create link audits. Create a team that will check the quality of your links and the effectiveness of your social media marketing strategies.
Lastly, integrate all your efforts. All online marketing elements must thoroughly be implemented together. Lag of one web search engine marketing and optimization strategy might delay the completion of your goals.
