One of the mistakes many people make in marketing their site is to focus solely on the quantity of visitors. It is not the goal of your business to have lots of traffic, but to have lots of sales. Same for a web site. The point of optimizing a site for search engines is to increase the quantity of buyers of your products and services. You do this with a structured optimization process.
The optimization process develops in a spiral: analysis -> optimization -> waiting for traffic -> accumulation of statistics -> analysis -> etc … As the spiral turns, new traffic to the web site is attracted and new statistics are accumulated for analysis.
To start the spiral, you first do an analysis for the initial set of keywords for your site. Keywords are the set of words that a visitor may use in a search engine to locate your site. If you had a site selling condos in Manhattan, your visitor might reach you by typing into Google the term “manhattan condo” – those words in quote are keywords. And most important to note is that the best keywords are a phrase – it would be extremely difficult to establish top position in search engines for a single word like “condo”. Thus what you want to do is determine your niche market, either by geography, specialized services, or other factors that will narrow down the competitive web sites on the Internet.
After you determine your niche market, you want to do some keyword research to find the best phrase for your purposes. There are keyword research tools available to you (listed at end of article). These tools allow you to observe the search behavior of people, based on the actual search terms, as they searched on the Internet. And when aggregated, you get a nice view of the words people most often use when thinking about and searching for a certain topic.
Once you have an idea of the words people are using, it becomes something of an art, combined with your expertise, to determine the exact phrases for which to optimize. A good idea is to concentrate on phrases that catch people in the middle of the buying process. You do not want to use generic terms someone might use when just beginning the buying process, like “buying a home in manhattan.” Nor phrases that indicate someone has a specific product in mind, like “house for sale at 211 East 31st Street”. It best to find them when they have narrowed their search down without having a specific item in mind, like “condo for sale on the upper west side.” Or better yet, where they are looking for the web site to facilitate the purchase process, “broker upper west side.”
After you have your keyword phrases, you will want to optimize your website pages for good search results. This is not about tricking search engines. It is about understanding what elements they look for on a page to determine the relevance of the page to your keywords. There are many factors that go into determining the rank (determination of relevance and popularity) of your web page, including your page title, meta-tags, text, captions, alt tags, links, etc. Tools to assist you are available. A good one, called IBP, is located at Axandra.
When your site is optimized, you will want to track the effectiveness of your keyword phrases in attracting visitors. To do this, the most important tool is your web log. When a visitor is referred to your page from a search engine or directory, he leaves a footprint that reveals what keywords and key phrases he used to search for your site, product or service. A good statistical analysis program is available from most quality hosting providers that will allow you to see these footprints in an understandable format. You will want to see the number of people coming to your site for the keyword phrases you chose. You will also want to see what other keyword phrases are attracting prospects. Using this data, you can do your keyword analysis again to refine your marketing strategy.
Resources for Analysis of Keywords
Google’s Keyword Tool
SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
Wordtracker
Keyword Discovery
Pagerank
Resources for Optimization of Web Pages
Google WebSite Optimizer
Axandra
Forums for asking questions
ihelpyou Forums
Webmaster World
Cre8asite Forums
Search Engine Forums
SearchGuild
Open Directory Forums
SitePoint Forums
