Registering Your Site The closing tip in the first tutorial was to visit Tooter at SelfPromotion.com and register your web site with the search engines and indexes. If the search engines do not know you are there, they will not send visitors to you. So we give them a hand by telling them we are there. As it takes some search engines and indexes weeks and others a few months to index your site, you have time to fine tune exactly what terms you will use. The exercise will have made you think about the three essential tags you must use for maximum effect, all contained within the head tag of your site, invisible to the site visitor.
Here is an important tip for when you register your site. Get yourself a web mail address from a mass supplier such as Googlemail, Yahoo Mail or, as a last resort, M$ Hotmail. In order for many of the search engines to accept your submission, the quid pro quo is that you sign up for their newsletter first. You can unsubscribe later but that is even more cumbersome. You will have to resubmit to many of them, say each six or eight weeks. Which means you would have to re-subscribe and unsubscribe each time. With a web mail account you simply log in once every week or two and delete them all. You get the added bonus of an Instant Messenger (IM) account, very useful for free online person to person communications in real time. Are the head tags important?
Several years ago Google announced it was no longer going to use the description or keyword meta tags. However, a couple of years ago it announced it was about to recommence doing so. Whilst the pundits argue about the relative weightings given to each, the fact is that they do not know and we can only rely upon the announcements from representatives of the most important engines themselves. They have not told us, at least not with any clarity, so we must treat them as being very important indeed.
Throughout the period, Google has continued to use the title tag in its weightings and algorithms. So what are keywords, then?The expression used to describe the words in those tags, and the most important words in the content of the pages our visitors can see, is keywords. Keywords, however, are most accurately described as those words people searching to find our goods or services use when they enter their search terms into the relevant boxes in the search engines. We only hope they will be the same ones as those in our three important tags and page content. If we are trying to attract traffic, rather than write good copy in language most suited to our usage, or embarking upon a designer ego trip with images and scripts the search engines cannot see, we design our tags and content so that we match as nearly as possible what the surfer is looking for in terms as they, not we, express them.
How can we ensure our terms match theirs?It is imperative we find several hundred, possibly thousands of, words, expressions, phrases, terms, call them what you will. To fail will render this whole exercise a waste of time. To do so without help can only involve guesswork and we may easily fall wide of the mark.
There are several places we can find some clues to help in this quest. Further, we do not need them all right now, today. We can start with a few and just keep on building. Once we have generated some close matches, our sites will begin to earn a little money and it will be sensible to reinvest some of that to speed our efforts and enjoy much greater effect.
Firstly, our web sites generate log files on our host's server. There are many log file analysis programmes which will show who visited, from whence they came, when, for how long, which pages they visited, whether they were new visitors or if they had been here before, and, as importantly, which search term they used to find us. These real search terms, given to us by real users, are very important keywords and we must take note of them and store them for future use. Start by looking at what your host supplies.
We can also use colleagues, staff, friends, family to brainstorm lists of what terms they may use to find what you have to offer. Remember, you are striving to earn visits from new potential customers who have no notion of your business name or of the fact that your site exists. The words and phrases must be ones used by people looking for your product or service, not for your company. Using the site in our newsletter support example, we must identify keywords and phrases used by surfers looking to book entertainment acts for their specific function or event. Using the site name or the business name in our efforts will be useless. We may as well keep those secret until the visitors are actually on the site, for all the purpose they will serve. When you look at the source code, you will see the business name is not even mentioned in the title tag.
Next, we can use search term analysis software, such as that available at Wordtracker, to test our ideas on keywords and key expressions. Type in the expression you have in mind and Wordtracker will give you a list of similar terms and alongside each, the number of times it has been used by people browsing, along with a prediction of how many times that term will be used over the following 24 hours. The professional version will do an awful lot more, too, like telling you how many other sites are using those keywords on their sites, how many of them are paying for clickthroughs on those terms and giving you a weighted score against each term which can help you decide which ones to use. This is where our money is. Starting with the free version for many of us, and subscribing to the professional version as the cash flow from the site increases, it is one investment we are never going to regret.
It can be a grind, so motivate yourselfMaking sure we have the right keywords, and keeping on top of surfers' ever changing use of words, is probably the most demanding and time consuming aspect of web site marketing. The rewards for getting it right are excellent and can be immense. The knowledge that literally millions of web site owners give up before they have even given the techniques a real try should serve to motivate us to stay the course. Does it still seem there are far too many "doing it" for us to succeed?
Try seeing it this way. The competition on the web is not nearly so fierce as on the high street and trading estate. The market place is potentially many, many times as large as the one you could reach by more traditional, much more expensive, methods. Much of the competition does not even know how to market itself - why did you attend my presentation? Many of your competitors who find out what they should be doing just give up without a struggle. All capped by the fact that the investment required is rarely anything like so high per unit of profit returned as any marketing method without a web presence.
Add to that the fact that once the money is coming in, you will be able to afford to pay your willing tutor here to do the job for you! How can you possibly lose? ;)
Now you know what they are and have some ideas for how to find them, you need to collect as many key words, terms and phrases as you can. If you are a dab hand with a spread sheet, that is the best place to keep them for future analysis and manipulation. If you are not, keep them in a spreadsheet anyway in case we get time later to discuss how to use a spread sheet to analyse and manipulate them.
In the next issue we shall be looking at how to use the keywords we have found, whilst gathering more of them and testing for relevance. Today's practical tip:Find out what site statistics software your web host offers, and what it is capable of. See if you can make out how many new visitors and how many repeat visitors you get each day, week and month. Forget hits. You will need a maths degree to use those figures effectively and they are relatively meaningless for our purposes. Your are interested quite specifically in visits, then sites, then pages. Next, can you make out where the visitors came from? Are they in areas you can serve as part of your marketplace? What other useful information can you glean from the statistics you have access to? How many keywords and key phrases have you gleaned from your visitors by using your stats programme?
If your really do hit a brick wall, that is sad because the best of the free log analysis software has to be installed on the server. There is a good cheap application which can be uploaded to your web site as an alternative if needs must. Take a look at Web-Stat. You will certainly need something of that nature in order to check how effective or otherwise your efforts in driving traffic are. Please do not use one of those ugly, visible "hit counters". For the most part, their accuracy is questionable, they do not offer the information you need and they put your visitors off.
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