Search Engine Optimisation Part I: The Importance
Every Internet entrepreneur knows that it's not just a case of build
it and they will come. As with all business effective marketing
is essential for it's survival. There are many ways of marketing
your business online, from banner ads to viral marketing. One of
the mainstays of an effective Email marketing campaign is without
a doubt Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
To help your business in this we will be offering some essential
information in this bulletin about this topic. We will be running
a bi-monthly article spanning the next 12 months to help you .
So why is SEO so important? Well with 85% of Qualified Internet
Traffic coming from a search engine and only 75% of users scrolling
past the first page of results* it is important you are not just
listed but in the first page or so.
Where Do You Want Them to Go Today?
As a first step in developing your SEO strategy it is vital you
know which keyword phrases you would like to target. We suggest
you start with just one. This should be something which is not too
generic. Having website as your keyword phrase for instance
would bring you up in Google but somewhere in amongst 68,800,000
other sites.
Take the example of a bathroom tile company in Edinburgh. They
could go for the phrase bathroom which would return 5,590,000
sites. If they narrowed this down to bathroom tiles they
would reduce the competing sites by 97% to 156,000. If they went
for the phrase bathroom tiles edinburgh they would get
just 1,410 sites returned and have a good chance of getting on to
the first page. If their business is over the counter then they
would not loose any business by using this strategy because who
is going to travel from London to Edinburgh to buy bathroom tiles?
You get the idea, keep it specific.
What's Your Name?
If you look
at the edinburgh bathroom tiles example in Google you will notice
something interesting about the addresses of the sites that came
up first on the list, they all have the word bathroom in their address
and the top ones also have the word edinburgh.
Once you have selected your keyword phrase it is a very good idea
to register domains for that phrase and point them to your main
website. This will help you get higher up the listings and prevent
your competitors from doing so. As an example we received a new
customer a few weeks ago who had typed Edinburgh Web Design into
a search engine and came across one of our sites www.edinburghwebdesign.com.
We have many of these sites forwarded to our 2F3 Internet homepage.
Being realistic new customers won't search for us using 2F3 Internet
until we are better known. In the meantime we need to focus on specific
keyword phrases.
If you would like help in selecting a keyword phrase and registering
associated domain names let us know.
*Source: Georgia Institute of Technology
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