In the previous article we looked at free tools within the website builder webeden.co.uk that you can use to market your website. In this article we're going to be examining the ways to market your website using search engines. One of these methods you have to pay for, and other is usually free. for visit to:- www.web-audios-plus.com Both are very effective!
Why should I market my Webeden.co.uk website?
The whole point of marketing your website is to send visitors to it. At the end of the day, you have decided to build your own website to showcase your products and services, in the same way a shop window does. If no-one is looking at the shop window, then you're not going to be able to sell any products! Search Engines are the single biggest source of traffic to websites. Over 65% of all journeys on the Internet start with a search. If you market effectively using search engines you will generate lots of traffic, and your website will be a success.
Pay Per Click Search
The most popular and perhaps best known online advertising channel is called Pay Per Click search (PPC). You might also know it as Google Adwords, which is Google's version of PPC. But the other search engines also have their own: Yahoo! has ?Yahoo Search Marketing?, and Microsoft (who run the search engines msn.co.uk and live.com) have ?AdCenter?. Put simply, its those ?sponsored links? that you see running at the top and down the right hand side of the Search Engine Results Page (SERPS). (That's the page that you see after you've typed in your search query and hit ?Search?). We're going to focus here on Google , as in the UK Google accounts for approximately 85% of all Internet searches. Bear this in mind when you make your own website.
In order to appear in these ?sponsored links? on Google, you need to sign up to a Google Adwords account (found at adwords.google.com). You will then be prompted by a ?Sign up wizard? that will guide you through the process of setting up your campaign. The first thing is to choose which keywords that people use when they search for your product. For example, if you sell pens, then you would choose keywords search as ?pens?, ?red pens?, or ?buy pens?, plus many hundreds of other variations.
Once you've chosen your keywords, you then write an advert to appear when people search using your keywords. There are editorial guidelines within your AdWords control panel, but briefly the top line needs to be 25 characters and the other two 35 characters each. You also need to add your website address (like www.webeden.co.uk), and choose the page on your website that you want to send visitors to. For example, if someone has searched for ?buy blue pen? and you have shown them an advert for a ?blue pen?, then link that advert with a page on your website where the user can buy a blue pen. Once all that is done, you decide how much you want to pay each time someone clicks on your advert, and you make the campaign live. more visit to :-www.video-web-wizards.com Your advert will then start appearing when people search using your keywords, and you pay Google when people click on your advert. The higher up you appear, the more people click on your advert. If you want to appear higher up, you need to increase the amount you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on your advert.
Having gone to the effort of building a website, PPC will probably be your most effective marketing channel.
In the first part of this article we looked at ways that you can use the sponsored listings on search engines to drive visitors to your website. This time around we're going to be looking at boosting your website in the organic listings on search engines, a process known as Search Engine Optimisation. If you're a website builder, then you're going to want to get this right from the start.
Search Engine Optimisation
This is the process by which your website appears on the left hand side of the search engine results page. Also referred to as the ?organic? results, Google decides what to put on the results page by sending out ?spiders? that search the web, reading every page and categorising them into a huge directory. The spiders decide what your website is all about, and then decide how important your website is. There are two things you need to do in order to appear high up in the results. First, make it very clear to the spiders what your website is about. Second, make your page appear very important. This is a whole art in itself, but here are the basic areas you need to look at
Changes you can make to your website - ?on page optimisation?
There are two separate ways to optimise your website so you can tell the search engine spiders what each page is about. The first is to modify the non-visible elements, such as the page title, meta keywords and meta descriptions. Within Webeden.co.uk this is very easy to do in the control panel ? in fact its an important reason to build a website using the Sitemaker platform. Just go to ?Admin? and then from drop down menu choose ?site keywords? and ?site description?. Enter the keywords and information that you want to appear for. If your site has many different pages then choose different keywords for each page. Its important that these keywords reflect the actual visible content of the website, and aren't about a completely different subject
The second way is to tell the search engines what each page is about, is to actually include visible text on your page, and to include your important keywords within the text. You need to make your keywords make up approximately 5% of the total content. Any headlines on the page should include the keywords too. Once again, you need to choose different keywords for each page of your site.
Off-page optimisation
The second and perhaps most important way you can boost your position in the organic SERPs, to reap the benefits when you make your own website, is by generating inbound links to your website from other websites. You also need to make sure those inbound links are using anchor text ? that's the actual words on the webpage that link to your site ? are keywords that you want to appear high up for. So using the pens website example from above, you need to get inbound links to your website using the anchor text ?buy pens?. Google places about 60% of the value of your website according to these inbound links, by looking at the ?value? of the websites linking to you, and the text they use to link to your site.
There's lots of ways to generate inbound links to your website. A few are:
- Make posts in forums that include links to your website
- Make comments on blogs, especially build your own website related ones, and contribute to debates, always including a link back to your site
- Buy links using a service like text-link-ads.com
- Send out press releases that contain links to your site
- Write articles (like this one) and post them in article directories, and Google Knol
- Ask your customers and visitors to link to your site
- Contact the owners of websites that you think would benefit from knowing about your website, and ask them to link to you
- Submit your website to as many as possible website directories, including dmoz.org and Yahoo!
Summary
Search engines are the single biggest source of traffic for websites, and something you need to think about when you build a website. You need to market using search engines in order drive high levels of traffic to your site. This doesn't have to be expensive ? in fact it will probably be the most effective source of traffic. Get it right and your website will be a guaranteed success.
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