The Ideal Web Site – Part 3 of a Series
The Ideal Website is Search Engine Friendly
Over 80% of the traffic on most successful websites will come from being listed on the first page (top-10) on Google, Yahoo! and MSN. The rest of your traffic will typically come from PPC (pay per click) advertising, inbound links from theme related websites and being listed on the second or third page of the top three engines. If your site isn’t listed in the first three SERPs (search engine results pages) your site should be considered ‘invisible’ to the Internet.
Most sites aren’t search engine friendly. They don’t rank well because they don’t deserve a top position. They have very little content and the content they do offer isn’t considered of much value to searchers. Typical ‘toot your own horn’ ad copy on the home and about us page, tables of prices, forms, Flash photo galleries, JavaScript widgets, most short description shopping cart pages, etc. are not good content.
Search engines love fresh unique content that is rich in naturally occuring keywords, internally linked to other theme content in the site. Content should be added at least weekly or even daily. Great content encourages naturally occurring links from other theme-related websites and trackbacks from blogs. Over time a website or blog will accumulate hundreds or even thousands of posts and/or articles.
Developing quality content involves a commitment. Many companies have several bloggers or a designated writer. If your company does not have anyone with the time to create content on a consistent basis, there are SEO copywriting services and web content writers that will help make your site search engine friendly.
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The Ideal Web Site – Part 2 of a Series
The Ideal Website Targets the Right Keywords
One of the biggest mistakes website owners make is targeting keywords that are unlikely to provide a return. Achieving a #1 ranking on Google for a keyword search term nobody is searching for is a waste of time and money. For search engine marketing, keywords fall into two major categories: broad generic (head) keywords, branded and regional (tail) keywords. The stiffest competition is in the short head keywords.
If you entered the head keywords ‘storage products’ into Google today you’d see over sixty-one million pages indexed. That’s a lot of competition. In the top five you’d find Rubbermaid. For a company with almost unlimited marketing resources very generic keywords may be worth pursuing. We have a client in the Vancouver area. By choosing regional (tail) keywords we have been able to secure the top position on Google for ‘vancouver storage products’. The amount of traffic received for their SEO dollars has proven to be a good investment. Pursuing top rankings for ‘storage products’ with the budget we had to work with would have been a poor investment, with little or no returns. If you entered ‘spacesaver storage canada’ today you would discover that these branded (tail) keywords also returned a #1 ranking for our client.
Whether you’re pursuing organic rankings or pay per click traffic, selecting the right keywords can be one of the primary decsions that determine your online success. Keyword analysis is the starting point.
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