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Giving you and your business the internet presence it deserves at a price you can afford! |
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Articles - Increase Sales by Getting Your Site Noticed!A good web site is one that makes money, and people have to find your site in order to be attracted to your store! According to the Seventh WWW User Survey conducted by the Georgia Institute of Technology, the ways in which people discover Web sites are: 1. Via search engines (86.34%) For a complete copy of the Seventh WWW user survey, go to http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/survey-1997-04/ There 5 primary techniques for getting more traffic to your website. They are: 1) your local marketing program, 2) strategic linking 3) search engine submission programs 4) directory submission and 5) email signatures. This article will discuss techniques to help you with all five. Technique 1: Have a Strong Local Marketing ProgramYou are responsible for the marketing of your site. This is simple. Make sure that your domain name is listed in every classified ad, on every sign, billboard, radio ad, cable ad, etc. Put your domain on your business cards, logo clothing and stationery, including your fax cover page. And here is one people usually forget; put your domain name on the front of your store so that people walking by after hours can get access to your web site. This can be as easy as redoing the “store hours sign” at your storefront and adding your domain name there. Technique 2: Strategic LinkingSearch engines like sites that have a lots of incoming links! Link popularity is a method of ranking a website based on sophisticated analysis of the links between sites. At one time link popularity was a simple count of all the links to a website. Now, link popularity is a sophisticated analysis that weights some links more than others. Link popularity considers the following: 1. Total number of links to your site. Each link must be from a unique domain. The more links the better. 2. Category of sites which link to you. Links from sites on the same subject count more than links from unrelated sites. 3. Directory Links from large, human-powered directories are weighted very heavily. Links from directory-indexed sites are worth more than links from unindexed sites. Swap links with other sites! First place a number of related links on your site, then contact those sites asking for a reciprocal link. You'd be surprised how many people are willing to do this as link popularity is considered in some search engine's ranking systems. Visit my site at www.conceptdesigngroup.net for a copy of link swapping request letter that you can use to contact other site owners with. Sign up for advertising on industry-related portals! These types of links carry a lot of weight with search engines. Concept Design Group has developed 3 portals: www.buyunfinishedfurniture.com, www.unfinishedfurnitureyellowpages.com, and www.unfinishedfurniturevillage.com in order to create link popularity for our clients. These portals are also designed to increase awareness among consumers that unfinished furniture is a valid choice for home furnishings. One portal has the theme that unfinished furniture as an art form, another as a ”solid choice”, and another promotes unfinished furniture as fun and easy! The World of Unfinished Furniture found at www.unfinishedfurnstores.com is another excellent portal! All UFA members are listed with a link to your sites. Check the UFA site to make sure your URL is listed and correct! All my clients have a free link at www.conceptdesigngroup.net regardless of the submission package they choose. In fact, you should request outgoing links to your site from each manufacturer that you purchase from. And there are various linking services you can sign up for. Have a goal of obtaining 100 links to your site. You can check how many sites have linked to yours by going to AltaVista and typing in the following: link:www.yourdomainname.com. You will be given all the domains that are linked to you. Technique 3: Conduct a Search Engine Submission ProgramNearly 90% of traffic to most web sites comes from the top 10 search engines. Good positions in these search engines produce big results! A comprehensive search engine submission program is important to your overall web marketing efforts, and is critical to making your site profitable. To help you understand, here is the anatomy of a search engine: Search engines have three major elements. First, the spider (also called the crawler) visits a web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. This is what it means when someone refers to a site being "spidered" or "crawled." The spider returns to the web site on a regular basis (every few months) to look for changes. Everything the spider finds goes into the second part of a search engine, the index. The index, sometimes called the catalog, is like a giant digital book containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. If a web page changes, then this book is updated with the new information. Sometimes it can take a while for new pages or changes that the spider finds to be added to the index. Thus, a web page may have been "spidered" but not yet "indexed." Until it is indexed (added to the index) it is not available to those searching with the search engine. Search engine software is the third part of a search engine. This is the program that sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and rank them in order of what it believes is most relevant. In summary, when a potential customer searches the web, they are not searching the web, but instead they are searching data collected from the web listed in a giant digital catalog called an index. In theory, all sites eventually get listed in this great giant catalogue in the sky. The critical part is where they are listed in this catalog! This position is called your ranking. Just about everyone begins their Web browsing at one of the 10 major search engines. Does your ranking make a difference? You bet it does!!! Your rank in these search engines determines how many people will find and visit your Web site. If there are 300 stores indexed, no surfer is going to examine all 300 listings. The majority stop at the first 20 or 30 listings. Step 1 of a good site submission program: The first step is to choose the correct Webmaster. Designing a site that can achieve excellent rankings with search engines requires a lot of care during the web construction process. Every site has two major elements: 1) the visible part of the site that people can see must have an attractive appearance, a user-friendly interface and good content. 2) Behind your site, all of the htm code must be written to optimize ranking in the search engines. The way a web designer weaves the correct htm code, metatags and keywords behind the scenes is as important as how the website looks to the consumer. In fact, more important, because good looking means nothing if nobody finds the site. Often the “free” yellow page sites or local chamber of commerce sites never get submitted properly (if at all) to the top 10 search engines, especially if your site is buried as a subdomain behind theirs! If someone is building your site for “free”, read on. It’s the money you don’t make that should scare you. Step 2 of a good site submission program: Submit your site (or hire someone to submit it) to the top 10 search engines on at least a monthly basis. I often get comments from clients who think they don’t need a site submission program because they do not intend to sell furniture from their site on a national basis. However, all research indicates that 90% of web surfers end up narrowing down their search to a regional or local level. For example, if I live in Texas, it would be logical for me to search for a store in Texas or my hometown first, and then increase my search if I can’t find anyone locally. Did you read those words? I will increase my search if I can’t find anyone locally. So make sure you can be found locally - don’t get passed by! The main objective of your site submission program is to get in the top 20 to 30 rankings locally. If your store is selling nationally, then your objective is going to be to get into the top 20-30 rankings nationally, which will involve a much more concentrated and expensive effort. As competition increases for the top 20 national spots for unfinished furniture stores, you will either have to spend more time at your computer or more money to outsource the submission program. Step 3 of a good site submission program: Learn the rules of the different search engines! The ones to concentrate on are Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, Webcrawler, Infoseek, Goto, Hot bot, AOL, Northern and Google. If you submit the wrong information to each search engine (they all like something different), then your site may never be included or will rank so low no one will find it. Your site can even be excluded from the index is your submission is considered to be spamming (over submitting or using too many keywords). If you're listed in the index but not within the first 20 or 30 search results, you lose, no matter how many engines you submitted your site to. The other problem with site submissions is that search engine requirements change like the shifting sands in order to prevent spammers from over submitting their sites. What worked last month may not next month! I subscribe to a number of periodicals and web subscriptions each month just to keep up with the changes for my clients and have noticed requirements getting stricter in the last 6 months. You or your webmaster must optimize your website pages by creating body text, meta titles, meta descriptions, url text and meta keywords that have the correct word count, keyword count, keyword frequency, keyword prominence and keyword density for each search engine. Remember, keywords are those words surfers will choose to search with. In our industry, they are likely to be “unfinished furniture” or “unpainted furniture” or “solid wood furniture” etc. Here are a few examples of search engine requirements: Word count is a count of the total words in a given area, not including HTML tags. Some engines may rank pages more favorably based on whether they have a certain number of words on the page, in the body text or in the title. Sometimes fewer words are better, and on other engines, more words are better. For example, AOL likes to see a word count of 681 to 1014 for the body text area with a key word prominence of 40% and Hotbot likes a word count of 104 to 134 for the body text area. Alta vista likes a total word count of 500 to 886 for the page as a whole and a word count of 6 to 8 in the title area. Keyword frequency is how often a keyword appears on the page or in an area on the page. In general, the more times a keyword appears on the page, the more relevant it will be to that search. Keyword frequency is one of the primary criteria for ranking on many engines. For example, Goto likes a total frequency of 4 to 9 for the page as a whole. LookSmart prefers a total frequency of 5 to 12 for the page as a whole Keyword Prominence is how close to the start of the area that the keyword appears. In general, a keyword that appears closer to the top of the page or area will be more relevant. However, with other search engines, it helps to have a keyword in the middle of an area, or even toward the end of the area. Keyword density is the number of times your "keyword(s)" appear in relation to the other words on your web page. These are just a few of the requirements, and if you understand the last 4 paragraphs, you should be asking yourself, “How do I design a home page to meet all of these different requirements?” The answer is…… you don’t. Instead, you design doorway pages and hallway pages that are created specifically for each search engine. Doorway pages are in essence, any page that is optimized to rank well on a search engine. Since each search engine ranks pages differently, it's virtually impossible for a single page to compete well on all engines. For example, AOL may favor pages with 800 words on the page, where Excite might favor 400 words. In this scenario, there's no way to design a single web page to appeal to both engines' preferences. The solution is to create one page designed for AltaVista, and submit it to AltaVista, and a separate page designed for Excite, and submit that one to Excite. So if you optimized your doorway pages for two sets of keywords for 10 search engines, that means 20 extra pages. Looks like a lot of work, doesn't it? Well it is.....the process is time-consuming and often frustrating. But when you get ranked in the #2 or #3 position on Lycos or HotBot, you'll feel really good -- and your site traffic and sales will begin to definitely increase. Good Webmasters spend hours each month checking your sites rankings, and rewriting your pages to optimize them for each search engines. Currently -- the most successful techniques for creating top ranking doorway pages are keywords in domain name, keywords in page name, keywords in page title, keywords in page headline, keyword relevance, keywords in page content and keywords in meta tags Once your doorway pages are completed, you need to create a “hallway page” that has links to all the "doorway" pages you've optimized for each search engine. When this hallway page is submitted to a search engine, the search engine's spider travels down the page and branches off to these links indexing those pages you really want indexed. In theory, the pages it spidered will rank higher than the hallway page and higher than they would if they were submitted individually. AltaVista, however, has suddenly gotten sticky about hallway pages, and hallway pages are necessary to submit pages that are more than two links away from your home page. Since Alta Vista is such an important search engine, I have designed my client’s web sites to be only 3 layers deep, using downloadable articles or scrolling options instead of deeper pages. I also exclude AltaVista when submitting hallway pages, submitting only one doorway page optimized for them with a link to the hallway page, so the rest of the site is indexed properly. Step 4 of a good site submission program: Use only key words that relate to the content of the page or your site may be rejected by search engines. Do not use other popular keywords in your Meta and Title tags that don't have anything to do with your website. Surfers get angry when a search leads them to a dead end. For example, imagine you were searching for a page about socks and end up with a site selling laundry detergent. Sites that do this lose validity fast and search engines are taking steps to prevent this type of abuse! For example, here is the warning on AltaVista’s site: “Sometimes sites submit a large number of pages to AltaVista hoping to have them show up often on our result pages. They submit pages with numerous keywords, or with keywords that are unrelated to the content of the pages. Some other people submit pages that present our spider with content that differs from what users will see. We strongly discourage these practices”. Simply put, your "keywords" must be relevant to your TITLE as well as to the contents of your web page. Your site can be banned from the indexes if you use techniques that
are considered to be spamming!
Technique 4: Conduct a Directory Submission ProgramDirectories are different from search engines. Search engines are an automated process, run by “scripts” or automated programs rather than people who run directories. Another difference between a search engine and a general directory is that a directory will not list your domain name if you do not register it with them. Directories do not make use of indexing software agents and so have no way of knowing your web site is out there unless you present it in the form of a submission. As a result, their registration form will be considerably longer than just your URL. Directories are usually subdivided into categories and you have to submit your URL under the most appropriate heading. When you submit your website to a directory, it is reviewed by a human being, and they decide to reject or accept your site. For this reason, I never submit my client’s sites to directories until they are complete. The people that review these sites do not like to see incomplete sites and construction notices everywhere! The main directories are Yahoo, Snap, LookSmart and Open Directory. The Open Directory is becoming a more important one. It’s database is used on more than 20 search engines and directories, including AltaVista, Netscape, What's Related, Lycos, HotBot, and Dogpile. It's also the default search for Netscape's browser. Get listed in Open Directory and you will improve your ranking on the other search engines and directories that use the Open Directory database. A good listing in Open Directory to be worth about 1/4 to 1/2 as much traffic as a site listed well in the same category at Yahoo. Technique 5: Email SignaturesLast but not least is the technique of advertising your website domain on your email address. It is so simple and so powerful. Set up the signature file in your email program to automatically include your web site along with your name and phone numbers. Here is an example: Christine Doyle Adams Office: 262-767-1234 Research indicates that over 30% of respondents found a site this way! So don’t delay in setting yours up. It is easy and it is free! Yes, this is an example of something that is really free, really.
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