Your Website Marketing Plan and Search Engines

How does your website marketing plan address search engines? This is probably the most important question to answer after you’ve figured out your web marketing goals. Why? Because like it or not search engines are where most of your customers start looking for your services. If you don’t show up in search engine results, you’re losing business—possibly a lot of business. And, as customers in the United States go online more and more, you’ll be losing even more business down the road.

Search Engine Marketing

The two main categories of search engine marketing are “natural” search results and paid search listings. To illustrate these, let’s just focus on Google since 65% of all Internet searches start with it. The “natural” search results  are all the links on the left side of the page.

Natural Search Results

Including natural search results in your website marketing plan is critical. The easier you are to find online, the more business you can win. Natural search results are based on each search engine’s own set of rules. The rules are constantly being refined and are held in secrecy by the search engine in order to keep folks from abusing or manipulating them. But, we do know a few key pieces of information to help your site gain in the rankings.

• The overall principle to keep in mind is that you need relevant, current content.
• Then, you need to let search engines know what the most important pieces of your content are by liberally applying that content to headings, titles, page names, picture names, and links.
• Next, you need to show search engines that other people agree that your content is relevant and good by having links coming into your site from all over the web, using the right keywords.

To see how you rank on a search engine for any particular phrase, just type the phrase into the search area, press the search button, and scan the results for your website. If you don’t come up within the first 100 or so results, you need improvement on that key phrase. Most people don’t go past the first, or at most, the second page of results. These are people who may be looking for you!