|
While many people think it is enough to have web site to earn hundreds or thousands
of dollars within a few weeks, it is much harder in reality to get people to
your web site and then
it is another thing to get them to buy something from you. But that's a different
story. Let's concentrate on the first aspect: Getting traffic and especially
getting targeted traffic. You don't want to have cat lovers on your site when
you are selling dog food, do you ?
How do you get targeted prospects ? First of all, you must know your potential
customers. Who are they ? What are they looking for ? So the first thing , even
before you have built your web site, is to know which keywords your prospects
would search for. It is not as hard as you might think. But if you have a general
topic like I have myself with Internet Marketing, it might be a much better
idea to concentrate just on one aspect of Internet Marketing.
My friend, you ask why ? Did you ever perform a search on AltaVista for the
term "Internet Marketing"? Yes ? Then you will certainly know that
there about 6 million web sites competing for the top position on "Internet
Marketing".
It is very hard, if not impossible to reach a rank in the top 10 or even the
top 30 for such a general term. But if you concentrate on, let me say autoresponders,
then there are a lot less pages that deal with that topic.
1.) Choosing your domain name
This means, when you order your domain name, be sure to include your keywords
in your domain name. To take the example just mentioned above: If you're selling
dog food, don't take a domain like www.petshop.com .
Because then people could think that you are selling cat food, bird food etc.
, too. You want to target your potential customers, so your domainname would
be rather something like : www.dogfood.com or similar .
So now you've designed your pages. What comes next ?
2.) Frames/no-frames
Web pages which use frames have one big disadvantage: Some search engines are
not able to index them correctly. They cannot follow the links that are included
on these pages and that means that they won't be able to show the results of
your pages.
If you want to be on the safe side, create your web pages without using frames.
There are some tricks to enable a correct indexing but this would lead too far
for this time.
3.) The title of your homepage
It almost goes without saying that your title should have your keywords included
as well. You should choose a title that includes your four most important keywords.
If you have a site where people can learn how to write ads, you could give your
page a title that has the word ads in it plus some of your other keywords.
Example : "Writing ads: How to write ads that sell your products like
crazy." You have repeated your most important keyword "ads" and
you have used other keywords like "writing", "write" and
"sell".
4.) Meta tag : description
Meta tags are additional pieces of information which are placed within the
HTML - code. Your description reflects the most important part of your homepage
since this is the description
that is shown when someone searches for your site on a search engine.
You should clearly state the benefits of visiting your site. It should be a
like a little ad for your site. You should include your keywords once again
but not more than twice. I'll give you an example of my own site and then it
looks like this :
META content="Writing Headlines : No Success With Your Advertisements
? Discover The Little-Known Secrets Of Writing "Killer"-Headlines
!" name=description
5.) Meta tag : keywords
The Meta tag keywords should be used to put in all your keywords that are relevant
for your site . It is crucial to put your 4 most important keywords at the beginning.
You can include 15 further keywords and even more .
Example :
META content="headlines, advertisements, ads, copywriting, writing winning
sales letters, prospects, online, web, internet, marketing, campaign, writer,
marketer, promotion, copywriter, top-seller" name=keywords
6.) Meta tag : robots
You create a little robots.txt to let the search engine know which links it
should follow. If you want to exclude certain directories, you can use special
commands which forbid the search engine spiders to follow a complete path.
This can be necessary e.g. to avoid that the search engines link to your download
page where you have the articles you want to sell. An example can be found below
:
# robots.txt for http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/
# file created: 16.08.01
User-agent: *
# Disallow: /cgi/ # exclude robots from specified tree
# Disallow: /scripts/
# file modified: 16.08.01
7.) Keyword density
Your main keyword should be mentioned within the first 8 words of your body
text and can be mentioned 3 times more. The other keywords should not be forgotten,
too. Try to use them at least 3 times in your text.
8.) Alt-tags for your images
Alt-tags are alternative descriptions for your pictures. If you move your mouse-cursor
over your pictures, you can see this alternative text. This text is also shown
if a picture is not loaded correctly. Use your keywords to describe your pictures.
9.) No tricks like white text on white background !
Some people consider themselves to be very smart and they want to outwit the
search engines by putting a lot of their keywords with a font in the background
colour on their pages to make it more relevant to the engines.
But times have changed : The search engines recognize these tricks and as a
result your pages are banned from their index. Try just to do what is necessary
but don't use tricks, it won't do you no good.
10.) Link-Popularity
Many search engines like AltaVista have a new ranking concept which includes
link popularity. This means, the more pages have a link to your site, the better
your site gets ranked.
Some of them have also made special deals with pay-per-click search engines.
Those sites which rank on the top 3 will also get a high rank at "normal"
search engines.
Detlev Reimer is the publisher of the 1A IMS-Newsletter which gives you tips
and tricks on organizing your marketing data, website and ezine promotion and
testing and tracking ads. Subscribe to his free newsletter and get 3 free gifts
for subscribing : mailto:newsletter@internetmarketing-success.com?subject=ms
or just visit http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/ |
