How to Get to the Top of the Web Pile
by Theresa Lütge-Smith
How things have changed! Only a few years ago the Web was an unfamiliar place where only a few techno-savvy individuals ventured to communicate with like-minded people and to explore the possibility of making their fortune in a virtual marketplace.
Despite the dot.com rationalization of the year 2000 when many lost their shirts, the conviction persists that if you're willing to stay ahead of your competitors by constantly updating your website-marketing strategies as fast as the emergent marketplace, you can make a killing as a Netpreneur. However, it's much more than just putting together a dynamic Web site that is marketing-oriented and customer-effective - it's also about building persistent competitive success and making it easy for users to find you.
There's no denying that the Internet is a powerful environment where websites are the critical marketing vehicles. However, not all companies flaunt elaborately designed websites that clearly put their marketing budgets to the task. A large proportion of today's online presence represents an ever-growing mass of low-end home pages - generally online brochures - that are being launched simply because they can't afford not to become mainstream. A further development shaping the way both large and small companies do business on the Internet is the upsurge in direct trade between wholesalers and consumers. Business-to-Business purchasing over the Internet is also accelerating. As these trends continue more companies will expand their customer databases with rich information to mass-customize their offerings (e-CRM). Albeit, according to research conducted in the US and Europe, around 85% of Web traffic comes from search engines, and if your site is not ranked high enough none of that traffic will come to you.
Keyword Analysis
Although the evolution of electronic business has been swift and instrumental in grooming online companies to become more marketing-oriented and customer-effective, it's become a known fact that competitive success is reliant on search engine optimization to drive traffic to your website. But with more than 1 billion Web sites currently listed with search engines, how will Internet users ever find you? Similarly, the large majority of websites are never found because they are targeting keywords that are never searched for, and even if a site is well ranked it might be optimized for the wrong keywords. If you really want to generate traffic and thus improve your bottom line, you will have to tweak your site to include precise keyword-related advertising and features search engines look for when spidering your Web site. This aspect has become something of an art of which the serious Webmaster should be aware. One way of doing this is to take the focus off technology and put it where it belongs - on the customer. Embrace the corporate culture of the future by communicating directly with your best customers to find out what words or phrases they are likely to type into the search box of a search engine to find your business.
Optimization
Optimization can increase your traffic. Optimization refers to the steps needed to make sure that your keywords are incorporated in your easy-to-use site in such a way as to make it highly visible to search engines. This also means that it is important to develop a successful marketing campaign that addresses all aspects of your business systems, including knowing your own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of your competition. Building a marketing system begins with intelligence gathering and research, which includes an in-depth staff survey to learn the inner workings of your business and a competitive survey to determine what your competition is doing; as well as a client survey to elicit feedback about their perception of your product and service. There are, of course, many services that will do all of this for you. One of these is NHB Internet Services (www.nhbis.com), a company that offers to take your marketing to the next level. Outsourcing your marketing is often the best way to guarantee results.
Search Engine Submission
For most Webmasters the goal is to get into that elusive 'top ten' ranking for particular keywords or search terms. While it may seem a simple task to submit your site to a search engine, search engine submission and optimization can be an intricate affair. A very useful site for webmasters in this regard is Search Engine Watch at SearchEngineWatch.com/webmasters. The site has concise and well written articles of various marketing related issues, and a section devoted to the essentials of search engine submission and optimizing.
Although there is a marked difference between search engine submissions and search engine optimization, these terms are sometimes used cooperatively to discuss ways to promote sites on search engines. Search engine submission refers to the job of getting your website listed with search engines - which simply means they know your pages exist - while search engine optimization refers to the task of changing your site so that it may rank high for particular search terms, and be among the top sites indexed by crawler-based search engines.
When an Internet user types a word or phrase into the search box of a search engine, powerful software scans the search engine's database for words that match the user's query. Each search engine has its own unique criteria for deciding on the relevance of the pages contained in its database to the search query. There are also differences in the type of search engines. For example, The Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) is maintained by a human editor who decides whether the site is suitable for inclusion or not, under which category it will be listed, and even the title and description that will be displayed on the results page. It is more difficult to manipulate rankings on a directory than it is with an automated search engine. Another example of a directory is LookSmart (www.looksmart.com).
PART TWO: How to Submit...
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