Paying to Come Out on Top

I was recently told by a company that they were paying (what they considered to be) a bargain rate of around $10 per day to stay on top of a major search engine. The CEO of the company was quite pleased when the employee that had suggested the expenditure proved that, sure enough, the money was well spent, there they were right on top of the search for those exact keywords.

There are a few points to consider if your company is planning to throw marketing money at a major search engine. First, there is more than one search provider and each handles searches a little bit differently. You can position your company on one search provider and it won't make a bit of a difference on the others. Often customers don't realize they are using Google over Bing over Yahoo and don't care.

Secondly, your company can hit the top without the extra outlay and search optimization should be part of the cost of the web design and deployment and strategy.

Or you can continue to pay a princely sum to the search engines... 

Submitting your Sitemap

Once you have your xml sitemap built or updated you need to submit to the search engines so they find you sooner rather than later.

Google has the easiest, most user friendly and documented procedures. You first sign up for a Google webmaster account (using your current Google ID if you have one.) Then you follow the procedures on this Google Web Page.  Google will tell you within usually 24 hours if your Sitemap passed the test. If so then you can proceed to send to the other search engines.

Submitting to Bing is basically the same type of procedure. Bing does have some tools to monitor your site where you can monitor how your site does through the various search tools.

Yahoo's site is located at this link. Yahoo will notifyyou when your site has been accepted under your "My Sites" tab.

Sitemaps should be submitted anytime you make a change to your site.

Key Words

Every word that is on your website is a searchable clue that your customer can use to find you. It is important that you are as precise and specific as possible when you are reviewing your site and your business with your web consultant.

No one can know what you do better than you do. If you are selling lawn mowers and tractors, your lucrative side business of other yard tools like pruners and shovels may be overlooked as keywords.

Unfortunately, you may miss the opportunity of inviting a customer looking for a specific $20 pruner into your shop. This same customer may also be in the market for that $3000 tractor that you have on sale this week.

Words that are included in graphics, brought into frames from other pages, or words that are part of logos are not searchable. These words need to be incorporated into your website in other ways.
   
Good website planning of key words is crucial to getting the maximum marketing dollar out of your website.         

How do your customers find you?

When customers search for your services or products on the internet do they find you or your competitor? Do you know?

Customers find you on the web in several ways:

1. By keying or copying your link in directly. These are people who have been given your website or have visited you before and have bookmarked your site.  
2. Search engines; Google, Bing, etc. 
3. Referring sites;  Twitter, a social network site, affilliated product site, or any site that has a referring link to your site.  

Finding out how your customers find you is an important part of the process in tweaking your website.

Once you know that 20% of your customers find you through a search engine you can research what kind of searches your visitors perform. Are the keywords appropriate for your site?

How about the 60% of visitors arriving from referring sites? Are you taking advantage of all the possible sites that could be linking up and referring customers to your business?

And lastly do your current customers have your web address, a reason to return to your site every so often, and a reason to pass your site information on to their friends?