Successful Web Marketing

The beauty of visitors arriving at your web site from a search engine is in the fact that they have arrived there because they wanted to, they typed in a phrase which listed something, which was interesting enough for them to take the action of clicking on it to visit your site. This means that if your search engine listings are accurate enough, you already have a visitor who wants to know more.

Search engine marketing is about becoming listed in important search engines like Google and Yahoo and also specific niche directories and search engines that will appeal to your audience. Having gained a listing you then want it to appear in a prominent position where your target audience will notice your message and take an action by clicking on it.

This process isn’t just about keywords and meta tags as is the common belief, it’s about everything that I want to talk about in this blog, like podcasting, blogging, social networking and more. In a nutshell, it’s all about content, content that’s useful to the people you want to reach and content that will help them to solve a problem.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the method used to achieve a listing in search engines and then to drive that listing to the highest possible ranking. This can be achieved by careful thought about the tagging of pages and words used in the content, but also relies on both inbound and outbound links from your content, and a number of other factors.

Alongside “free” seo techniques you might also run a search engine advertising campaign using applications like Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing. For these services you can set a monthly budget to spend on advertising and allow the application to determine how it is spent or override the settings and spend manually. The basic plan is that you choose a series of keywords and phrases to appeal to your audience and then bid against others who are using the same to have your ad appear.

As with all successful web marketing techniques, the way to reach your potential buyers is not to tell them how good you or your product is, but to provide for them information that they are looking for or a solution to their problem. The key to success in both the free and the paid for techniques is to think very carefully about the types of keywords and phrases that your target visitors will use when they are searching for an answer to their problem. Using very broad generic terms will not be likely to provide you with a high listing, so for example if you are supplying parts for classic motorcycles, the phrase “motorcycle parts” returns about 8,000,000 results in Google. Whereas “triumph motorcycle parts” brings us down to 235,000 listings and “1960 triumph 5TA Speed twin motorcycle parts” gets us to 138.

A useful technique is to think very carefully about each of your customers and potential customers and divide them into categories or types, then for each of these write a profile listing their likes and dislikes, their habits etc. From this you can start to build content and develop keywords that target these particular characters.