Rescue Your Website from the Internet "Black Hole"

Kethyr's CAMEL Report
Moscow, Russia
Monday, December 15, 2008

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Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
— Mark Twain

Okay, so you have a website. You've spent time and money getting this thing up. You've used all your creative juices to get the words just right. And you added some nice graphics to make the site aesthetically pleasing. Now what?

A website is of little use if nobody can find it.

Mastering organic search engine ranking has proven to be a fundamental part of the online marketing mix. (By "organic," I mean the "natural," as opposed to the "paid/pay-per-click," listings that appear when someone conducts a search on Google or other search engines.)

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — the ability to increase your website's visibility in organic search listings and refine the content structure on the site itself — are critical for market awareness and acquiring clients online.

According to a recent study by CreativeWebsiteMarketing.com, most people who buy online start with a search engine, and a study by WebProNews indicates 66.3 percent of people who use search engines click on organic listings before they click on a sponsored link.

You must make sure your site doesn't get lost in Internet obscurity.

Here are five simple ways to help boost your website's search engine ranking, the traffic your site receives, and the clients it generates:

1. Create online buzz about your site, product, or service.

You can do this by generating online press releases. There are services on the Web, such as PRWeb.com or Free-press-release.com, that do this for free or at a nominal cost. Another idea is to post comments to high-traffic blogs, bulletin boards, chat rooms, or forums.

Do a Web search for top blogs or news forums that are related to whatever it is that you're selling. Go to each site, one by one, and post a comment. (Start a new topic or reply to an existing one.) This helps in two ways: One, you create buzz in the marketplace. (Depending on your tactics, your message can even go viral.) Two, you get a "back-link" to your site that helps when the site is indexed by search engine "spiders" (programs that search engines use to rank your site).

An important note: Your post should be relevant and genuine. Your comment should be relevant to the question you're replying to, have some sort of value to the readers that view it, and be in the proper area/subject matter on the forum you're posting to. Stay away from posts that are blatantly self-serving. These posts are viewed as spam by forum webmasters and could get you banned from the forum.

For example, if you have the good fortune to interview a celebrity in your field, immediately after the interview post a press release to several online press distribution services. You should also upload comments about the interview to news-aggregating services, blogs, and like-minded forums (with a back-link to the release posted on your website).

Within a few weeks of the initial interview, your website visits and traffic rankings could easily double and customer conversion should spike. Even months after the fact, your press release may still be picked up by the media… and your website should continue enjoying residual traffic and back-links from your efforts.

These techniques, and the others I'm about to go into, have helped increase website traffic by 80 percent and more with a greater than 150 percent return on investment!

Which leads me to my next strategy…

2. Initiate a relevant inbound link program.

Set up a reciprocal link page or blog roll (a listing of website addresses on a blog, as opposed to a website) that can house links from industry sites. Contact sites in your industry to see if they'd be willing to swap links with you — a link to your site for a link to theirs. As always, relevance is key. Search engines shun link harvesting (collecting links from random websites that have no relevance to your site), so these links should be from sites that are similar in nature to your business.

3. Give Web searchers great content and a link back to your site.

Upload relevant content to sites that make information available to other sites that want to publish it, such as ArticleDashboard.com or ArticlesFactory.com. This is a great way to increase market awareness as well as establish an inbound link to your site. There is also a syndication opportunity, as third-party sites may come across your article when doing a Web search and republish your content on their own websites. As long as third-parties give your site editorial attribution and a link, getting them to republish your content is just another distribution channel for you to consider.

4. Website pages should be keyword rich and related to your business.

Make a list of your top 20 keywords and variations of those words, and incorporate them into the copy on your site (avoiding the obvious repetition of words). Search engine "spiders" crawl Web pages from top to bottom, so your strongest keywords should be in that order on your home page and sub-pages (the most relevant on the top, the least relevant on the bottom).

You'll want to do the same for your tagging. Make sure your title tags (the descriptions at the top of the browser window for each of your website's pages) and meta tags are unique and chock full of keywords. And your alt tags (used when coding images on your website) should have relevant descriptions as well.

5. List your site in online directories by related category or region.

This is an effective way to increase exposure and get found by prospects searching specifically for information on your product or service by keyword topic. Popular directories (like Business.com) typically have a nominal fee. But there are many other directories (like Dmoz.org, Info.com, and Superpages.com) that are free.

Most important, before you start your SEO initiatives, don't forget to establish a baseline for your site so you can measure pre- vs. post-SEO tactics. Upload a site counter (which counts the number of visits to your website), obtain your site's Alexa traffic ranking at Alexa.com, or get your site's daily visit average (from Google Analytics or another application) — and then chart your weekly progress using Microsoft Excel. Understand that it typically takes two to three months for a site to be optimized… so be patient. You will eventually see results.

Yours in success,

Sean Eric Armstrong
Kethyr's CAMEL Report

P.S. Please send your questions and comments to editor@kethyr.com. For more information on how you can increase your website's search engine rankings and the traffic it receives, please don't hesitate to e-mail info@kethyrsolutions.com.

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