Visibility

Step#3: Building Free Links to your website:

Links to your web site can accomplish a number of things, the least of which is making search engines aware of your pages. There is no advantage to submitting your site to search engines directly. Once a search engine becomes aware of your site from a link on any page in its index it will schedule a crawl of your site. Once your pages start showing up in the index there is no need for resubmission.  Google Maps local business center is a great place to get started building links for your site. Once you have added your entry not only will Google know about your web site, you may well be included in search results. Here is an example of the results page.  So let’s kill two birds with one stone, by adding our business to the local listings of the search engines.

Follow the link and add your site to Google now. Out of pocket $0.00

Follow the link and add your site to Yahoo now. Out of pocket $0.00

Follow the link and add your site to MSN now. Out of pocket $0.00

The ideal website for search marketing would have all the authoritative content on every aspect of a subject related to your products and services. Everyone in the related fields would recognize this site by posting referral links on their websites and blogs. The anchor text of the links would have your best keywords relating to your products. This proposition is unlikely for most of us.

However, we can take advantage of the link building process to improve our web sites performance in search. Links from pages that have content related to our web site and its content have value in improving search results. Search engine rankings are relying more on referrals from related sites. The closer the linking pages relate to your content, the more value they have as a referrer. A link on your local Pizzerias’ website may get you some traffic if someone clicks on the link, but does not contribute to your search ranking.

The next step#4: Building Links to your website part 2:

Step#2: What does the Search Engine see on your pages?

Search Engines cannot really see your pages as human readers can. Therefore, the task for a search engine is to catalog your pages correctly in its index from the text on a page. The better job done in cataloging web pages, the better the potential for delivering results well matched to a searchers query.

Now that we have seen our page tittles and descriptions, we can look at the body of the page content. No one but the search engine designer can predict exactly how a web page is cataloged, but there are good rules of thumb. The search terms should be included in the page text, to match up with a search query.

Use the Leadslander tool http://www.leadslander.com/php/kpa.php and enter the URLs of each page you found listed for your site in the site: command step#1.

In this case, www.chirishtech.com pages were examined to find the pages that “read best” to a search engine. Pages that have titles, descriptions, and now body content that are clearly about our products key-phrases are ones worth promoting.

The home page of a website is often not worth promoting. As in the case of the Chirish site, the home page is an attractive graphic just like their print material. It is a poor candidate for link promotion, having very little text for a search engine to read.

The bluegaglepins.html page is also graphically appealing and has much richer content suitable for search promotion shown below.

Now you have listed your web pages with the site: command, and examined the content of each page for their potential value in search. Next, we will look at boosting their position in the search engines with in-links.

The next step#3: Link Building is an Essential, Ongoing Online Marketing Strategy

Most businesses have had websites for years now without any consideration for search engine marketing. We have all been through the stage of putting up a website, adding the web address to all of our printed material. We may have had the site rebuilt by a professional designer.

Search engine marketing seems to be everywhere we turn. The newspapers and trade journals publish frequent stories on the subject. Solicitations by marketing firms offering to make your site #1 in Google prompt us to consider what we are missing. The arguments they make sound reasonable, “being visible in search engines”, has to be a plus. The question is how much is it worth and how do you go about getting there?

The first step in your journey is to lay out a roadmap, with waypoints along the way. Here we plan a 12-step program where you take advantage of the possible benefits of SEM (search engine marketing) for your business. Each leg along the way has a cost commensurate with the benefit. Many steps have little or no, out of pocket expense and others may involve a substantial investment.

Answer these questions: Out of pocket $0.00

Will my business benefit if potential customers become aware of my company’s products? Can my business benefit if my existing customers become aware of a new price or process I am offering? I expect the answer is a resounding yes or you would not be reading this page.

Search engines are in business to make money, delivering the best information they can find to those who use them. The more relevant the results they deliver the more satisfied their customers. Just like hit TV shows, the advertising revenue is greater.

Step#1 in our process is to determine where we are in Search Marketing terms: Out of pocket $0.00

Unbelievably, just putting your website “on the internet” by hosting it with an ISP (internet service provider) does not mean that your pages can be found by a search engine. Each search engine builds an index of the pages it finds while crawling the internet. I do not know why we still call it crawling when it’s so fast that billions of pages are included in these indexes. The search engine employs automated software called “bots” to find and index pages by the content it “reads” from each page.

Search engines provide tools you can use to check how your site is doing in their
index. When you search for “large format printing”, you get instant results. The search engine ran your query against its index. If your page on large format printing is not in their index it cannot not be in the results.

Open your favorite web browser Internet Explore for example and goto: www.google.com

In the search box type; site: followed by www.yourdomain.com
This is a command for Google to list all the pages it has indexed from a domain.

Each page in the index is listed with the title of the page followed by a description.
The web page designer coded this text into the page. If the designer encoded no description, Google will grab whatever text it finds and display it as a description. Any time a page from your site appears in the search results this is how its’ presented.

This command will work for the other search engines like Yahoo, and MSN.
Review

If your site has been published for more than a few weeks you can expect to see results. A link to your site from any other page that Google has indexed will lead them to schedule a visit to your site. If no pages are listed, you will have to make the search engines aware of your site. This will be accomplished is a later step.

Print your results and add it to your website review folder.

The next step: What does the Search Engine see on your pages?

Search Engine Marketers lament that so many prospects that would benefit from search Marketing techniques don’t buy into the program.  The prospect wants some form of performance guarantee, often based on a lack of understanding of the process. 
Client’s awareness of the performance of their website is limited to how appealing the pages render in a web browser.  The first thing a search marketer does with their suite of analysis tools is show the site owner how ugly his daughter (website) is. 

The next step is a proposal to fix the offending daughter with some SEO make-up. The pages must be updated with improved copy, the underlying code needs work and to perform well under the performance guarantee, a PPC program is recommended.  This is an expensive proposition, involving many thousand of well earned dollars, by the consulting firm.

Ah, if only we could only take the client into the future showing the results that will be achieved.  The prospect, after finding that his site returns in the Google for a meaningful search term, would gladly sign our long term contract.  They have had a positive experience with Search Marketing and now “buy into the process”.  PPC campaigns are often recommended to provide this positive experience.  The prospect wants that elusive long lasting organic result, the result they trust in their own search experience. 

The look into the future is not possible, but encouraging some activity where the prospective customer can have a positive experience with search.  A search firm can offer some entry level marketing program the client can use without developing SEO skills in-house. 

Many businesses can use free samples or test runs of their product to develop new customers.  The customer does not have to understand how or why a product works, they can see for themselves.  That still leaves the obstacle of demonstrating value of a product to a prospective customer.  Unlike the legal and medical fields where demand is created by circumstances, search marketing must produce some added value.

Search Marketing offers the promises of building a business by improving the companies’ visibility in search.   Visibility is the first step in making connections to potential customers.  The conversion process is then addressed, through direct conversion on site, often developing direct contact to the prospect. 

Do not dismiss prospects who may be potential clients down the road.  Providing some free samples may be just the thing a prospect needs to develop a positive experience with search. Google Maps is one free sample that can be offered with no cost.  There are several DIY options that will help lead a prospect to the professional marketer. 

A demonstration video of LeadsLander Client Engine shows the simple steps to build link building campaigns. Marketing and Sales personnel can now promote their company website without web design or copyrighting skills.

Businesses have ample content available that would be suited for publication on the web, the problem lies on the lack of technical skills related to publishing material optimized for search. LeadsLander product is our attempt to offer a tool where in-house textual content can be published by “cut and paste” skill levels.

The integrated SEO scoring method provides for fine tuning by LeadsLander Client Engine. The HTML Tags important for effective indexing by search engines are automatically generated for each page. The visible scoring system assures that the page content supports the keywords and phrases chosen.

Publishing of pages to the integrated hosting is allowed once a minimum score is achieved. The page is viewed in a pre-viewer once saved, then automatically published to the AML server. Pages are submitted to search engines through XML sitemaps generated as pages are added.