Promoting online stores: how to improve your search engine position

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

November 11, 2005 [3911 views]

This lecture should help you see how sites are promoted in order to gain traffic and customers.

Strategy

1. Know what you want
2. Know where you are
3. Plan a campaign
4. Implement campaign
5. Measure results against targets
6. Repeat

What do we want?

1. Revenue or savings
2. Customers – It must be easy to buy
3. Repeat customers – We need to be able to identify that they have been there before and offer them some tangible benefits/offers
4. Qualified visitors – We need visitors who are looking for the things you sell and we want them to convert to customers here
5. Referred customers – They are better than general visitors because they have been recommended from another site. We need to identify ways of helping other sites generate these referrals; syndicate content, offers or services to partner sites or offer an affiliate scheme
6. Visitors – general visitors might be interested in what we have to sell or might know someone who would be. We need to make it easy for them to remember or recommend our store
7. Other visitors who could become partners, employees etc. There are many sites looking for partnership deals. Make it clear you are looking for partners.
8. High placement in search engines (particularly Google, MSN and Yahoo!). Sometimes you can pay to be seen for adjacent to the results (eg adwords)
9. Attention and publicity. Controversy, recommendation and discussion will help build your reputation. This will help improve your search rankings.
10. Traffic figures that you can learn from. You want to know your current levels of traffic, the search terms that are bringing people in and the sites that are referring visitors to you.

Here are some easy things you can do

1. Create a site with excellent content and services.
2. Use predictable URLs that are easy for humans to remember and contain keywords that search engines will notice
3. Make sure that you feature your URL on stationary, advertising and brochures. Even email signatures should be designed to help your campaign
4. Design your site and your pages with search engines in mind. This means designing a simple site with appropriate page titles, META tags and headlines.
5. Avoid things that put roadblocks in front of search engine crawlers such as Flash, frames, tables and some database techniques.

Understand search engines

1. Recognise the difference between automated engines such as Goggle and MSN Search and directories (DMOZ and Yahoo directory); automated engines use a spider to collect and index information, directories use human editors.
2. Each search engine has a different algorithm (top secret) but are all based on keyword matching in content, recency and reputation. Some add payment to this list.
3. Search engines categorise pages according to the keywords used in the content (and titles, headings, images, page links and in-bound links)
4. Search engines prefer regularly updated pages rather than old pages and can detect the creation date for files.
5. Most engines measure the popularity (reputation) of a page (usually based on the number (and reputation) of in-bound links) and rank more popular pages above less popular ones. You can get a measure of reputation by examining the Google rank of a page, search for the number of linking in sites (using Alltheweb) or study statistics from sampling sites such as Alexa.com.
6. Search engines hate people who try and artificially increase the position of a page and may block the pages and sites involved.
7. Directories such as DMOZ are often used as the starting point for new crawls of the web. Try and get listed there.
8. Blogs have become useful tools for improving reputation. Bloggers tend to point to useful links and these sites therefore become more popular. It is worth creating content that popular bloggers will link to.

Search engine promotion strategies

1. Understand the search engines, keywords and their importance
   Brainstorm keywords
2. Analyse keywords
3. Search for keywords on Google and analyse competitors
4. Run a test campaign on adwords
5. Select keywords for your campaign
6. Create content (and landing pages) to capture those keywords
7. Tell the major search engines that your site exists. This is getting harder.
8. Try and get listed in DMOZ
9. Add your URL to high ranking directories
10. Search for blogs in your subject area and comment on them

Example: How would we promote a new site such as Food Parcels

1. Measure the traffic now
2. Press campaign (trade and general); This is unlikely to be successful unless you can find a real ‘angle’. Launching a site is not a story. You can use personalities to create a story. The computer trade press is always desparate for stories but this is unlikely to generate leads. Try a behind the scenes story for the book trade papers.
3. Email to all our contacts
4. Consider two-way site links – good for Google ranking. Join forums and comment on blogs leaving URL behind. Make sure that you are not “selling” or you will get flamed by irate forum members.
5. Create affiliate offers (Delia Online etc)
6. Experiment with a specific keyword campaign such as “christmas hampers”
7. Register interested visitors for special offers

How do we promote the OTHER media?

1. Word of mouth recommendations
2. Keep an eye on Google ranking
3. Sell benefits on our site through news, articles and case studies rather than products or services
4. Use blogs and expert articles to link to our site
5. Cross selling – “we’ve built this for X”
6. Brochures and newsletters
7. Networking: industry functions, seminars and activities
8. Reward people who recommend us
9. Be better than our competitors and be able to demonstrate it

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