If you’ve already invested money in doing customer research on your web site, but you’re still not getting the results you want, you’ll want to tune into our on-going series with Leslie Caruthers, The Search Guru. It may not be obvious at first, but your web site holds a wealth of data about your customers, who they are, what they like, where they’ve come from and so much more.
In my last article, we talked about what a critical ingredient search engine marketing was to your overall web strategy. In this part of our series, I’m going to give you some insider tips on how to integrate search engine marketing into your web site and make a more powerful customer magnet.
The top 3 Search Marketing secrets:
1. Build your site in a search friendly way from the start – or get SEO friendly now.
This means working with a developer who really understands the search engines (not one who says they do, but one who REALLY does – they are rare). Or you hire a Search Marketing firm to partner with your web development company to add in the secret sauce Search Engine Optimization (SEO) knowledge.
Many developers don’t fully understand how search engines work and may have inadvertently made it more difficult for search engines to understand your site. Reversing this through search engine optimization on the site will make a huge difference for your business.
A few common problems:
- Content Management System issues: most are not SEO friendly out of the box.
- JavaScript navigation that isn’t crawlable
- No h tags, or h tags used excessively/incorrectly
- Duplicate content issues
- Poor internal linking structure
Sign up for our newsletter for a free white paper on search engine friendly website design and share it with your designer and developers.
And don’t forget… While it is critical to rank well with the search engines, you must never forget it is the human customer that matters – search engines don’t buy your products, services or click on your advertisements; people do.
Next month, we’ll share secret #2 – keyphrase research: the foundation of any organic search marketing effort in the next post. You’re going to love keyphrase research – it’s like cracking open the skull of your prospect and watching them think!
This month’s opportunities:
Didn’t take on last month’s search marketing opportunities? Go back and start there – that’s your best bet – then move up to this list after that.
- Read the free white paper on usability and design from a search marketing perspective. You can get this singing up for our FREE monthly email newsletter at http://www.TheSearchGuru.com (right hand column).
- Bonus: read past blog posts: http://www.thesearchguru.com/blog/ and back issues of the newsletter here: http://www.thesearchguru.com/email-archive.asp to learn more.
- Register for Google Analytics if you haven’t yet: http://www.google.com/analytics/
- Register for Google Webmaster Tools http://www.thesearchguru.com/google-webmaster-tools.asp if you haven’t yet.
- Read through the Search Marketing Terms Glossary and catch up on basic terminology.
- Burning question or comment? Email me at Results@TheSearchGuru.com.
Leslie Carruthers is President of The Search Guru, a best practices full services Search Marketing firm creating breakthrough results for their clients since 2004. Leslie can be reached at 440-306-2418 or Results@TheSearchGuru.com.
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6 responses so far ↓
Website Design // November 3, 2009 at 12:27 pm |
For SEO, one must approach a professional SEO company that will provide you with the best SEO services and that will help you gain rankings on search engine sites. Looking forward to the next post on Keywords, as they are the more important because by using keywords, SEO is done effectively.
Giving Your Visitors What They Want // November 15, 2009 at 6:20 pm |
[...] Search Engine Marketing Secret #1: Build Your Site With Search Marketing in Mind (questionpro.com) Share and Enjoy: [...]
Carl Kest // November 27, 2009 at 2:10 pm |
We do use Kentico CMS for all of our corporate websites, we reached the first page of organic search in Google within first two weeks from launch.
http://www.kentico.com/Features/Web-site/Friendly-URLs-and-SEO.aspx
Leslie Carruthers // November 29, 2009 at 11:58 pm |
Website Design – thank you for your comment! Yes, keyphrases are definitely important, but not necessarily more important that a search engine friendly site. Bottom line – fall down on either one of those and you won’t win in the SEO game.
Carl Krest- thank you for sharing. I’m glad you had such great results! I’ve yet to see the perfect CMS (Content Management System). In our experience they all need to be managed from an SEO perspective. I recommend having a competent Search Marketing person or firm review the CMS’ you are considering and share with you their strengths and weaknesses from an SEO perspective, then support you in managing those.
Search Engine Marketing Secret #2 Revealed: Use the Keyphrases Your Customers Use « QuestionPro Blog // December 7, 2009 at 7:10 am |
[...] the second of the three secrets, take a moment to review our Search Engine Marketing Secret #1: Build Your Site With Search Marketing in Mind. This is a great reminder that when you write for the web, you are actually writing for two [...]
Search Engine Marketing Secret #3 Revealed: Links are Like Recommendations « QuestionPro Blog // January 4, 2010 at 7:21 am |
[...] with The Search Guru, Leslie Caruthers. In the first post, we learned how important it was to focus on search engine marketing because it’s one of the most powerful ways that your customers will find you. Our second [...]