How do I successfully market my website? Why is this so important?
2 of the most frequently asked questions by any website owner, so lets break this down:
1) How – As with any project the HOW is always the most difficult to define – especially for someone looking to embark on a “DIY” search engine marketing campaign. Depending on what you are looking to acheive and what function your website performs, the HOW can be broken into a heirachy of importance; what is it you want to acheive?
- most visitors over a short space of time?
- long term search engine placement?
- a mature catalogue of inbound links?
- High level page rank?
- Sales and/or sales leads?
For any website owner that offers an “e-commerce” or service based product the last is likely to be the most important – which brings us to the WHY.
2) Why – The internet is the most accessible resource of information devised by human kind, it is a boiling pot of opinions, memories, facts (and often fiction), debates, questions and answers. So what are you looking to add to the mix?
WHY is internet marketing so important? In the UK the internet is fast becoming the primary source of reference vfor just about anything – need a plumber? got to checkatrade.co.uk, want to know how much a power drill is likely to cost, go to your preffered search engine and type in what you want and you will find hundreds of vendors trying to get your attention – “cheapest price”, “fast delivery” “widest selection in stock” and within a moment or two you will be in a position on empowerment, knowing what is a “fair” price for the item you are looking for and you are also likely to have been told whats so great about it (and often whats not so great)
When people want to find out something fast, the internet is the primary place to go (unless you’re lucky enough to have a “phone a friend” who knows his/her stuff!) and thats WHY search engine marketing is so important.
With millions of people searching the web everyday, there is an infinate spectrum of outcomes; purchases, phone calls, emails, comments, uploads, downloads etc etc. and to make your mark you need to be just as active as your potential client base at gaining their attention.
So, back to the HOW.
How you market your website is entirely up to you, you can set up a pay per click campaign, set your daily budget and watch as your money gets spent with very little in return, not a completely bad idea if all you are looking to achieve is maximum visibility in a crowded market, BUT is it the best.only option?
Pay per click campaigns can often fall foul of the “who can shout the loadest” effect (or in some cases, who has the deepest pockets) and in the long run can be very costly and reap little rewards, so what other options are there?
Organic Search Engine Marketing (OSEM) and Organic Search Engine Optimisation (OSEO) come as a tandem pair, The Marketing side is dealt with in several ways but the bias of this is in the “seeding” of content in various corners of the internet, with well thought out, structured content given to third party sites with a relevant connection to your service and/or product with a link back to your site for more information. Note: THIS DOES NOT MEAN LINK FARM (See link for more details)
So h0w is optimisation handled? and how long is this going to take?
Search Engine Optimisation is a process where the content of your site is examined and propageted across your own domain, breaking the content into bite size, relevant chunks and served up with a side salad of good formatting, accessibility and semantic order.
In order for a web site to be taken seriously by search engines, is must have been created in a way that makes the content as open and transparent as possible, ensuring that when a search engine goes to index your site it knows what content belongs to what header, what page gives what message and what bit of information will be useful to the end user who will ultimately find it and interpret it.
If all this sounds like a headache, get in touch, we will make the whole process, start to finish as straight forward as possible, updating you al the way and providing evidence of progress.
