The greatest challenge for an online business person is not in the building of a web site, but in building one that will attract well-targeted traffic like a magnet. The secret is search engine optimization (SEO). Some of the biggest internet successes like eBay utilize SEO techniques and rely heavily on search engines to bring in traffic.
Why Search Engines?
There are many obvious and highly visible means of promotion online, such as banner ads, pop-up ads, newsletter promotions, and so on. However, research shows that 85% of web site traffic arrives via search engines, and if your site is not ranked high enough, then you are missing the opportunity of gaining a huge number of potential customers.
It has been proved that traffic from search engines is the cheapest and most effective marketing strategy to implement; and using search engines is the most popular way for surfers to look for products or services that they want to find.
The Biggest Advantage of Search Engine Traffic
Search engine traffic is highly targeted because those visitors arriving on your web site from a search engine listing are already seriously interested in your products or services. These are known as ‘pre-qualified’ visitors as they have followed the keyword trail from a search engine through to your website, and expect to find exactly what they are looking for; and all because you have used the same keywords for optimizing your web site. Normally, you would have to spend large sums of money on advertising to pull in such specifically targeted traffic.
The five major search engines that are used by surfers are GOOGLE (37.6%) YAHOO (30.4%) MSN (15.6%) AOL (9.2%) and ASK JEEVES (6.1%). These generate over 90% of all search engine traffic, so it’s vital that your site is listed with them.
How to Make Sure You Get High Search Engine Ranking
To make sure of your presence in the top search engines, it is always wise to take the cost-effective route and use the services of professional search engine optimization (SEO) specialists. This will save you time, money and avoid a complicated learning curve.
In simple terms, SEO is a process that prepares or improves your web site content in a specific way, so that search engines can easily interpret and understand the purpose and relevancy of the site.
This is achieved by focusing on the products or services that you provide and optimizing your site for the appropriate keywords, as well applying other optimization techniques to ensure that your site is search engine friendly. Professional SEO specialists can help you optimize, submit and achieve high rankings.
Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Promotion
In addition to the major search engines, there are many pay-per-click search engines that function quite differently. Commonly known as sponsored listings, you decide where you want to be listed according to the keywords you select and how much you want to pay for using those keywords in your listing. If you want top ranking on a search engine results page, you simply bid the highest price of the day. You only pay the bid price when someone clicks through to your web site from the sponsored listing.
For example, if you are selling Arabian coffee, you can open an account with a PPC search engine by providing your URL, site description, and keywords that describe your products. Some of the popular PPC search engines are Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture), Google Adwords, Miva (formerly Findwhat) and Kanoodle.
Regular Tracking
Once you hire SEO specialists, they will keep track of your web site as it climbs steadily up the ranks. Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, so good SEO specialists always know the latest updates that will ensure your web site achieves the rankings that you desire.
If you haven’t started to build your web site yet, the best tip we can give you is to plan and integrate SEO right at the development stage.
Professional SEO (whilst creating your web site and page content) will not only provide you with an instant advantage on launch, but also eliminate the necessity of having to keep modifying your site immediately after you have just built it!
Source by Moutushi Banerjee