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Marketing on the Net: What's the Trick? "Are you
Optimized?"
By: Jeff Hotchkiss
So you want to...become an Internet millionaire? A web
celebrity? Promote your retail store? Sell your service?
Simple, put up a web site, sit back and wait for the
surfers to find you and have the orders to roll in,
right?
 We all hear the glory stories about sites like Hotornot,
MySpace, YouTube and many others that demonstrate the
web's power to rally millions of people around a new
site, service, or product. The web is an amazing
resource for sharing information, promoting a product or
service and supporting other marketing activities-but it
is not going to help if people can't find you.
Browser bookmarks are a good method to grab and hold
onto a website for future reference. Maybe you saw an
ad, did a search or got a tip from someone about the
site, bookmark it and that's it, right? Wrong. As the
net has grown by millions of new sites every week
relying on bookmarks could put you a risk of missing a
better service, product, or source of information.
Research shows that, today, most people use search
engines to find what they want. People have their
favorites-whether it's MSN, Yahoo, Google, Clusty, DMOZ
any one of a hundred others-and these become the trusted
friends that help us locate the web site for a
restaurant, job site, auto repair, entertainment, news
or whatever.
Now picture this: you own a web site and want it to be
at your audience's fingertips; but, can't seem to get it
to come up easily in a search engine. Maybe it's too far
down to do you any good...your target audience finds
your competitor and stop searching.
Search engines all have different search algorithms and,
consequently, you'll often find that the same search
terms or phrases on different engines often bring back
different results. The pages you see appearing across
different engines are optimized.
Ah, the art and science of web site optimization....
There are many aspects to this discipline but,
basically, it involves techniques to help make the site
"findable" by web-spiders and list-able by search
engines. Optimization is accomplished by creating parity
between the web site URL, title, description, keyword
META tags, ALT image tags and body copy. In addition to
parity of terms, there are character count limits in the
Meta tags that prohibit loading your tags with every
conceivable combination of keywords-so, you need to pick
the best ones.
If, for example, your business relies on local traffic
be sure to include the city name in your tags/copy. One
of my clients, Core-Care.com services Mac computers in
Sacramento. Before optimization, their site was barely
findable (#124 under Mac Repair, Google page 13); now,
they are page 1, #1 when searching for Mac Repair
Sacramento.
 Beyond the mechanics of optimization is the separate
matter of getting inside the mind of your target
customer and making a best guess as to which terms they
are going to search under. One of my sites is
OliveTea.com, is optimized for olive related topics. Few
people search for olive leaf tea; however, when
searching for olive leaf extract, olive oil or olives,
OliveTea.com pops up with a good short description. So,
because the concepts are closely related, a good number
of surfers are interested enough to click in and make a
purchase. There are also tools like Google Analytics to
help you figure out what people are searching for.
Another one of my sites, JeffsList.net is run by a
database that can't be indexed by search engines. In
this case the solution was to build an HTML home page
that is optimized that leads to the main body of the
site.
Site optimization is critical because a well optimized
site attracts surfers, leads, customers, and sales
24/7/365 without spending a dime. Almost all other types
of site promotion (CPC or "cost-per-click," banner,
eZine, podcast sponsorship, text-link ...) cost
hard-earned money and often don't bring enough targeted
traffic for a good ROI. Reciprocal linking with other
sites is another free method to build Page Rank, it
works best when your site is optimized. Google is also
starting to penalize sites that link to non-related
sites so be careful when building links.
As I mentioned above, web site marketing is as much art
as science-and optimization is one of the first pillar
of success every successful site needs to address.
Writer Information
Written by
Jeff Hotchkiss, MBA
Jeff owns five active web sites. He provides
site development, optimization and marketing
services & coaching to Internet
entrepreneurs. Contact him at
www.ConsultaCoach.com or (916) 601-1396.
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