Marketing Your Web Site

Marketing is and should be an integral part of entrepreneurial expertise.
In this instance when we speak of marketing, the commodity that we're talking about is your web site. Just as you promote and advertise yourself or your products, you must also promote and, in essence, market your website as well.

Let's assume that we've already laid out and designed the best website possible. We've created the artistic portion and written the informational content. Now the time has come to put this all together, and this is where we begin the promotional aspect of the website. The promotion of your website begins with the background work that the average person,very often, tends to overlook.

You have to begin the advertising and marketing of your website during the building process. This is a major part of the foundation of your website. As you are writing the copy and formatting each page you must be cognoscente of how to format and include such things as; keywords, meta tags and titles for each page.

What we're talking about is, how we get your website to show up whenever someone is looking for what you have to offer. This is more difficult than it sounds. Take a moment and think about how and why certain websites keep popping up when you search, Yahoo, Google, etc. How come you keep seeing these same names at the top of the list, sometimes even when they don't pertain to exactly what your looking for.

Basically, we have to get the, search engines, to be able to find your website on a regular basis and try to get your name, if not at the top, at least near the top of the list. Keep in mind, that more often than not, a search turns up hundreds of pages of responses to a query and as you, or, I generally do, after the first 50 or so responses, we begin getting weary and gradually discontinue the search. Therefore, if you are not near the higher end of the list, it's quite possible that you won't be seen. You will see the details as to how we do this as we continue.

For the sake of this article I'm not going to discuss the pay as you go aspect of search engine positioning. We'll save that for another article.

Before we get to the internal workings of the search engines, let's take a moment and talk about the name of your company or business. This should be one of the first building block in the foundation of your website.

Very simply, in the internet world the name of your business must descriptive if you want it to work for you. The days of "John J. Jones & Company" is passe and doesn't quite make it in the 21st Century.

When you see this name what does it actually tell you about this company. Other than telling you that it is probably owned or was founded by John J. Jones, it doesn't tell you anything. "Absolutely Nothing."

In the internet world we want "exposure", this is of prime importance. We want to include as much descriptive information as possible, within reason of course, in all aspects of your business, and the name of your business should be the first place to begin.

Let's take John J. Jones & Co. and change it to J.J. Jones, Certified Public Accountants, or Jones & Co., CPA, or Jones & Co. Accounting Services. If you can't figure out that the latter series of names are more descriptive of what this company is all about, stop here, do not pass go, go directly to jail and lock the door behind you, because you're wasting your time.

If you do a "keyword" search for John J. Jones & Co, as an accounting company and use only the name, your search results will be zero. If you do a keyword search using, "accounting", your search results are in the hundreds of thousands. This certainly doesn't guarantee, that your name will come up when you search for, "accounting", but by being more descriptive in your name it gives you a better chance at being found.

The name of your business, very often acts as one of the factors that the search engines use to find and bring up your web site. Which brings us to...

The definition of a "Search Engine" is; "an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system such as the World Wide Web."

In order for your website to appear on search engines you must submit your information to each of the search engines (or to submit to multiple search engines at one time). We'll save submissions for a more in depth article. In this way when someone is looking for your type of business or product your name will show up on the list.

Keep one thing in mind. Being listed on a search engine does not mean
that all of a sudden your name is going to pop up at the top of the list. You have a lot of work to do to get to the head of the class and you may never actually get there.

Although all search engines do basically the same thing, that is direct people to your website, there are differences in their approach to achieving the same end. For example, Yahoo is what is called a "directory based" search engine, which means that when you submit your site to Yahoo, one of their methods is that they have real people reviewing and indexing your site. Yahoo, by the way, has two ways of submission, the best way is the one that you have to pay for. In the long run, the general consensus of opinion, is that it's worth the money.

Other search engines depend upon crawlers or spiders that are constantly scanning web sites for content and indexing the information on their pages. If you do not submit to any of the search engines, although eventually you may get found, the likelihood of being anywhere near the top of the list is fairly remote. (I guess miracles could happen.)

There are hundreds of search engines out there and there are services that you can pay for that will submit your site. Whether it's worth the money or not is one of those questions that, if you ask five professionals you'll probably get six different answers. However, there are a few that are a must. Yahoo and Google are without a doubt the two most used search engines at this time.

Another very important engine is the Open Directory Project, also known as, DMOZ, which is an acronym for Directory Mozilla. The Open Directory powers the core directory services for the internets largest and most popular search engines, including Google, AOL, Lycos, Hotbot, etc. Which means that by submitting to the ODP you will be gaining access to a large number of search engines.

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl
Yahoo: http://submit.search.yahoo.com
ODP: http://dmoz.org

Most of the search engines today use what are known as "spiders" which crawl throughout web pages in order to find out what the particular websites are all about. These spiders pick up on specific words and phrases, which are within your website, that describe what you are all about. Preferably these "keywords or phrases" should be near the top of the pages in order to show that they are of importance, as opposed to the lower portion of each page, which creates the illusion of lesser importance.

In addition, if the keywords, or, phrases are written as title tags as opposed to regular text you are creating more importance to them, subsequently giving the spiders an easier target.

Statistics show that over 80% of all online transactions begin with a keyword search. Let's take for example a retail jewelry company. Keywords or phrases that could be used might be; retail jeweler, gold jewelry, diamonds, diamond jewelry, precious stones, gemstones, jewelry designers, watches, etc. The list can be endless, but, you can't go crazy with these words and just keep repeating the same word for no apparent reason, or, even including words that don't apply to your business. The search engines are smarter than you think. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use them in your website, but you must select the words that most closely relate to what you are doing and emphasize words and phrases to make it a little easier for search engines to pick up on.

Each page of your website should use different keywords that reflect what that page is all about. Staying with our Jeweler, let's say that page two of the website is devoted to Precious Stones. The keywords or phrases for that particular page might be; Precious Stone, Gemstones, Gemstone Jewelry, Ruby, Sapphire, Tanzanite, Emerald rings, etc.

The keywords tag is one area that appears to be gradually becoming less important. More and more of the crawler based search engines are searching your entire site as opposed to just picking up on the keywords that you submit. In fact there are some that think it's a waste of time to bother with the Meta Tag Keywords.

With all that said, for the moment, it is still worth including them in our Meta Tags. For our website, Armen Graphic Design, a selection of keywords may be; Graphics Design, Graphic Design, Website Design, Web Site Designers, Website Developers, Business Website Designers, E-Commerce Website Designers, Website Designers Directory, Web Design, etc., etc. The list goes on.

In addition, when selecting single keywords, a better choice is using two or more words as a keyword. The logic behind this is when using a single word you will get a list of everyone and anyone without any qualifiers.

For example; let's go back to the Retail Jewelry business and use the keyword "jewelry". A Google keyword search of "Jewelry" gives us a result of 294,999,000 websites or pages. If we qualify that and search "Gemstone Jewelry", we drop down to 2,390,000. To go a step further, if we use the keyword "Precious Stone Jewelry" we drop down to 1,720,000. And if you really get specific and look up "Tanzanite Jewelry" we come up with a result of 1,210,000.

The point here is using the broadest definition of what your website is will get your name on the list, but if you get a result of 294 million websites or pages where do you think you will be on that list. Qualifying your keyword and refining it will give you a better chance of being near the beginning of the list and subsequently a better chance of being seen.

What are they? Meta tags are a coded list of your keywords, a description of your business and the title of your page that are written in HTML code and are meant for search engines to find with their spiders.

These tags are not seen on your web site. They are included in the coding of your pages in order to be found by the search engines, but they are not something that you have to worry about designing or placing on the site.

When you input your meta tags they will automatically go between the <Head> of your HTML code and the closing of the </Head>. You will include the; page title, several words describing your business and single or preferably pairs of keywords that someone might use to look for your business or product.

The description tag goes a step further and can be fairly detailed, whereby you can use up to a couple of hundred characters.

When you've searched for a specific item on the web and you get your list of search results, you first have the name, or, title of the website or page, then you have a description of what that site is about. Generally, that description is, or, is based upon the description you write in your description tag.

In our case the description tag for our Home page reads; "Business today requires internet exposure. ARMEN GRAPHIC DESIGN creates and advises how to create, practical, sales oriented websites. Our tutorials provide the guidelines for better websites and marketing."

The following is an example of a Google search result for our site.

Doing Business in the 21st Century - Armen Graphic Design
Business today requires internet exposure. ARMEN GRAPHIC DESIGN creates and advises how to create, practical, sales oriented websites... http://www.armengraphic.com/

As you can see we come up with the page title, the name of the business and the description pretty much as we have written it into our Meta Description Tag. Although, the search engines often take the liberty of editing, generally you get what you've written.