Sunday, November 25, 2007

It's the Keywords, Stupid


This is a “long-y,” but I think it’ll be worth your while…

How many of you out there have a website?

Ah, but how many of you know how to UTILIZE the website?

That is, how many of you have a website, have it registered with a search engine, and are taking full advantage of key words within your site to help drive potential Internet readers – and prospective clients – to it?

Welcome to another edition of Not Your Usual Marketing tips from JDK Marketing Communications Management.

And let me be the first to concede that I may not be doing all that’s appropriate to reach a conclusively assertive answer to the last question I posed. That’s because I’m fairly new to the game myself. Notwithstanding three decades of experience in “marketing communications,” it has been derived mostly from traditional print and broadcasting means.

I have two websites: http://www.jdkmarketing.biz/, which features my background in advertising, collateral and publicity; and http://www.caricaturesbyjoel.com/ that, as the name suggests, highlights my capabilities as a professional caricaturist and illustrator.

Yet I am mindful that I probably need to re-address the text in each of these sites so that they are worded in such a way – in such SPECIFIC ways – that they not only adequately describe what I do, but the words themselves act as “bait” to bring those “fishing” for my services to my “watering hole” -- er, um -- site.

Esther Kane is a long-time friend and principal behind Eckweb Designs, Inc. (http://www.eckweb.com/), offering website design, website maintenance and website marketing services. So she’s got some authoritative say on what’s called “Search Engine Optimization (SEO).” Enough so that I’m going to get out of the way and let her do the talking here:

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“SEO…is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site. ”SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.

“1) You can't just plug a keyword phrase into your website and expect search engines to rank you for that phrase or even expect viewers to stay at your website just because your phrase brought them there. The keyword phrase you place on your website must be relevant to your service and or product and you must provide information (valid information) concerning that service or product.”


2) The density of keywords on website pages is important. Therefore, you can't just place a chosen keyword phrase on a page once. That page must reflect the "theme" of that keyword phrase. For example: let's say you chose a keyword phrase such as "mortgage calculator". You have a real estate site and you would like to provide your clients with a mortgage calculator. This keyword phrase provides a particular service. Therefore, it would be best to place this on its own page. By doing this, you also create a link to it on your navigation menu which adds links to that page. What I'm trying to say is that you can't just plug the phrase into a website page and expect that phrase to be considered important to the search engines. It isn't, not in comparison to other websites and their promotion of Mortgage Calculator.”


3) Relevance, relevance, relevance. This is a very important factor! The keyword phrase you choose MUST be relevant to your product or service. For example…it can be argued that you can put a sentence on your website (saying) something like "As seen in Google." Well, the problem is that even though your website may be seen in Google, the truth is that when an Internet searcher types in "Google" they're not looking for your product or service, they are looking for the search engine Google. BUT, if you wanted to provide your own website clients with the option of using the Google search engine directly from your website, then yes, by all means, you can. That's a service you are providing your clients, and if by chance, the service you provide to your clients happens to be something that other Internet users are searching, then by all means, it's valid!


4) Single word keywords - because of the general nature of a single word keyword such as "health," it is almost impossible to obtain high rankings for a single word keyword (unless it's a specific brand name) and also, it brings in a general traffic population versus a targeted audience. Any ethical search engine optimization company will advise you that marketing for a single word keyword on websites is simply not feasible.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Ya got all that?

It’s not just the graphics, folks. It’s the words.



Joel Kweskin

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