Achieving a high ranking on
the search engines is the best advertising "bargains" on the
Web today. The reason is simple: Millions of searches are
done every day! The thousands of Web sites that appear near
the top of those search results essentially get free advertising.
The visitors coming to those sites are more likely to buy
on average since they were specifically searching for that
product or service. Therefore, you have a very low cost of
advertising (free), with a potential high rate of return,
maximizing your profits, while minimizing your risk.
The one problem is that search
engines are changing and will continue to change over the
next year or so. They are looking for different revenues and
ways to increase their profits and are actually switching
to different profit models. They are giving sites bold listings
for a price, ranking them higher for a price and trying out
a lot of other different things… all for a price. They
are adding different categories, and are using methods that
lead visitors to a certain advertiser, rather than actually
taking them to the real search… something that is listed
by algorithms and displays what the visitor is actually looking
for.
The bottom line is that search
engines may not be free for much longer, so get in while
you can... the traffic you can generate will amaze you, so
utilize this resource before it is gone.
The effectiveness of search
engine marketing is not just our own opinion. Third party
surveys back us up on this claim: According to a July 1998
study by WebCMO, guess what the most effective advertising
strategy was for Web marketers?
Banner ads?
Print ads?
Spam mail?
Sorry, none of the above! The
single most effective method of generating Web site traffic
is Search Engines followed closely by Solicited or Opt-In
Email.
The following scale demonstrates
how each Web marketer in the WebCMO survey rated the over-all
effectiveness of the following methods on a scale of 1 to
5, with 5 being the most effective.
Search Engines 3.35
Solicited or Opt-In Email 3.34
Offline Advertising 3.04
Press Release 3.00
Banner Advertising 2.85
Discussion Forums 2.83
Sponsorships 2.61
Newsgroups 2.46
Strategic Linking 2.44
Spam 1.83
Those Webmasters that found
the search engines effective must have known the secret: People
must be able to find you on one or more keywords when they
perform a search!
OK, so the Web marketers in
the above survey found search engine marketing effective you
say? But if everyone wants to be in the top 10, I'm never
going to get there, right? Wrong! In fact, so many people
make this assumption that they don't even try to improve their
positions in the first place. Or, most try and tackle the
process by hand and fail miserably. This leaves a wonderful
opportunity for those who really want to succeed, and who
are savvy enough to use the latest tools.
We've also found that over half
the people out there don't even know they need to submit their
site, or if they know enough to submit, don't even realize
there's more they should be doing. Therefore, of the millions
of Web sites out there, only a fraction of them are even trying
to compete for those top positions.
In addition, there are not just
10 or 20 slots everyone is competing for as some people assume
at first. Millions of different searches are being conducted
everyday. Target multiple keywords and PHRASES that apply
to your Web site's content. You might find some words less
competitive than others and achieve top rankings quickly.
Simply carve out a niche for yourself to greatly improve
the odds of your success. This is basic "Marketing 101".
For example, if you are in the
competitive category of "travel" and find it too difficult
to obtain a high ranking on the word "travel", then create
pages that describe in detail one particular destination or
activity. Perhaps create a great page discussing "sailing
in the Caribbean". Most people try to be specific in their
searches today, because they know if they don't, they will
get back thousands of pages that they aren't interested in.
Take advantage of that bit of knowledge.
Many of you may have submitted
to the search engines, hoping for thousands of new visitors
to begin flooding into your site. If you have been disappointed
when they didn't, then you have just stumbled across one of
the biggest myths on the Internet. Submitting alone is not
enough. You must rank in the top 10 to 30 matches to be found
on the search engines. To do that requires the creation of
pages that appeal to each search engine's preferences. These
pages are often called doorway pages, gateway pages, or bridge
pages since they act as a doorway or alternate entrance to
your Web site.
The reason you must optimize
multiple pages is simple. No single page can rank well for
all engines. For example, if AltaVista likes to see 400 words
on a top ranking page this month, and Infoseek likes 800 words,
the same page will not rank well on both engines. Therefore,
the need to create doorway pages that are custom-tailored
to each search engine, and set of keywords you wish to target
becomes necessary.
So you've submitted to the search
engines, but you're still waiting for that traffic to start
flooding in, aren't you? Unless you know how to create pages
that target specific keywords, you may be in for a long wait.
There are so many pages on the Web now that if you just submit
your URL to the engines, you will likely be thrown into the
middle of a very large search list for just about any keyword
you try to search on.
But I have good news! Increasing
traffic to your Web site using "DOORWAY PAGES" is quite simple
and is very effective. Some people who are more advanced may
already know about this, but for the newer businesses, it
is incredibly important to understand how they work, and how
to utilize them on your page.
The secret is NOT simply making
use of Meta Tags (although, they can help) or trying to include
every keyword under the sun on your home page.
The secret is to create very
FOCUSED pages, commonly called "doorway pages." That's because
you create these pages to act as doorways to your site. The
more doorways you create, the more traffic you're likely to
bring in. You have to remember that some directory-oriented
engines like Yahoo normally accept only a single URL submission
or doorway page per Web site. However, most search engines
will accept as many pages as you wish to submit.
This means that for most of
the others you can customize as many doorway pages as you
have keywords, so long as each page contains different content.
It is common to develop one customized doorway page for every
important keyword you have. Some people, like Connie (whose
testimonial is listed below), have used literally dozens of
doorway pages, each one working to get a higher ranking in
a particular search engine for a particular keyword.
Am I advocating that you create
dozens of duplicate pages and "spam" the search engines? Of
course not! What I am saying is that if you want to be seen
when people do a search for, say, "Los Angeles real estate",
you must create a page that specifically repeats that phrase
multiple times and has content specifically geared toward
that theme.
Follow these general steps as
a rule of thumb:
- Repeat your keyword phrase
in the title tag (the MOST important thing you can do!),
repeat it in the meta keyword tag. Also use it in your Meta
Description tag.
- You should repeat your targeted
phrase, or small variations of it, in a heading tag like
<H1>Los Angeles Real Estate: Complete Listings Found
Here!</H1> at the top of the page.
- Repeat it again in the first
paragraph of the page, trying to use it naturally in at
least two or three sentences near the top.
- Include the keyword phrase
within one or more hyper links.
- If you include a graphic,
repeat the keyword in the ALT IMG tag. This tag displays
text to the user if they have graphics turned off and is
also indexed into the keyword list by many of the big search
engines. This is because we've found that some search engines
include words they find in the ALT IMG tag as part of their
relevancy scoring system.
On some engines, a short, one
paragraph page will often rank higher than a long, wordy page
even though the longer page may include the phrase MORE times.
That's because many search engines divide the number of keywords
by the number of total words on the page to score the page
for "relevancy." Therefore, it's often the concentration of
that phrase/keyword that matters more than the sheer frequency.
Search engines will then take this score and add additional
weight to keywords found in the title tag, heading tags, and
the first 200 or so words of the page. (All words are generally
indexed, but those near the top will carry the most "weight").
Try both a long and short page and see how you do, since sometimes
a longer page may do better for certain engines.
Use your keyword early on:
With most engines, having your
best keyword at the BEGINNING of your title tag will raise
your rank considerably over simply putting the keyword in
the middle or the end of the title. The same general rule
applies to the location of the keyword in the content of the
page, the sooner in the page it appears, the better. This
is called the "relevance" or "prominence" score
for the keyword.
Problem with Doorways:
Unfortunately, the search engines
do not publish many details on exactly how many keywords they
like to see, and where they want to see them. Therefore, most
people will find the quest of achieving a top 10 position
a time-consuming one to do by hand.
Luckily, there's a product available
called WebPosition Gold that takes all the work out of search
engine marketing. It not only generates doorway pages and
submits them, but it also has a Page Critic feature which
analyzes your pages and gives you plain-English advice on
what to change to make them rank in the top 10 for each major
search engine.
Another feature is that Web
Position has the ability to create reports with an unlimited
number of keywords and phrases. This is an important factor
when posting your page to the search engine as many people
use different terms to search for the same product or service.
Lets take buying a car as an example...one person might do
a search for "car buying" while someone else will
use "automotive sales". These two people are looking
for the same thing, but are going about it two different ways.
If you don't pay attention to this, you will lose sales!
You also have the ability to track what your competitors
are doing. This is a topic I discuss in my Internet Marketing
Course, and is something you simply cannot ignore. If you
don't know what your competition is doing, how can you ever
soar past them? The answer is simple, you cannot. Therefore
you need some insider information on what they are doing to
get ranked higher, or how they come up when you search for
the most popular keywords used for your product, information
that Web Position can quickly and easily provide for you.
I have also mentioned in both
the course and in my newsletters that the automation of your
business is essential to your success, and if you cannot automate,
your business will be unable to grow. The features in Web
Position allow you to spend more time making your business
grow, rather than spending it on keeping yourself in business!
Features such as the generation of a detailed report consisting
of all visitors that came to your site (something that was
once only offered by log programs such as Web Trends), the
ability to save hours... even days of time by simplifying
the multitude of tasks that are involved with proper search
engine placement, and most of all, you have the ability to
create an infinite number of "doorway pages" in
almost no time at all! Web Position gives you the ability
to automatically generate these pages without having to spend
hours upon hours coding the HTML by hand. This is crucial
to have as there are at least 20 main search engines that
you simply must list your site with if you ever want
your traffic to explode.
If you want more information
on WebPosition and how it can help you explode your traffic
and saled, go to http://www.marketingtips.com/webposition.html
Here is a perfect example of
the power and profit potential of using Web Position to create
and manage your doorway pages:
Date: Tue, 08 Jun 1999 12:06:23
-0500
From: Conikds@aol.com
I don't know if you remember
me, but I sent you my "testimonial" to doorway pages last
fall. I had just put my children's clothing store on the
web a year earlier, and was not getting satisfactory results.
I just wasn't being "found". After purchasing your WebPosition,
& learning about doorway pages, and submitting about 30
of them, my hits started soaring. Well, 6 months later,
the hits just keep increasing! (and the sales!) We literally
went from an average of selling $100 per month on-line to
$10,000 per month, just by the implementation of these doorway
pages!
Now our sales are even higher,
& growing everyday, requiring new phone lines,computers,
& personnel to handle all the orders! I am NOT complaining!
This is wonderful, & has been such a fantastic boost to
my actual walk-in store! I have even been tempted to close
my store-front, stop paying high overhead, & just do business
on-line! The customers have become faithful return customers,
and are telling all their friends as well. But the biggest
reason for the great boost in on-line sales has been the
creation of those wonderful "doorway pages", that I never
even knew existed prior to purchasing the Web Position software.
Thank you AGAIN for a superb
product, that is both informative, yet written in an easy
to understand format, that can be immediately helpful.
With MANY thanks, Connie Todd
P.S. I have included links
to my home page & to some doorway pages, so if you want
to use this in your next newsletter people can see immediately
how the doorway pages look.
http://www.connieskids.com/
http://www.connieskids.com/ChristeningGowns.html
http://www.connieskids.com/FlowerGirl.html
http://www.connieskids.com/Ruth.html
Can you now see the extreme
power of doorway pages? Connie is now making over 100 times
what she initial made by simply setting up and utilizing doorway
pages.
This only touches the surface
on the importance of proper search engine placement and monitoring.
If you were to do it by hand, it could literally take up hours
upon hours of your day if you are really serious about your
placement on the engines. However with a program like Web
Position, it takes minutes, if that!
I could go on for days about
how important search engine placement is, and how important
it is to properly monitor your position and make sure you
don't slip even an inch, but Web Position speaks for itself.
It is simply the best, and if you buy the program and feel
that it hasn't lived up to your expectations, or that it was
not worth the purchase price and didn't launch your search
engine results into high gear, you can return it for a full
refund. You can also be assured that if you have any problems,
you will get assistance! First Place Software (The
manufacturers of Web Position) offers free lifetime support,
this means full technical support, updates (you will receive
automatic updates to the software program the second
they are released, for free!), information, and general guidance
on how to use the program. This is something that other companies
charge in upwards of $100/hour for!
The simple fact is this: If
you want to see your site succeed, you need Web Position.
And as you know, I stand behind every piece of software I
recommend, and I only recommend programs that are worth
every penny. So if you want more information on Web Position
and how you can get it, go to http://www.marketingtips.com/webposition.html
