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The world of search engine marketing can be very intimidating - there are so many strategies to try, so many new techniques to employ, and generally so many things to do and it's virtually impossible to work them all into your search marketing activities. In the realistic world where our time and our resources are limited, we need to find out what strategies will get us the most bang for our buck and the best return on our search marketing investment.
Let's take the example of an online fish tank store as an example, and discuss a few items that should definitely be a part of your search engine optimization plans.
First off, the things you can do to the pages on your own site, the pages that you control, can often be the things that cost much less money than they do time. First off, you want to make sure that a search engine can read what's on your page:
- Are you embedding your text in images? Maybe you have a beautiful website filled with pictures of custom aquariums and the images of tropical fish are so eye catching that you just had to put the item labels right in there with the image. That might be great for a human visitor, but the search engines can't see pictures. And if your descriptions (with all those keywords) are in the form of a picture, they're lost on the engines.
- Are you using your tags properly? Let's continue with the fish tank store example. Does every page on your website have the name of your website as a title? Are you using general descriptors like "About Us" or "Site Map?" Think of how you identify things that are important in an article that you would read in the newspaper. What's the thing that draws your attention to the article in the first place (i.e. the MOST important thing about the article)? The TITLE! So make sure you tell the search engines what your page is about! Instead of "About Us" (which doesn't describe anything), try something like: "About MyStore.com - the best source of fish information and fish supplies on the internet."
- What else draws your attention in a newspaper article? Boldface or italics? Sub headers? Bullet points? Absolutely, and guess what? These are all important to search engines as well. Make sure to use at least your H1 header tags well. If you're selling protein skimmers on your fish tank product page, then you should make sure you include the words "protein skimmer" in the sentence that goes between your H1 tags on that page! Also, in your product description, while you're describing why the aquarium enthusiast needs a protein skimmer, you can't go wrong putting it in bold!
Now that we've got some on-page basics, let's talk about some good ways to get links back to your pages from sources that you may not control. When you're going after links, here's a few things to consider:
- Look for similar websites to get links from. You might want a link from a tropical fish review website, for example. Or maybe a fish tank hobbyist magazine's site.
- Make sure that your links point to the right pages! If the link that you've acquired is all about aquarium supplies, then make sure you don't have it going to your fish tank lights page or even your homepage. The link that describes aquarium supplies should go to your specific web page about aquarium supplies!
- Look for well established pages that have a good pagerank and rank well in the search engines by themselves. In fact, a great way to find a good link partner for your ultraviolet sterilizer products is to type "UV sterilizer" into a search engine. See who the top ten results are, and then see if you can't contact them for some links to your UV sterilizers page.
There are many ways to optimize your pages both on and off the actual pages of your site, and we hope this helped you get started. When you're ready to see what we can do for you, please contact us and we'll be glad to help!
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