Ok, you have a website or a blog, now what? They say “If you build it they will come.” I am sure that is true about your friends and family who know about your cyber real estate, but how about the others? If you have an online or a brick and mortar business, you want to make sure that those who might be your potential customers can find you. How do you draw traffic to your site? How do people find you? This post begins series of topics related to my work – search engine optimization and marketing, internet marketing, website development, website analytics and the internet for business in general.
The primary place for finding information …
on the Internet is a search engine. There are many fine search engines out there but only a handful account for 90+ % of the market popularity and use. These include Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and AOL just to mention the top ones. When people need to find something they “google” it on the search engines. If you have this something to offer, you want to make sure that your website comes up in the search results on the first page. If your website is anywhere deeper than the first page, chances are that the searcher will not see it. Why? Very few people click on the search results past the first page. There are studies done and published which show this trend. We will post one of them in the coming posts.
The job of making sure your website or blog appears on top of the search engine results, (commonly called SERP), is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Marketing (SEM). This is a fast growing industry with many great companies and startups offering these services, including yours truly. I have been doing search engine optimization since 2001. I am fascinated by this area of my work and it does interest me continually. In the coming post we will explore in more detail the aspects of search engine optimization and marketing.
One of the great places to find more information on this subject is Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land – couple of many independent groups of SEO/SEM professionals.
Great topic, Marek. I’m really looking forward to future posts in this area. A post on the effectiveness and various ways of doing word-of-mouth marketing would be highly interesting as well.
/Juan
Not sure if my first response made it…
Anyway, I wanted to second what Juan said in the first comment. I’ve already employeed much of Marek’s advice and seen great returns in the SERPs. However, now that we’ve started a vegetarian section of www.yanoff.org, I’d be interested in knowing how to get parts of it out there to the search engines. Specifically, we’ve got a frequently-updated Vegetarian Restaurants in Milwaukee section at
http://www.yanoff.org/veg/vegRestaurants.shtml that I have yet to see appear in the SERPs.
Cheers,
-Scott
Juan,
WOM is huge. I sure hope to include it in the future posts. Thanks for your interests and your support.
Best
Marek