Tom Doyle :: TALK

As my day-2-day job involves managing an online marketing company (www.2bscene.net), I thought it’s about time I started a blog discussing some issues relating to online marketing. So here it is, my first blog post on online marketing and I will start with the topic I feel is most important to any online marketing campaign.

I’ve been in the web development game for just over 8 years now and have seen many changes over that time. However, there is one area of the web development industry that I feel is too often overlooked. That are is Search Engine Optimisation…..

Even the first book I read (the name escapes me now) on web development had a whole chapter dedicated to marketing your website on search engines. This was at a time when optimising websites was as simple as putting your phrases in the title tag of your HTML pages and spamming keyword tags with words like Madonna, Sex, Pamela Anderson just to generate traffic for these searches. The funnier thing was, it worked!!

But nowadays it’s not that simple. It’s a much harder taks to acheive top rankings on search engines for phrases relating to your business. Studies have shown that 75% of search engine users will be looking in search queries not for your business name - but for what your business does or the services you provide. So basically, that means that you need to be coming up in searches relating to your business, if you are not you are unlikely to get a return on your invesment from the website.

Yet, web development companies seem to avoid this issue when talking to potential or existing customers. They still seem to instill the “Build it and they will come” mentality. Anyway, that’s enough of me ranting off let’s get down to the nitty gritty. What are the top 5 most important items when optimising your website…. here it is:

1. Choosing Strong Keyphrases
   This is the most important area of any online marketing campaign. If you cannot decide who your target market is, where they are and what they will be searching for in their search queries you might aswell stop right now. It is imperative that you not only choose words relating to your products and services, but it is also important to target phrases that you have a realistic chance of appearing in the top 10. So for example, trying to get number 1 for “sex” would be a mammoth task, but if you can add “sex ireland” or “sex toys ireland” etc, you will have a much better chance of developing traffic.
2. Optimising your website
   This is the easiest part - this is where you do all the stuff you have read about online such as Title Tags, Meta Tags etc. However, don’t forget things like the names of your files. E.g. To be foudn for the phrase “car dealers ireland”, make sure the name of the page is “car-dealers-ireland.html” (or whatever extension). Most search engines treat “-” as a space whereas if you used an “_”, tey would read the page as cardealersireland, which obviously means nothing. There are many other thing you can do, too numerous to mention here….
3. Submitting to Search Engines & Directories
   I always think it’s best to naturally let the search engines pick up your website as opposed to mass submitting your website to hundreds of search engines. And one of the best ways to do this is to submit your website to the many free web directories out there such as www.dmoz.org, www.search.ie, www.browse.ie, www.searchme.ie etc etc.
4. Build Strong Links from Other websites
   Try not to rely on Directories for your main source of back links as this can take time. You should ask your clients would they exchange links with you. Try to be part of a partners section or something like that rather than a links page.
5. Keep Monitoring Your Progress
   You should always know how you are doing, with thousands of sites coming online every day, you need to make sure you don’t fall down the pecking order. Also, always try to continue to get links from other website where you can.

Ok, well that’s it for this installment. Keep coming back and I will post any new findings as they appear!