Boost Your Sales With Search Engine Optimization

Page 1 of 2

Most system builders would be the first to admit they do a poor job of marketing their services. Many, if not most, rely entirely on word-of-mouth referrals. But referrals alone can take a business only so far.

Formal marketing efforts cost big bucks, certainly too much for many small system builders. Even low-cost Web marketing has failed to attract many system builders, mainly because so much systems building is done for local customers. As a result, the Web's worldwide reach has brought little benefit to system builders.

That is, until now. Especially with new localized search-engine features, the Web is a marketing outlet that no system builder can ignore.

In this TechBuilder Recipe, I'll show you how to make the most of search-engine optimization (SEO). It's a powerful way to extend your system-building business (or any other business, for that matter) on the Web in a way that will attract potential customers.

How Do You Rank?

Without a doubt, major search engines carry an awesome amount of weight in the advertising and marketing arenas. Just look at the annual revenues of Google, Yahoo!, and Overture; the evidence is clear. As one of my customers put it, "Google and eBay level the playing field by allowing small companies to compete with the big boys."

The result: pure competition based solely on merit, not favoritism or deep pockets. To prove this, Google "Windows XP" and look at the third listing. I have never heard of Kelly's Korner, but you can bet the site gets millions of hits each day, owing to the huge popularity of Windows XP.

The goal of SEO is to get the highest possible ranking from a major search engine. Number 1 on the list is best, of course, though any spot on the first page is still great.

Of course, you need to appear for relevant search terms. For instance, a box builder in Los Angeles who fixes broken PCs would want to have its Web site come up No. 1 on a search for "PC repair Los Angeles."

Later in this recipe, I will discuss SEO strategies for local businesses, a new niche being targeted by Google and Yahoo! But for box builders who wish to distribute products worldwide, SEO knows no boundaries, international or domestic. For example, I have sold my own how-to manuals to customers in Nigeria, England, and Sweden through my SEO efforts. All of these overseas customers found my site on a search engine. Also, while I have not paid for a single click in more than 18 months, my Web site has attracted more than 200 new customers since January 2004 and gets about 1,600 hits per month based strictly on my SEO efforts. So let's get started on the journey toward optimizing your rankings on the major search engines.

Ingredients

Here's what you'll need to get started. I'm assuming you already have a Web site for your company. If you don't, then your first step is to build a site!

• An E-commerce Web site with products or services for sale.

• An active Overture or Google pay-per-click account, funded with a few dollars.

• FTP access to Web pages on any site you've built, or may build in the future, for meta-tag updates.

• Optional: A subscription to KeywordRanking.com. This is expensive, but worth it. The pricing is set at $1,000 a month, and you must commit for at least two years. You read that right: $24,000 over two years. That's big bucks for nearly any system builder. Yet if you're serious about Web marketing, then I highly recommend you consider this option.

Spider Bots and Search Engines

A good friend recently asked how the major search engines collect all of the information that's out there on the public Internet. She could not figure out how the entire Encyclopedia Britannica found its way on to Google without being placed there deliberately. At first blush, it seems as though the every site on the entire Internet is polled every time a typical search is executed from the Google search box. Of course, this is not what really happens. There are simply too many sites. Google says it now searches more than 8 billion pages, and such a search would take weeks to complete. The answer lies in the areas of indexing and Spider Bot crawling.

We already know Indexing from books. A book's index can save a reader hours of time when they need a reference to a word or group of words. Who would bother to scan every page of a book about cars for the word "Buick?" Instead, we look up the word in the book's index and find the references right away. In the same way, the major search engines are all indexed, allowing a search to be completed in a matter of seconds.

How are the indexes built? The search-engine's engineers write software programs called Spider Bots or Web Crawlers. As the names imply, these programs crawl the Web 24 x 7 to gather information from every site in the world. Then they delivering this information back to the "Mother Ship" for addition in the index, also known as the directory. The Spider Bots never rest; once they finish a complete tour of the Web, they start the process all over again. No one knows precisely how long this takes--except for the folks inside Google, and they're not telling. I would guess that a full tour of the Web takes the bots about six weeks.

Back at the "Mother Ship," all the information collected by the Spider Bots is then processed by a ranking index. This assesses a value to each site and then ranks it accordingly. That is why Microsoft comes up No. 1 in Google for "Windows" and why www.apple.com comes up first for "computer." Makes a bit more sense now, right?

1 | 2 | Next >>

Tweet

   

More