Getting people to your web site

Web sites need to be found. Most often that occurs through a search engine query, or e-mails being forwarded to friends and colleagues.

Getting Them

Don’t spend a fortune on advertising or banner placements to get eyes to your web site. Instead, get those eyes by having your web site written and designed to get great search engine ranking.

Think outside the square, form smart strategic online marketing alliances and find good online homes for some of your original content (such as articles, items of interest and calculators).

The Travesty

Web design tools are so easy to use that many designers show their expertise by doing lots of graphics (such as having your company name as a graphic instead of plain type), rather than guiding clients through marketing and search engine strategies. In fact, the ultimate travesty is that 99 out of 100 sites are designed without search engines in mind.

Search engine ranking is an ever-changing discipline and most web designers wouldn’t have a clue.

Go to www.google.com.au right now and type in a word important to you — unit trust, financial planning adviser Sydney, the name of a managed fund. Look at what happens.

Here are 10 tips that will immediately make a difference to your search engine ranking results.

1. Google is king

Google now even powers Yahoo — so it has 80 per cent of the search engine market cornered. Concentrate on getting a good Google ranking and you’ll do well.

2. Incoming links

Links into your web site are of prime importance — but from relevant sites in relation to your keywords. So if a fund manager has a link to an adviser’s web site, and you have ‘unit trust’ as an important keyword, then this will help you enormously.

3. Text. Text. Text. Not graphics

Are your navigational links graphics? Are many text items graphically produced instead of using ordinary fonts? Does the actual text start low down on the page? Search engines work on text. Not graphics. That’s how they rank your site — how your text fits in with the keyword search being conducted.

Merrill Lynch’s entire home page is a series of graphics, and the words ‘Merrill Lynch’ never appear on the home page. Even the web address is www.ml.com.

Search engines can’t read pictures. They can only scan text.

Top Tip— Get rid of unnecessary graphics, instead use keyword rich text. Give every image an alternate text source rich in keywords.

4. Each page is unique in keywords

Have the copywriters write each page with keywords that are unique to the subject covered.

So, if you have a section of the site covering five different product groups, not only would you have five different pages, each devoted to its own group of products (and only talking about that group), you’d also want lower level pages each uniquely covering only one specific product within that group.

The rationale is that each page will have a higher search engine ranking because of its keyword density. You’ll also multiply the chances of your web site being found — and of course, when someone comes into any page of your site, they can get to the rest.

5. The title is the most important part of the page

Give your title keywords and don’t have your company name first. Don’t have ‘contact’ if it’s the contact page. Instead, use keywords and the company name at the end. The first word is most important to Google. The second word is second most important and so forth.

Remember, people type in problems and questions, not company names.

6. Heading 1 and 2

You can set styles for web site text in much the same way as you can set styles in Word documents (headings, bullet points, numbered lists, body text).

Google places great importance on text that has Heading 1 (H1) and Heading 2 (H2) style ‘tag’ designations. It means it’s a heading, and being a heading is important.

So have lots of headings and sub-headings in your web site text, breaking up paragraphs, using keywords.

7. Metatags—forget about them

Metatags are old news. No one except Altavista uses the meta tags at the top of the web page coding anymore. So, forget about using them.

8. Home page is the most important page of a site

Google considers your home page to be the most important, so give it incredible attention. Don’t have a lot of graphics high on this page. Use H1 and H2 designations as mentioned above.

9. Site maps

Think of a site map as a table of contents for your web site. Have one created that is rich in keywords, as it helps pump up your ranking.

10. BONUS: Cardinal Sins

* Frames

* Dynamic pages w/ ‘?’ or ‘&’ or ‘cgi-bin’ in the URL

* Flash navigation

The last thing I want to do is make your hard-working marketing team cry, but guess what? Framed sites, dynamic pages with all the ‘?’ or ‘&’ in the URL and flash navigation leave Google so cold it won’t go near them with a 10 foot pole.

Dynamic pages aren’t ‘real’ web pages. They are created upon demand from a database. You can tell when you see a dynamic page when the web address has ‘?’ or ‘&’ or ‘cgi’. Dynamic sites make Google get sucked up in an endless loop, so it doesn’t go near them.

Flash is graphics — there’s no text behind it, so what on earth can it rank?

And framed results fall apart. So if it does get in the search results, either the navigational link portion will come up or just the content side without the links.

It’s best to have your web design team write the coding, so that dynamic pages don’t have the ‘?’ or ‘&’ in the URL.

Debbie Mayo-Smith is fromwww.successis.co.nz. She is a leading financial services expert in marketing and business development using the Internet.