Optimizing for success & high ROI

November 19, 2003

Optimizing a website for success and a high return on investment (ROI) can be easy, if only you follow the right steps. There are no shortcuts, no easy way out, if you truly want to succeed.

As with any serious undertaking, the right way to successfully optimize and position a site requires planning ahead and executing the project step by step. If you follow all the advice given in the great SEO articles on this website, you will do extremely well- better than many of your competitors in many cases.

As with any serious undertaking, design a well-structured methodology and start by a strong foundation at the very beginning of the optimization process. Also, you should never underestimate the obvious. If you have a good idea, write it down and ask a professional SEO firm if your idea makes sense. New ideas sometimes can make a whole difference in the search engine results pages (SERP’S).

Start by the beginning: the right keywords
Even if your website ranks number one in Google and most of the major search engines, it is of no value at all if it brings you unqualified, off-topic traffic. A properly optimized website with all the right keywords and key phrases will not only bring you traffic, but targeted and qualified traffic. People visiting your site will have a real need for the products and services that you offer.

Recent studies and market surveys confirm that most Internet searchers use the major search engines to rapidly find the products and services that interest them. These same surveys say that once visitors have found a site that best answers their queries and seem to satisfy their needs, they usually end up buying their product or service from that website.

Using the right keywords and key phrases will insure that they will find your web site and they will purchase what they need from you. To begin on the right track, no successful and in-depth optimization project can be seriously done without the help of WordTracker, in order to effectively identify, correctly select and finally use the keywords that are just right for your website.

What may be good for one of your out-of-state or out-of-the-country competitor may not always mean it will be good for your business too. Local variations in the economy, geo-political concerns, a different climate or a host of other different factors can, to a certain degree, affect the optimum choice for the right keywords and key phrases that should be used on your website. Additionally, try to use all possible keyword combinations.

For example, if you sell “quality and durable red widgets”, using WordTracker, you could also check to see if a key phrase such as “red widgets of the highest quality and dependability” are frequently being used by searchers. If they are, you should plan to use them on your site for added visibility.

Or, if your website sells airline tickets, obviously those needs can vary a lot from one country or continent to another. The same is true for most industries. A steel products manufacturer in the US could have different keywords and key phrases than some of its European competitors. Using a powerful search tool such as Wordtracker can help you a lot in the clear identification and definition of the exact keywords and key phrases you should in fact be using.

From experience, I can honestly tell you that an extra hour spent searching your keywords with the help of Wordtracker could mean a big difference in the careful and accurate identification of your most important keywords and key phrases.

Avoid using any spam techniques
If you truly want to rank for performance, for your own good, don’t resort to illegal methods or unwanted spam in an attempt to rank higher. That will just ban or seriously penalize your website and it’s just not worth it. Instead, write quality, search engine-friendly content that your users will benefit from and that will be valuable to them. Ensure that each page is structured so it is obvious to a search engine that the page is truly relevant to a specific keyword.

Always try to place your most important keyword or key phrase in the first paragraph of text. That way, you will be certain it’s at the top of the page where the spiders will see it and index it accordingly.

Also, it is extremely important to make certain that your pages and the rest of your site be read by a search engine spider. Make sure you have a dependable web hosting company and that your site is always up and running. Ask for “up-time” guarantees and if they have a free 30-day written warranty or your money back.

Deal only with professionals when it comes to web hosting. A search engine spider cannot do it’s job if your website happens to be “down” or off-line when it comes to visit.

Also, another technique that works for me is you should try in creating a reference point associated with your keywords. A reference point could be similar to a balance of an authority, which could have many quality links to it from other sites and pages associated with that specific keyword.

In order to rank better, you need to participate in a reciprocal link exchange program (RLEP for short). Actively try to get other relevant and quality sites to link to you. To be effective, be certain that those sites are in the same field or that are on the same topic as you are.

Stay in the same industry. You can get excellent results by simply following the above rules. Still the very best way to get quality in-bound links is to have great and valuable content for your users. Once you have that, other website owners and webmasters will be glad to link to your site on their own free will.

Remember that an inbound link is always more powerful and will rank higher than a reciprocal link exchange, where the links point to each other’s website.

PPC programs could make a difference
Purchasing keywords and key phrases in Overture and Google’s Ad Word program could represent a faster way for you to drive fairly targeted traffic to a website and could be most effective in testing or promoting new products, seasonal services or other short-term needs. Additionally, it can provide short-term results, to fill a certain vacuum between real ranking results and its underlying campaign launch.

But these benefits all come at a certain price- a price that isn’t always under one’s control at any given time. Hence, a conservative investment in a PPC program could become an ingredient to a serious search engine marketing campaign and should be viewed as a supplement only to “native” and “organic” SEO.

Given all these facts, and throughout your SEM campaign, as your natural visibility generated through native search engine optimization regularly increases, your dependency on keyword and key phrase purchasing should lower with the passage of time.

Always remember that search engine optimization is a science as well as an art. It is a delicate mix of many techniques and processes that all have an importance place is any SEO program. Also, prepare yourself with a lot of reading material if you truly wish for the best possible results in the search engines.

This industry is a constantly changing and improving one. There isn’t now one day that goes by without some major developments either in the field of search engines, search engine marketing or SEO.

Every PPC program analysis process, like native search engine optimization, is based on such things as keyword density, placement, optimization and general link structure in the whole site.

As with any other SEM program, it is crucial that a company first understands the actual surfing habits and buying styles that Internet searchers demonstrate when looking for specific services, products or information using today’s modern search engines.

Conclusion
Once all of this has been put in place, prepare yourself for the actual day-to-day monitoring of all your SEO efforts. Thirty days after your site has been carefully optimized and placed back online, you should start entering your most important keywords and key phrases into the major search engines, in an attempt to see where your site gets the most visibility and note where it is being placed in relation to your competitor’s sites.

Once you start to see it, you can “fine-tune” it by maybe increasing your keyword density or by possibly turning around a few words in your sales copy. For more on this, read my 12 steps in writing a powerful sales copy.

Sometimes, the smallest changes can mean a difference in the results pages. In the end, your ROI should improve considerably from before.

Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2003

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Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. The keywords you think are the best may be totally different than the ones recommended by WordTracker. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

        

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.