Ken’s Corner

Mary C. | 18 November 2004 |

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Ken’s Corner

Q: How important are search engines for website marketing?

A: Search engines are extremely important to your marketing efforts, but they should not be viewed as the only way to drive traffic. We feel that link building, online directories, and pay-per-click resources are also highly effective in driving traffic to a website and bolstering original search engine ranking. Be sure to do all that you can to rank highly in search engines, but realize that you may need to work with other resources to truly succeed. The days of free search engines supporting your business are probably over.

Q: How do I get good search engine placement? What can you do to my website to make it perform better?

A: Ahh, the Silver Bullet approach to website marketing. I’m sorry to say that there is no single thing that you can do to attain the ideal search engine placement. You must take a macro look at your search engine placement in order to raise it as high as you can, which may never be the highest placement possible. You must first realize that current search engines take a cumulative approach to rank your website; they are looking at the big picture of your website existence.

Some work can be done to your local site to improve placement. Your website must appear to contain important information to visitors searching for the term(s) you wish to rank highly on. Your website must contain all of the optimal information that search engines look for (keywords, relevant pages, links to and from your site). A site map may also help to ensure that search engines find all of your pages, especially pop-ups.

Even with all of this work to your website, you must still remember that the main search engines expect that you will take part of free and fee resources elsewhere around the Internet. These may be free and fee directories, association websites, pay-per-click resources, and chamber of commerce sites. Spread yourself around the Internet in relevant arenas and you will notice an increase in performance.