Welcome to the first lesson in the Search Marketing Made Easy Crash Course. Over the next few days, you will receive several lessons that will help you learn the ins and outs of using search engine optimization strategies to marketing your business online.
In this first lesson let’s talk a little about how search engines work so you can get a better understanding of how you can use them to market your business. Too many website owners are unaware of what good search engine placement can do for a business and they often believe that once they submit their webpages to a search engine they are guaranteed tons of traffic, sales and success.
I’m sorry to say that’s generally not the case. Simply submitting your webpages to a search engine is not always enough to see real results. To get a good ranking in the search directory it requires at the least some basic search engine optimization for the index to list your pages in the top results.
Search engine optimization is the art and science of making web pages attractive to the search engines. The goal of search engine optimization is to have your website ranked in the top ten internet search hits that appear on the first page. Why is it important to be on the first page?
It’s important because the average internet user doesn’t click on any of the sites listed on the second or third page. Out of sight, out of mind. One website owner reported a two hundred and ten percent increase on her e-commerce sight when she had her webpage redesigned for optimal search engine optimization.
You would think that the prospect of a two hundred and ten percent increase in sales would be all the incentive a web developer would need to redesign their site. That isn’t always the case. There are a variety of reasons people avoid recreating their websites.
Some people believe that search engine optimization is too difficult to understand. The reality is that search engine optimization is fairly simple. All it takes is a little research and most people are ready to rock.
Other people feel that there are simply too many things to learn before they will be ready to optimize their website. Search engine optimization is just like anything else. When you first start out you know nothing. With some homework and a bit of trial and error and you will know exactly what it takes to make your webpage popular with the web crawlers.
Some people believe that search engine optimization will take up lots of their precious time. People with this particular fear should remember that old adage about time and money. If time spent optimizing your website leads to an increase in sales isn’t it time well spent? Besides search engine optimization is easy, once you have the hang of it won’t add much to the time you would already have to devote to updating your website.
You do not have to submit to hundreds of search engines to reap the rewards of search engine optimization.
If you have a large site, you shouldn’t worry about spending lots of time optimizing it and running the risk of never finishing the process. If you have a large website just take things one step at a time. Focus on optimizing on page per day. Start with your most important pages and then concentrate on the irrelevant pages. By using this one page a day method you won’t run the risk of sitting at your computer until your eyeballs fall out of your head.
It might take some time and some trial and error to optimize your website but you will consider it time well spent when you see an increase in the amount of traffic, the increase in traffic should lead to more sales.
That’s it for today’s lesson. We have a lot to go over in the next few days if you want to
learn how to use search engine strategies to market your business online, so make sure you look for your next lesson soon. We will be talking about how search engine marketing (SEM) differs slightly from search engine optimization (SEO).
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