Targeted Results Driven Business Website Development
Does it touch you? Do you feel an emotion with the design work? Has it got value to your organisation? Is it a company asset?
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How does search engine optimisation work?
It is a well known fact that over 80% of visitors to websites find them on the Internet through search engines. Out of the millions of web pages how do you get ranked highly enough in your market segment so that people will easily find you?
The following is a simple layman's explanation of how to get indexed on search engines and have them rank your website and appear on the first page of all the search engines to attract many visitors.
A search engine’s robot visits your site, reviewing your content, including links to and from your site, and even scrutinizing the way your site has been constructed. Next, your site is run through a set of algorithms (rules to calculate your ranking) and compared with other sites with similar keywords and content, and then a ranking is determined.
These algorithms are well guarded secrets; otherwise, who would want to use a search engine with fixed results?
Firstly, you need to know your target market as this will define how you approach the optimisation of your website.
As an example let's go through the basic steps of defining our website:
Your business is advertising, you are an Advertising Agency, and your primary target market are prospective clients in the mid to large business sector. Your secondary market is current clients.
You know that if a client is looking for a new advertising agency the first place he will look for background information is the Internet. Apart from contacts and a client's knowledge of who is out their the web has become an easy accessible knowledge base of information.
We all know that placing an advertising account with an agency may involve millions so background information will be critical to making a decision. Initially the client does not want the most creative advertising agency, he wants to know many other things like:
- The management and expertise.
- The company status (size, current clients, length in the business,
financial etc).
- Agency philosophy (what can you offer that others don't).
- Current client testimonials.
- Creative success stories.
- Client service particularly, (due to high employee turnover in the
advertising industry) continuity of service.
Writing down the list above has provided us with two critical factors before developing a website:
- Answering these questions sufficiently will provide a potential advertising
agency client with sufficient information to form a basis of whether or not to
contact this Agency.
- By producing the list above we have also defined the content
when designing the advertising agency
website.
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After defining your target market and developing your website how do you ensure
that your market will find you?
Doing this is called website optimisation, Internet marketing, SEO and a host of
other names however the objective is to get your website indexed with the search
engines and ranked highly on their site. Unlike the Yellow Pages where you are
able to look-up a category in the index and it will tell you what page all the
advertising agencies appear on, this is not the case with the Internet and search
engines.
Search engines work very differently and they evaluate each website to determine what it is all about and how, in their opinion, important it is.
The more important it is the higher up it will appear.
In our example we are an advertising agency so we have to make this very
apparent to the search engines because we want to be categorised in their index
(database) as an
advertising agency.
This is where keywords and keyword phrases become critical to a website. Your
have to be able to add keywords relevant to what you are an advertising agency.
Keywords are the words and phrases that potential customers type into the search
engines when they are looking for products and services. The best keywords are
those that potential customers type in a lot when they are searching but that
competitors don't use.
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Two of the most important factors for high search engine rankings
It is no good just adding the words: advertising agency to your page. Everyone
does that. This is not sufficient and as time goes by more and more advertising
agencies websites appear on the web the harder it becomes to get a highly ranked
website due to the amount of competition.
The first factor to a well positioned and highly ranked website is the amount of relevant content about your subject
that you are able to publish. If for instance you have 4 pages on your website but your competition
has hundreds of pages, guess which one will get ranked higher on the search engines?
The second critical factor is website optimisation.
As an example of this if we
had on our home page the keywords advertising agency repeated 5,000 times then
we would get ranked really highly on the search engines right?Wrong! This is
indeed the way to get high rankings on the search engines because we mention the
keywords, advertising agency so many times. Search engines have long banned this
practice and they view it as website spamming. The website that does this stands
a 100% chance of getting banned by the search engines completely so your
website will never appear on them.
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To digress on the matter of search engines. They send out "spiders or bots" to
your website every now and again. Website spiders are computer software programs
which have been designed to read a website. These spiders read all the pages
that they find on your site and that is how they evaluate it. It does not matter
to the search engines, what your site looks like it only matters to them what
you are saying. A website made entirely of pictures or Flash designed sites are
useless to having a successfully optimised website on the search engines because
they cannot see or read pictures or Flash produced sites. The only way to get
visitors to this kind of website would be to spend a lot of money advertising it
to potential visitors.
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Words are the lifeblood of the search engines. They can only evaluate a website
based on words. The correct words, the correct positioning and the correct
amount of repetition of words are what will make your website reach the number
one position in your target market.
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Now that we know what search engines are looking for when they rank a website.
How do we go about developing the right keywords for an advertising agency?
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Here is report of keywords that people used in July 2009. These keywords are
significant in so far as they are words that people have typed into the search
engines relevant to advertising. So it goes to logic that if we were to use
similar or the same words (where applicable to our advertising agency) that we
could expect more people to use the same keywords in the future. |
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Searches done in July 2009 |
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Count |
Search Term |
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30334 |
advertising agency |
| 2361 |
internet
advertising agency |
| 1786 |
advertising
agency employment marketing |
| 1534 |
media
advertising agency |
| 1517 |
online
advertising agency |
| 1118 |
top
advertising agency |
| 1115 |
advertising
agency media search |
| 1108 |
interactive
advertising agency |
| 1019 |
advertising
agency and services |
This table (above) gives us the keyword phrases that we need to use on our
website. We need to build these words into our web pages. Why? Because these are the keywords people are using to find your business!
The count is the number of people using the term over a month period. |
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Your company may be an advertising agency but you may specialise in something in
addition so we can segment the market even more. Segmentation is good because
less people (competitive websites) may operate in a segmented market making it
easier to reach the top of the search engines. Sure you may see less visitors
but you will know that they are good quality visitors who are looking for your
specific service.
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Below is an example of market segmentation keywords and
phrases: |
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Searches
done in July 2009 |
| Count |
Search
Term |
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2446 |
advertising design |
| 1216 |
advertising
brochure design flyer index index layout layout newsletter page
poster stationery web |
| 779 |
graphic
design advertising |
| 393 |
newspaper
classified advertising design |
| 379 |
advertising
design agency |
| 219 |
advertising
design typography |
| 191 |
advertising
by design creating visual communication with graphic impact |
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The above results are for the keyword phrase: advertising design. The count is the number of people using the term over a month period.
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Understanding the returned keyword search results from Google
Understanding what to look for when viewing your website listed on Google. Below
is a "snapshot" for our web site
www.epnetwork.co.za. We are ranked number 1 on the 1st page of Google for this keyword phrase:
website developers.
The important point to look for is that we are ranked number 1 out of
millions of other pages.
This number gives you an idea of the SUPPLY (or how many competitors there are)
for that keyword phrase. It
is not a good idea for a new website to try to compete with millions of other pages that is why
market segmentation is important. Rather try to compete with 2 to 4 million other pages to start with
then build it higher as you add new content.
A sample of returned results on Google for the keyword
phrase: website developers |
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If you are thinking of having a website designed and want to reach the
top rankings on Google, MSN, Yahoo and others then this information should be of help to you.
There is much more to getting visitors to a website and getting high positions
on the search engines but they are more technical in nature. The absolute
necessity from a website clients point of view is to understand what has been covered on this
page. Any questions we would be happy to answer please email us:
studio@epnet-web-design.co.za
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