Top 10 Driving Tips
1. Know your target market
It all starts with knowing who you are trying to attract to your site. Deciding on word and phrase selection for keywords, tags, content, etc., are all difficult tasks. Once you get specific to your audience, everything falls into place.
2. Know your limitations
Limitations come in many forms; your expertise, your budget, the amount of content on your site, your online competition, and more. Be realistic about what you want to accomplish and the resources you have at your disposal. It’s better to rank highly in a few terms than to rank in the middle on a bunch of terms.
3. Determine target terms and phrases.
Take your best guess at what good target terms are likely to be. Then, use a tool such as Yahoo Search Marketing’s “Keyword Selector Tool”, to rank the relative popularity of your terms and to get ideas for additional complementary terms.
For additional ideas, look at some of your competitors and see what terms they are using to attract their targeted visitors (view the HTML source of their page and look at tags and titles).
Finally, judge how competitive the terms are. Will it be difficult to rank highly for your general, broader terms. Maybe it will make more sense to focus on a narrow term which adds industry or geography specific words to your targeted phrases (e.g. “san diego accountant” or “medical industry accountant” vs just “accountant”.
4. Evaluate current or planned site
If you have a site, how well is it indexed by the Search Engines. Do the search engines see all of your pages. How many sites are linked to your site. Most of the search engines (e.g. Yahoo, Google, MSN, etc.) have advanced search options to let you find these answers. If your site is not being well indexed, there may be an architecture challenge that stops their crawlers (e.g. frames, flash navigation, poor navigation, etc.).
If you are still in the planning stages for your site, you need to look at how much content you’ll have, how accessible it is to being crawled (e.g. is it a dynamic site or mainly static), the
5. On-site basics
On-site refers to the code and content on your site. This is information you have complete control over. Make sure you do at least the basics. Have unique page title tags for each page. Make use of descriptive Alt attributes. Make sure your content is in text form (not images), and contains the search terms/phrases you’d like to be found for. Make sure your content is original and not copied from other sites. Address metatags such as “keywords” and “description”.
6. Off-site basics
Off-site refers to traffic drivers that are not contained on your site. Typically this means links to your site. Link building can be a challenge. Generally, you want as many high quality links to your site as possible. To do this you need to convince other sites to link to yours. This can be done either passively or actively. Active link building would entail your approaching other sites to link to your site. There should be compelling reasons for the linking to do this. Passive link building means that you have content and a site worth linking to. Thus other sites will link to you without your solicitation.
7. Reevaluate based on success/challenges
You’ll find that you tend to be naturally more successful on one search engine over another and certain pages will rank higher than others. Start to focus on those engines and those pages to push them over the top.
8. Stay educated
The Search Engines are continually changing. You’ve got to stay educated to maximize the impact of shorter term tactics. There are a lot of resources out there to help you along your way.
9. Get Help
As any market gets more sophisticated, there is more and more to try to track and keep on top of. The Search Engine Marketing area has definitely reached that level. It’s difficult to do everything yourself. Supplement your skills with those for hire.
10. Silver bullets
So you’ve read through all of the first nine in order to get to the silver bullets. Here they are – Patience and Persistence. Things don’t change overnight, but if your diligent in your efforts over a long period – they will pay off!
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