Search Engine Marketing and Website Content
by: Andrew Seidel
What is one of the main keys to successfully positioning your website in the search engines? The simple answer is, Content!
Why is content so important to your website?
Many businesses feel that having a small amount of content is enough, and the rest of the website will sell itself! This may be the case with a small percentage of business websites, but in the majority of cases you will lose out by not having strong content throughout your site. Read on, and you will find out why...
The aim of most businesses with a website is to successfully market their website and increase sales. This is a much cheaper form of advertising than other main stream advertising media.
There are quite a few components that make up a successful internet marketing campaign. They include,
1) Competitor Analysis
2) Keyword research
3) Linking - Internal and External
4) Coding your meta tags i.e. Header Tag, Description Tag, Keyword Tag.
5) Well optimised Content
The focus of this article is website content. That website content is a very important element in most successful internet marketing campaigns, cannot be stressed enough.
Now don't get me wrong; I am not saying website content is the only component you need to have for a successful internet marketing campaign, other elements are also very important. Content is a very strong element if the search engine is to correctly identify where a website belongs in its search engine listings. Other elements used in search engine marketing -see the elements listed above- can be manipulated to try and deceive the search engines, but good solid website content will give you an advantage over your competitors that have little or no content.
Why will it give you an advantage? If your website content is dedicated to a particular subject or theme, then search engine logic will be able to determine where your website will best fit within its search pages.
Even though this article is mainly focused around the benefits that strong content brings to your search engine rankings, don't focus purely on the search engines when writing content for your website. After all, the main purpose of having a website in the first place is to attract customers who will buy your product or service, not search engines!
Website content should have the following components:
1) Relevance to the product or service you are offering;
2) Incorporate targeted key phrases throughout;
3) Focus on the relevant sales message per product/service, as well as making it informative.
4) Free information, articles or hints and tips.
1) Relevance to the product or service you are offering;
Many websites make the mistake of covering multiple products or services on a single page. Not only can this be confusing for visitors to your website, but it also means that your overall keyword density on each page is weak. The aim is to ensure your relevant keywords appear often enough throught your content to give you the opportunity to attain high rankings in the major search engines for your targetted keywords.
Note: Wherever possible, make the focus of each web page relate to one particular product or service.
For businesses that offer a range of different products or services, this can sometimes be quite difficult to effectively manage and organise. This is where it is of more benefit to hire a professional web designer to manage the structure of your website more effectively. Your website needs to be clear and concise for your customers as well as being effectively optimised for the search engines.
2) Incorporate targeted key phrases throughout;
Key phrases are an important part of any search engine marketing campaign. Most search engine marketing specialists will tell you that your keywords should make up approximately two to five percent of your content for optimal results.
Note: This percentage range is an estimate as there is no documentation provided by any search engine company to support this.
I will not go into too much detail here regarding key phrases, but if you would like to find out more, look out for my article on researching search engine key phrases which is coming soon.
3) Focus on the relevant sales message per product/service, as well as making it informative.
a) Relevant Sales message:
"Click here to find out about our special offer for the month of December!!!"
This statement is referred to as a "call-to-action". A Call-to-action triggers a user to perform a certain action; in this case the action performed is clicking on this special offer. Various sales and marketing research shows that when a call-to-action is used, the conversion rate to sale or enquiry is significantly higher.
b) Detailed information relating to the product or service being sold:
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Search Engine Marketing and Website Content
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