Master Plan Search Engine Optimisation And Internet Marketing

SEO is simultaneously science and bullshit. While there is a fair understanding as to how search algorithms are constructed there is also a large degree of guess work what weighting does Google put on inward links, heading tags, meta data etc. Further search algorithms are regularly changing, taking into account the evolving nature of the Internet. For example, links are regarded as very important as they are seen as an endorsement of a web page by a third party. So everyone started links pages and reciprocal links regardless of likeness. Not quite what Google had in mind. The solution; Google devalues the amount of weight it gives to reciprocal links and inbound links on pages with lots of links.

The purpose of an Internet Marketing strategy is clear and simple to generate more and better quality traffic to your website. The website thereafter takes over with the purpose of converting that traffic to customers (known as the looker to booker ratio). This paper focuses on how to generate more of the right customers to your website. “The right customer” is an important phrase. Search engine and Internet marketing that focuses purely on traffic numbers is a flawed strategy. Rather the focus should be on identifying the ideal customer (those customers willing to spend their time and money with you) and attracting them to your website.

SEO and Internet Marketing

The following paper covers four distinct but inextricably linked elements:
1. Website Optimisation
2. Search Marketing
3. Link Campaign
4. Content Syndication.

Optimising Your Website Keywords

The goal of SEO is to generate more and better quality traffic to your website. One of the worse errors is to put effort into very general keywords such as Australia at the expense of very specific
phrases such as “hostel Sydney city.” Focus on 5 to 8 keyword phrases. If top spots are achieved
with these keywords, then the focus can be expanded while simultaneously maintaining effort on
the main keywords (you can easily lose rankings just as quickly as you have gained them).

A common practice is to stuff lots of keywords into the keyword and description meta tags of your website. While it is debatable the impact if any these tags have on your search engine rankings,
it is the case that at the most the keywords and description should be no more than 250 characters
long. There are many methods for deriving the optimal keywords for an Internet Marketing and Optimisation Campaign. Below is a simple suggested methodology that takes advantage of free software.

Google Keywords

This tool allows you to extract the keywords that Google sees from any website.

First: Select the region, repeating the process for every region, where your customers are expected
to search from.

Secondly: Select the site related keywords tab and enter your URL. Google will return a big long list
of keywords from which you go through and select the ones you are interested in. NOTE: you are
only interested in phrases with high search volume. Repeat the process for your competitors
URL to build up your list.

Internet Marketing

Google Keywords Overture & Wordtracker
This particular tool analyses Wordtracker and Overture at the same time. Type in the keyword phrases individually that you selected from your Google analysis to look for keywords that were
missed and to get relative search volumes. Begin to eliminate phrases from your list based on the
search volumes. Once again enter each keyword phrase for each region that you are interested in;

The keyword intensive content might appeal to search engines but equally it must entice your customers into the site. Make “a big fat claim”. For example, “lose weight in 21 days“, or “the highest rating hostel in Rotorua”. This claim must not be too generic and must be able to be substantiated. Another important point is the tone of your website content. When marketing on a website (or in an email) you are in fact only marketing to one person. Websites are seldom read as a group, rather just by one person and so should be marketed as such talk directly to the reader rather than use the third person. An interesting tool is the “we-we” test. The we-we test analyses the number of times you discuss yourself or use the word ‘we’, or your company name, relative to the number of references to
the customer themselves. Try this tools "we-we test" for fun