Search Engine Optimization

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" colspan=2 height=90 BGCOLOR="#006699" TEXT="#080000" background="05bfd5a3.jpg"> <div> <B>Marketing Articles</B></div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" width=210 BGCOLOR="#FFCC66" TEXT="#080000" background="05cd2043.jpg"> <bR> <div> <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Mike Albin.Com "><U>Mike Albin.Com </U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="wd.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Web design"><U>Web design</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="ma.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Marketing Articles"><U>Marketing Articles</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="sr.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Show Reviews"><U>Show Reviews</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="mt.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Marketing Tools"><U>Marketing Tools</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="l.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Links"><U>Links</U></A></div> </td> <td valign="top" height=390 BGCOLOR="#777777" TEXT="#080000"> <div> The little search engine that could</div> <div> How to use Internet searches and marketing</div> <div> to generate more hits for your Web site</div> <bR> <div> In my last article, I wrote about ways to start your own Web site. I hope that I inspired at least a few of you to give it a try. Now that you have a Web site, your main focus should be getting people to visit it and purchase from it.</div> <div> So what’s the best way to promote your site? That’s going to depend on how much money and how much time you have to devote to it. Let’s start with the most basic ways of promoting the site and go from there. Your Web address should be printed on everything: your business cards, receipts, labels for your artwork, post cards, jewelry boxes, return-address labels on your envelopes, EVERYTHING! Patty and I find that the hits on our Web site go up greatly while we are at an art show and for a few days after the show, and that’s all due to handing out our cards at the event. We have made a large number of sales to people who saw us the first day of the show and came back on the second day to purchase something they saw on our Web site. It works! </div> <div> If you have a little money to invest, there are several ways you can promote your site. You can make bumper stickers with a catchy slogan like “Got Art” or “Art by Bob,” and your Web address below that. Keep your stickers simple and make the letters as large as you can. (It’s tough to read fine print while you’re going down the road.) Other ways to promote your Web site include utilizing items such as key chains, pens and refrigerator magnets. Those are things people will hold onto, and when they come across them later, they will remember your work and visit your site.</div> <div> Now let’s get a little more advanced: search engines. If you know how to use them and can maximize your exposure on the right ones, this is where you can really become successful. However, a great deal of that success is going to depend on what it is you are selling and how many people actually go to the Web to search for and purchase items such as yours. It all starts with “key words,” which are basic words or phrases that you should include in the HTML, or the programming, of your Web site and the Web pages themselves, to maximize the number of visitors.</div> <div> My wife and I sell photography with handpainted frames. Photography is way too broad of a search term, and few people are going to search the key words “photography with hand-painted frames,” so try to find the key words that are most effective. Try this at home: Go to <FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="ITC-NewBaskerville" ><U>www.google.com</U></FONT> and search “French flower pots.” It’s the title of one of our pictures, and occasionally people will search for this term. When they do, our Web site, www.<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="ITC-NewBaskerville" ><U>albinarts.com</U></FONT>, comes up, usually in the first three or four results. Those are the types of results you can have too. If you use the right key words, you essentially create free advertising for your Web site.</div> <div> If you sell bronze sculptures of horses, you can probably do well with search engines because people will likely search for words such as “bronze,” “sculpture” and “horses.” You can target your search-engine traffic around those key words and attract people to your site who are looking for that type of work. If your key words are less specific, such as “paintings” or “earrings,” you’re going to have a much tougher time. So try to make your key words as specific as you can but still something people will search for, i.e., “paintings of ducks” or “dolphin-shaped earrings.”</div> <div> There is an appproriate place on every page of your Web site for key words. Finding that place and listing those key words differs depending on the program you are using, so it’s very important to do your research. There are hundreds of different programs for building a Web site, but each one should have a help menu. I would suggest searching for “adding key words” in the help menu of the program, as that should explain how to do it for that particular program.</div> <div> Be patient. Getting search-engine results can take years. You are planning for the future, so the sooner you get started, the better. One quick way to get bumped to the front of the line on search engines is to include alternate spellings of commonly misspelled key words. Most people like having everything spelled correctly on their Web site, as it makes you look more intelligent, but if you research common misspellings that people search for and find a way to include those misspellings in the key-word section (rather than on the Web pages themselves), it might boost your hits. For instance, on our Web site, we have a picture of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in North Carolina. Some people spell it like it sounds: Cape Hatterus. If you do a Google search for “Cape Hatteras,” our site is lost somewhere on page 670 or so. But if you search for “Cape Hatterus,” our site comes up at the bottom of the first page. It’s also important to know where your visitors are coming from. I use the extreme tracker I wrote about in my October column to track this. </div> <div> So how do you get your Web site ranked up with the big boys, on the first few pages? It’s called SEO or search-engine optimization. If you make jewelry boxes and want to sell them on the Web to people who go to search engines such as Google or Yahoo and search for “jewelry boxes,” you’ll quickly find out you have A LOT of competition. My recent search on Google for jewelry boxes came up with 333,000 Web sites. Usually only the first 10-20 sites get looked at. After that, if people cannot find what they want, they’ll usually search for a different term.</div> <div> So how do you get into the top 20? I spoke with Donald Boudreau, artist and Web master of <FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="ITC-NewBaskerville" ><U>www.boxesbyboudreau.com</U></FONT>. He’s been selling his custom made boxes at art shows and on the Web for years. Right now he only participates in 10-12 shows a year, as approximately 50-60 percent of his sales are from his Web site. He receives an average of 170 visitors a day, with 90 percent of those visits being from search-engine referrals. He says there are two parts to optimizing search engines to get your Web site in the top 20: constructing your Web site with many key words, and getting high-quality and relevant incoming links from other Web sites. The latter is when someone with their own Web site has a link from that site to yours. The more Web sites that have links back to your site, the higher your site will be in the search results.</div> <div> It also helps if these sites have something in common with, or are relevant to, your Web site. For example, if you sell jewelry boxes, having links from other jewelers’ and woodworkers’ sites to yours will help move you up the rankings. Having links from dating Web sites — not so much! Basically, you need to spend time e-mailing other Web owners and designers, asking if they would like to exchange links. You put a link on your site to theirs, and vice versa.</div> <div> It takes years and many hours of swapping links to get into the top 20. Good luck if you want to try! It can be hugely successful if you can get it done. Boudreau’s been working at it for about 10 years now and has really made it pay off for him. Did you catch this: 50-60 percent of his business is from search engines! He sits at home, takes orders off his Web site and ships them out. It’s what Patty and I are striving to do with our Web site in order to complement our art-show income. Try it at home for yourself: Go to <FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="ITC-NewBaskerville" ><U>www.google.com</U></FONT> and search for “men’s valet boxes” or “wood tea boxes” and see where <FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="ITC-NewBaskerville" ><U>www.boxesbyboudreau.com</U></FONT> comes in. He’s usually very high on the list. </div> <div> One quick thing to beware of: There are companies out there that claim they can put your Web site at the top of the search engines in a matter of months. Their sales people can be very persuasive and had me seeing dollars coming in hand over fist. I signed up with one of these companies and found it to be a huge disappointment. Three-thousand dollars and a lot of headaches later, the only thing I got out of it was a total loss of my $3,000 and a vow never, NEVER to do that again! You can try one if you like, but, remember, you’ve been warned! </div> <div> So how can you get a bit of immediate traffic to your Web site? Pay-per-click advertising is another way you might want to go, but it can be expensive and your competition can click on your links and run up your bills. Here’s how it works. Search engines have sponsored links; you’ll see these at the top and sides of each search-engine page, with a little footnote. You set up an account with a search engine and bid on certain key words such as “earrings” or “jewelry boxes,” and you pay only if someone clicks on the link to your Web site. Both you and your competition bid on how much you are willing to spend each time a person clicks on your link. The more popular the search term, the more you have to pay to get your site to the top. You usually set up a budget for each day on how much you are willing to spend. Say you bid 50 cents per click and a budget of $20 a day. After 40 people have clicked on your link for the day, your link will disappear from the sponsored-link results. The BIG problem you run into with sponsored links is the people who have bid under you can go to the search-engine page every morning and click on your link 40 times. By the time they’ve done that, you’ve run out of money and their link has moved up the page. Rotten jerks! </div> <div> Operating your Web site can be very overwhelming at first. Trust me, though, it’s not rocket science or brain surgery. If I can learn it, so can you! You’ll find yourself in the middle of dinner or lying in bed at night, and an idea will just hit you. “I’ve got to add this to the Web site!” you’ll say to yourself. You’ll actually start looking forward to tweaking your site to make it better, adding your new work and updating your show schedule as you get acceptance letters. Once you take your first few orders off the Web and it starts to pay off, you’ll be hooked! </div> <div> Good luck, and I hope to see you out there! Thanks so much to those of you who take the time to visit our booth at shows and let me know you are reading my articles. I do appreciate it very much. You always make me feel good when I receive such positive feedback!</div> <bR> <div> 6260 N.W. 19 Street, Sunrise, Fl. 33313 Toll Free 1-877-512-3333    Email: <A HREF="mailto:mike@mikealbin.com" TARGET="_top" TITLE="mailto:mike@mikealbin.com"><U>mike@mikealbin.com</U></A></div> </td> </tr></table></body>