DPS - Marketing your website

In the movie Field of Dreams, the most memorable line is "You build it and they will come". I remember that line vividly because ever since I started building websites for people, I have been amazed that they actually think that is the way the Internet works. If you even have the slightest doubt whether that is a foolish thought, consider this; According to a recent study by Inktomi and NEC, there are over 2 billion websites on the internet and growing by about 20,000 per day. The point is that for someone to just find your site, they would have to wade through 2 billion-plus websites. Do you still think they will be beating down your door anytime soon?

Let's put this in perspective. I live in a community of about 100,000 people. Let's say I decide to open a shoe store in my community. Due diligence uncovers 6 shoe stores in my area, a visit to each gives me a list of brands and how well they are marketing them.
Being the new kid on the block, I have to make some choices; do I carry a brand that they are not and market this as a niche market, or do I try to out-advertise them for one of the more popular brands they carry. Either way, I am not going to get enough traffic to survive just by opening the store and waiting for people to discover me.

Taking it a step farther, let's say we have been successful at our brick-and-mortar shoe store, and now we want to expand by setting up an Internet store. Once again due diligence give me some raw data. Searching the generic term "shoe store" I find that there are 1,820,000 shoe stores advertised on the Internet - lots of competition. Narrowing it down to my brand I find that there are 1,100,000 stores offering Dansko shoes (just for clarity I tried 5 brands of shoes with similar results). Do you see the problem?

What I am trying to point out is that although building and stocking an Internet store is easier and cheaper than starting a brick-and-mortar store, it has its inherent problems - marketing. How do you compete with a million Internet stores marketing the same product? The answer: time, money and a lot of daily tweaking.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO has become the buzz word of internet marketing with thousands of SEO "specialists" Just waiting to drive you to the top of all the search engines. Isn't that wonderful? All those companies who have sweated over the years to gain a commanding position on Google and these "specialists" are going to zoom you right past them and give you their time-earned spot! NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!

These SEO guru's would have you believe that for $49 or $149 or even $249 they are going to alter a few key things on your home page, add some keywords to your metatag, and then do some inside manipulating of Google and you are going to wake up in the morning on the first page of a Google search engine. What about the other million stores who have paid their Gurus to be in the same position? What about the stores who have, over the years, earned their way to the top? Don't get me wrong, sometimes with some shady moves (which I will get into in a later article) they can get you there for a day or two, but not as a permanent, earned position.

Here is what Google has to say about itGoogle

So why SEO?
SEO has its place, and there are a lot of good SEO experts who do their job without blowing smoke up your skirt. When done right, SEO helps a Search Engine like Google understand your site so it can be indexed correctly. A SEO specialist works with the pages on your site to try and get content placed that does not interfere with your sales pitch and product display, but is rich in keyword placement. They will adjust your titles on each page, ad keywords to the Metatag, and make sure the links are visible and available to the search engines. If your site is built with dynamic links, links generated on the fly, they will duplicate the links at the bottom of each page so the search engines can navigate your site. The more honest information you provide in text form, the better the search engines can index you. Keep in mind that you have to get properly indexed in the first place before Google, MSN, and Yahoo can start placing you among the others selling the same product or service. Finally your SEO specialist will set up an account on Google and tell Google where to find you and what to look for. Google will request a small recognition script be installed on your pages to steer the search.

METATAGS
Metatags are Used to identify the creator of a Web page, what HTML specs the page follows, and the keywords, title and description of the page. You will still read a lot of hype about getting hundreds of keywords in the metatag so the search engines will index you higher. In the old days (5-10 years ago) this was somewhat true. Search engines were not as sophisticated and were getting scammed a lot by metatags. At that time, the crawlers were not developed enough to scrap your site and discover what you really do, they took the metatags at face value. Porno sites, for instance, could put a lot of mainstream keywords, and even key words that attract children, and search engines would index them under those categories. Imagine, and I have actually witnessed this, someone typing in Harry Potter and without warning being exposed to vivid scenes of hardcore porn.

Although there are still some minor search engines that pay attention to keywords in metatags, Google and the other top search engines rely on sophisticated scrubbing methods to decide what you are really offering. They check each page for keywords. They watch for invisible text; that is text that is in the same color as the background (white text, white background) so the visitor can't see them but the search engine can. When they find this kind of trickery, they give you minus points, and often blackball your site.

Lee Siemon - author
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