More people than ever are expected to shop online.
"What we've seen is that the demographics of shopping online have begun to more closely mirror America in general," says Raul Vazquez, chief marketing officer at www.Walmart.com. About 41% of Internet shoppers in the U.S. made their first online purchase within the past four years, according to Forrester Research Inc. That reflects the growing number of homes with personal computers and broadband Internet connections.
That's why search engine optimization (SEO), the practice of building your website so it is ranked high in search results by popular search engines like Google and Yahoo, matters today. You can be a SEO do-it-yourselfer by following a few Web marketing practices. To carve out a presence on the Web requires a focus on your target market, learning what's important to your customers and giving them what they need. Once you do this you have the information to take the following actions:
1. Select the best keywords to put in your website pages or blog postings that people would type into a seach engine inquiry where you expect your site to show up on the first page of search results. There are a number of keyword research tools that tell you how often a term is searched, including:
Yahoo at: http://www.inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
WordTracker at: www.wordtracker.com
SEObook at: www.seobook.com
and if you are buying Adwords at Google, use their analytics and keyword tools often.
2. Update the content on your website and/or blog often. The more recent content you add, the more search engines will search and the higher you will be ranked. Repeat keywords and related words in your content but don't overdo the use of keywords.
3. Use specific titles on every article or blog post that take advantage of your selective keywords.
4. Engineer links to industry, location, complementary websites that are appropriate to the subjects you cover in your articles and blog postings and request links back to your site from other sites whose readers might have an interest in what you have to say.
5. Create a site map: a separate HTML page that acts as a directory of your website pages. The site map makes it easy for search engines to locate content on your site and help visitors find the content they are looking for.
6. If you don't have a blog, get one. People feel they can have a real conversation with a business person through their blog.
Source: Business Asset, Summer 2007, www.MyBusinessAsset.com