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In This Issue:
Visual
Data About UsVisual Data Systems is a leader in Internet marketing, technology consulting and World Wide Web design. As a pioneer in Internet business, we've logged more than a decade of achieving customer satisfaction and Internet innovation. Visual Data Systems offers a wide variety of products and services that can be customized to fit your unique business needs. Let our experienced professionals polish your ideas and dreams to create your distinctive Internet presence. At Visual Data Systems, there are no barriers. Just Innovations. News & EventsCatch Visual Data Systems at the upcoming Conferences: RMS Users Conference Wilmington, NC, September 22-24 Vacation Rental Managers Association (VRMA) National
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May
2003 • Volume 1, Issue 2 The Benefits of Premium Search Engine PromotionHow is your target audience finding your website? The majority of your first time visitors should be finding your website through a search engine or directory. Therefore, you need to have an ongoing search engine marketing campaign in place. Search engine marketing (SEM) is the overall process of marketing a site to the search engines. This includes search term research, optimization of your web pages and design issues, submissions to search engines and directories, building link popularity, managing pay-per-click and paid-for-inclusion listings and more. Visual Data Systems has been involved in search engine marketing for about as long as we have been in business (about 10 years!). SEM used to be a fairly quick and easy (and free) process to get a website in the top 10 for its targeted search terms, but as the Internet and world wide web have grown, billions of searches are performed daily and competition for those top positions is fierce. It takes time, tools, research, analysis, experience and patience to run a successful search engine marketing campaign. As such, it's rarely "free" anymore. Have you been spidered lately? You may have heard about search engine spiders before. These spiders are robots, or automated programs, that search engines, like Google and AllTheWeb, send out to crawl (index) websites. The spiders find websites either from submissions to the search engine or from links on other websites. Some "food" that spiders look for on your site include text in the title, meta description, header text, alternate text, links, and content of your web pages. But beware, you don't want them to find any hidden text or links because your website may be banned completely from the search engine's index. The search engines also look at the websites that link to yours; the quality of those websites and the text in and around the links to your website. Based on all of this information, your web pages are then stored in the search engines' indices. Each search engine has a different algorithm used for determining relevancy of your web pages to a search term. These algorithms change often as the search engines consistently work on improving relevancy of their results. Show those spiders what you're about! When optimizing your web pages for the search engines, Visual Data Systems first works with you to determine the search terms to target based on what people are actually typing to find your product or service through search engine requests. These terms tend to be specific toward your product or service in order to attract your target audience and increase the potential of turning the visit into a sale. Think about when you search, you have an idea of what you want to find and your time is valuable, so if you get to a website that is not what you were looking for, you back up and start over again. This behavior is termed "hit and run" or "red herring" by web marketers. Minimizing the "hit and runs" to your website may also be a key objective in your SEM campaign. Once relevant search terms are established, the web pages are optimized for these terms. You should consider the theme of your website and that each web page is potentially a doorway to the rest of the site, so content is very important. Good information for the user is also good for search engine ranking and placement. Generally, you will want about 250 words of content on your optimized web pages, each focusing on two or three of your targeted search terms. Don't forget the directories. Directories, like Yahoo and the Open Directory (dmoz.org), do not utilize spiders. Instead, your website is submitted through a form on their site. It is important to write a good description and request the appropriate category for placement in the directory. Directory submissions are reviewed by a human editor who determines if your website will be accepted and additionally may change your description if it does not follow their protocol. Directory listings are valuable because they are considered good links to your website. Although Yahoo! no longer serves up directory results on its initial results pages, a Yahoo! listing for your website will boost your link popularity, so it's helpful to have a link there. Are you in the popular crowd? Have you heard about back links, or link popularity? This term relates to the number and quality of websites linking to your site. For quality, you don't want your website to be listed on a "link farm", as these sites only trade links with other sites and are not valuable resources to search engines. You do, however, want your site to be listed on sites like area chambers, organizations, publications, etc., because these sites will refer traffic your way as well as improve your link popularity. Link popularity is an important consideration because some search engines use this measurement as part of their algorithms in determining your relevancy to a search query. You want to be at the top right now… You may have seen sponsored ads at the top of Yahoo!, AOL and MSN's search engine results pages (SERP), and Google's AdWords on the right-hand side of its SERPs. These are the result of webmasters bidding for the top positions on relevant search terms. Some advantages of pay-per-click are quick set-up and highly controllable results; you are not at the mercy of search engine algorithm changes. Services to assist paid for promotion efforts are offered within our Premium Search Engine Promotion offerings and include both management of pay-per-click services (PPC) and paid inclusion. Visual Data Systems' Premium Search Engine Promotion Package covers these bases and more. Our monthly report shows your website's visitation trends and search engine/website referrals, as well as web position of your targeted search terms in the popular engines and how it changed from the previous month. If you participate in PPC, you'll find the cost-per-click and number of clicks for each search term you're bidding on and total expenditures. As we transition into advanced log-analysis software, there's no limit to the amount of statistical trends we'll be able to provide to you and use to help the future visibility and stickiness of your website. Contact us to find out more about our search engine promotions products - we want to increase your business!
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Visual
Data Systems, Inc. To unsubscribe to The Visual Exchange, please send a blank e-mail to: remove@x.vdsys.com. Copyright © 2003 by Visual Data Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
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About
the Author: Jeanne Reilly has contributed this article. Jeanne is
Internet Promotions Specialist for Visual Data Systems and may be contacted
via email at 