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#3.09: The “Search Engine Basics” Issue

1> It’s The Payoff, Not The Position
2> Get Creative With Search Terms / Free Spreadsheet
3> Don’t Forget The Search Engine Basics
4> Check It Out: Most Popular Searches

1> It’s The Payoff, Not The Position

We asked search-engine placement guru Kevin Lee, CEO of Did-it.com, to share his secrets on how to optimize your sales from search engines. He recommends:

a. Match Your Landing Pages: You close more sales if the searcher lands on a page in your site that is tuned very closely to their search term. That may mean pages deep within your site. In cases of high-value customers, it may make sense to build custom landing pages.

b. Pick The Right Position: For most marketers, the top position is NOT the optimal position and results in poorer percentages of post-click sales. This drives up the price and wastes cash. You may get more sales for your search-engine spending as the 10th listing! Test it.

c. Diversify: Just because a keyword only gets 40 searches a month doesn’t mean you should leave it out. Add 50 of those keywords together and if they work it adds up to a great traffic-builder.

d. Automate: Automate your search engine marketing campaign using software or a service. Your time is best spent elsewhere, not micro-managing your listings.

THE LESSON: Great search engine placement is not all about being number one — it’s about driving sales. Focus on the payoff, not the position.

MORE INFO:
Kevin Lee, CEO, Did-it.com, http://www.did-it.com

2> Get Creative With Search Terms / Free Spreadsheet

You never know what a potential customer is searching for, so plan on listing your site under a variety of terms. It’s proven that customized headlines and descriptions in search engines pull better results. But when you have thousands of keyword terms, who’s got the time to write targeted headlines and descriptions? And what about all the possible misspellings that are relevant to your company name, product, or web address? The answer: create a spreadsheet that will generate customized descriptions for all of your keywords within seconds. Begin with a column with every search term you can think of, including likely misspellings. Build a formula in the next column that inserts that term into the description sentence. You’ll have an automatic tool that turns a complex mess into an easy-to-maintain search engine submission tool.

THE LESSON: Plan to be where your customers are looking. List your company under every variant of a word that could lead a customer to you.

DOWNLOAD OUR FREE SPREADSHEET HERE:
http://www.gaspedal.com/s_search

3> Don’t Forget The Search Engine Basics

Every week we get calls from companies that are ready to invest in search engine placement services. Before you spend a dime, make sure you’ve taken care of the basic steps that will get results at no cost:

a. Check Your Meta Tags: Look at the source code of your web pages and make sure you have “keyword” and “description” lines at the top of each page, and that they are correct and relevant.

b. Title Your Pages: Titles of your web pages should say more than just the name of your company. The more you put in a title, the more likely a search engine will bring someone to the right page. We changed the title of our home page from “GasPedal” to “GasPedal – We’ll help you get new customers.” If you search on “get new customers” we appear in the top 10 on Yahoo and Google.

c. Images Aren’t Searched: Remember that search engines can’t read graphic images. That means that your headlines and company name (which are probably the most important words on the site) will not be found if they are graphics. Insert “alt tags,” which are text words that correspond to each image, or replace the graphics with text.

THE LESSON: We’re all so busy that we often miss the obvious tactics right at our fingertips. Take care of the basics before you get fancy.

MORE INFO:
http://www.searchengines.com/ranking_factors.html

4> Check It Out: Most Popular Searches

What do Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and crop circles have in common? According Google’s Zeitgeist report, those words were among the search queries with the fastest growing popularity last month.

CHECK IT OUT:
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

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