SEO/Analytics

if you build it - correctly - they will come

Over 1.5 billion people the world over now have access to and use the internet - and they have 100s of millions of websites to visit. How is your website going to stick out in such a huge crowd?

Step 1: Marketing Your Site

The best and most realistic way for you to think of your start-up website is as an on-line brochure that you can direct people to by marketing it - through handing out your business card or brochure with your web address on it, advertising in print media or on other websites that people visit often (like facebook or myspace or google).

Step 2: Submit to Search Engines

Once your site is up, it should also be submitted to the major search engines, like google, yahoo and msn. These search engines may take up to 2 months to list your site, so don't expect miracles overnight. Then, once they do list your site - your site will be in competition with all the other hundreds of millions of sites out there.

If you are selling MP3 Players, for example - if you put the words "mp3 player" in google, it finds 82,300,000 websites in 0.26 seconds. So that roughly spells out the chances of you getting the top spot on a google search for "mp3 player": 82,300,000 to 1. Even something much more specific, like "plastic hoop earrings," returns 183,000 results. "Vancouver plastic hoop earrings" returns a more manageable, but still dizzying 14,700 sites.

Step 3: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization aims to get your site listed on the first few pages (of course, the number one position is the ultimate goal) of searches for certain terms. This can be easy or difficult, depending on how much competition there is out there on the web for the search terms for which you want to optimize your site.

If I put the words "masticate worldly invigorating" on my website and then submit it to google, I can pretty well assure that I will get the top spot when someone puts the words "masticate worldly invigorating" into google - if they ever do. But if I'm not selling gum that suddenly makes you excited to understand the cultures of the world, search engine traffic from a search term of "masticate worldly invigorating" would be pointless.

So the point of SEO is not just to get you listed high on any search, but on the right searches - the search words that your potential customers are likely to put into a search engine.

Again, depending upon the level of competition, improving your rankings on search engines can be a multi-faceted process - involving:

clever writing tricks to incorporate and repeat key words and phrases in your site
using the correct mark-up (html code) to let search engines know what information on your site to index, skip - as well as how to weight different sections of your text
analyzing your more-successful competitors' websites and imitating some of the strategies they seem to be using that might be resulting in their higher ranking
updating and adjusting your site content frequently so that search engines see it as fresher, more dynamic and therefore more relevant content
arranging to have links to your site present on other websites (especially high traffic ones) - which will both bring direct traffic to your site and show search engines that your site is popular (and therefore possibly more relevant) because of all the links that lead to it
etc.

The important thing to know is that search engines DO NOT PUBLISH rules of how to get high rankings on their services. Their goal is to provide relevant results to their customers - internet searchers. If they don't provide relevant results, people will go search on another search engine - and will likely never come back.

In the internet's infancy, a piece of mark-up called a "meta tag" came into wide usage, both by web designers and search engines. The idea was that the web designer could put these invisible keywords and descriptions in their code to tell search engines about the content of their site. What happened? They were abused. As an example, porn sites put non-porn keywords and descriptions on their websites, hoping to entice people who may be looking for something else to make a pit stop, and non-porn sites, knowing that porn was a subject of great interest on search engines, put porn keywords and descriptions on their sites, hoping to cash in on porn's pulling power.

Today there are no SEO silver bullets, just hard work. If you want more of a sure thing - pay for pay-per-click advertising!

On the other hand, if the field isn't too crowded or dynamic, a couple passes of SEO (combined with careful analysis of changes in site traffic - see below) can make a big, and possibly permanent, difference in your rankings. At eggmedia, while SEO is not our specialty, we have been able to get many of our clients listed at number one on google for the keywords they wanted to target, but, because there are so many variables in the process - some controllable, some not - every case has to be considered by its own merits and challenges.

Step 4: Web Analytics

Once you embark on some of the strategies listed above, you will want to see what effect the changes you have made are having on your site traffic. Analytics can tell you a great deal about traffic to your site - most importantly:

search engine keywords that result in traffic coming to your site
referring links on other websites that result in traffic coming to your site
geographic location of visitors that come to your site
which pages visitors visit on your site, the path that they take through your site, and how long they stay on each page (as well as on which pages they exit your site all together)

As you can imagine, this data can be both very useful and overwhelming. We will help you know how to understand and use web analytics to improve both the amount of traffic coming to your site and the results you get once visitors are on your site.