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They've fallen in love with their beautiful homepage design and graphics. But they do not understand why their homepage is No.67 in search results. Their site is not, shall we say, search engine optimization ready.
Thus, at No.67, the chance anyone will scroll to their result is about equal to convincing a rabbit to eat meat. But there are simple reasons for search engine optimization ranking. The cost to optimize your homepage for search engines is nothing more than a two hour meeting with the marketing team.
The Search Engine Carrot's homepage writes about their services...perhaps, but it is not clear what they do from reading the text. Here is a sample of their homepage.
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"Welcome to Search Engine Carrot's homepage. We are the biggest
and brightest bunch in the industry. Our customer's love us too! To
engage our services, simply call us, and provide your credit card number
over the phone and we will overnight the package to your home.
Search Engine Carrot's Inc. is the best company in the vegetable market! This is what some of our happy customers have said about our products: .... " |
etc... etc... you get the point. Marketing gibberish that makes you want to open a barf bag.
First off, lets look at what Search Engine Carrots Inc. sell. The marketing manager says "we are the best at what we do, customized, detail-oriented sphondyli of all kinds..." (Okay, sphondyli is Latin for carrots -- but let's stop right here mister marketeer, no one, no matter how slick your brochures will ever type sphondyli into search to find carrots!)
The web writer, "you," need to bring the marketing guy back down to earth and talk about search engine optimization. Your question should be "best at what?" and "will our customers type that word into search?" Custom-made carrots to go, essentially is the product. However, this information is missing from their homepage.
Marketing manager: "No it is not! Our $5,000 graphic on the homepage tells customers exactly what we do and calls our carrots sphondyli!"
You: "Ah, but search engines don't have eyes." Search engines crawl text. The marketing manager's vitriol relaxes.
Tell me what you do in the simplest of words: Search Engine Carrots Inc. customizes carrots to go. "How important is it to list the company name in text?" you ask. The marketing man predictably says it is "essential." You know it is not to a web user, but to save your job you do have to compromise a little... hold that thought.
You: "Now, talk to me about our customer base." Who are they? When they go online, what terms do they use to find our product?
The marketing man says customers are looking for the best company in this industry when they call him on the telephone. "Fair enough," you say; "But on the web, people don't type 'the best company' into search; if they want carrots, that is what they type."
Your team decides they want to capture all users who type in "carrots." Simple enough. There are number of companies online that allow you to check search through keywords -- some charge and some give you archived information for no charge. You find that 300,000 folks have typed in "carrots" in the previous month, but your traffic from search engines is only 2,000. The potential for attracting 298,000 search queries is fairly high. That makes the marketing manager quite happy.
The Compromise: You are going to have to break the news to your marketing manager that his $5,000 graphic needs a makeover. Instead of the graphic showing "Carrots to go," make the graphic your company name and rewrite the text for search engine optimization.
The text of the page will reflect your product, and this is what you, the web writer, proposes to the marketing manager:
| "Carrots to go! Call us your source for carrots. Anyway you like them -- sliced, diced, bunched -- we can overnight carrots to your home. Order carrots now by dialing 1 800 CARROTS." |
This new paragraph accomplishes the first goal for search engine optimization: The use of your product's term "carrots" is prominent in the text. This is perhaps the most difficult task of optimizing your page for search engines as many products and services are extensive and complex. Spending time narrowing down the taxonomy of your specific product set will greatly increase your ability to search optimize the page. Practice the same exercise for all your other pages. And if your company has hundreds of pages.... seriously considering chopping them back to as few pages as possible. Too much information simply overwhelms users -- no matter what product or service s/he is searching for.
Continue to Step 2 of Search Engine Optimization
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