In This Chapter

What do you do when you need to find something on the Internet? If you’re like most people you go to Google, Yahoo!, or some other search engine and type in keywords associated with what you’re looking for.

Guess what? That’s what many of your potential website customers do, too! In fact, according to research by Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than 60 million U.S. adults per day use search engines. So it’s important that when people are seeking the type of products, services, and information your website offers, they can easily find you in this manner. If they can’t, then you’re missing out on a significant amount of traffic. This chapter will help you make sure that doesn’t happen!

Recently a friend of mine was looking for a wedding planning service in the Chicago area. So she typed in “wedding planning” and “Chicago” into Google and was greeted with literally hundreds of pages of search results. Of course, she didn’t click on every link. In fact, she made her shortlist of potential wedding planners from the websites that were listed on just the first two or three pages.

Chances are, those wedding planners made some smart decisions regarding how their websites were structured and written. They were able to become very easy to find on Google, and probably most other search engines, too, and as a result gained a significant competitive advantage. If your website offered wedding planning services and you were listed only on page 17 on Google, then you’d be out of luck. You just lost a potential customer.

So what makes the difference between a website that gets showcased on those critical first few pages in search results and one that ends up buried on page 300? Search engine marketing.

Search engine marketing, or SEM as it’s often called in the industry, refers to techniques you can use to get your site seen on the first few pages of search engine results.

Say your website sells custom decals for bikes. You want to make sure that potential customers will easily find your site when they’re looking for that type of product on Google, Yahoo!, or any other search engine.

How do you make that happen?

To answer that question, let’s take a closer look at a typical search results page. If an Internet-connected computer is available to you now, do a search for any popular product using Google or Yahoo!. If you were to search for “snowboards,” for example, you’d see a long list of websites listed down the left side of the search results page. Those are what is called the organic results.

Now run your eyes over to the right side of the page. Chances are, there is another list of websites that look a lot like text advertisements. That’s because they are advertisements! Yahoo! calls them sponsored sites. Google refers to them as sponsored links. In the industry, these ads are referred to as paid results.

So there are two ways you can get your website listed on the first two or three pages of a search result: organic and paid.

Of course, getting your website listed high in organic results is ideal. It’s essentially free advertising. And according to various studies, potential customers are four to six times more likely to click on a link in the organic results than they are an advertisement in the sponsored links section.

As you’ll discover throughout this chapter, by using search engine optimization (SEO) tactics there is a lot you can do to influence how high your site gets listed by Google, Yahoo!, and the other search engines. However, despite your best efforts, you won’t get on the first page for every common keyword or phrase your potential customers might type in. So a great strategy is to do the best you can to get listed on the first couple of pages in the organic search results for specific keywords, and then use search engine advertising to fill the gaps.

Okay. You want your site to rank as high as possible in the search results of all the popular search engines. But if your web-based business is new, how are these search engines going to find out about you and include you in their listings?

A few years ago, a new website would have to be manually submitted to each of the major search engines. These days, however, search engine spiders have pretty much replaced that time-consuming exercise.

A search engine spider is a tiny computer program that search engines use to scour the Internet for new or updated websites. In fact, you can expect a spider to visit your site within a few weeks after it goes live—and probably within a few days!

A search engine spider is a text reader. It crawls through your website text and HTML code to gather information about your site so the search engine can make decisions regarding how to categorize and list you. It’s vitally important that your web copy describes each web page accurately and that other elements of your site are making that easy. You’re not just trying to impress website visitors about how wonderful your website products and services are, you’re trying to influence the spiders as well.

Don’t worry. The spiders are coming! There’s nothing you need to do to invite them to visit your website. Usually, you don’t need to submit any sort of request to Google or the other major search engines. However, if you want to make sure, search for your website URL on Google (for example, forcopywritersonly.com). Is your site listed? If it is, then check the description area for the word cached. Click on that and it will show you when the Google spider—called the GoogleBot—last visited your site and what it saw.

You can repeat this exercise for Yahoo! and Ask. Currently, MSN, AOL, and many other search engines use the search results of other search engines! For example, if your site is listed on Yahoo! it’s also listed on MSN.

If, for some reason, your site doesn’t appear on a particular search engine, then try manually submitting it. You can do that on Google at: www.google.com/addurl. Yahoo!’s manual submission site is: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.htmlfree/request.

You can’t submit your website to Ask, but their spider is very good at finding websites and will probably find yours.

In addition to making sure the spiders have visited, I suggest that you also submit your site to the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org). This is an organization where volunteer editors—human beings, not spiders!—review your site. Many search engines supplement their database with information from DMOZ, so it’s a good idea to submit your site to these folks.

What is the most important thing you need to do in order for your website to be easily found in search engine results? Discover the keywords that your potential customers are using to look for the type of products, services, and information your site offers. Keywords are the key to successful search engine marketing.

Say your website sells used books. Which keywords would your potential customers use to find this type of product? Well, you can expect they would start their web search using words and phrases such as:

Your potential customers might also use keywords that are less obvious. For example:

Now what if the phrase “second hand college books” was nowhere to be found on your website? Chances are, a search engine won’t display your website when someone types in that phrase. You certainly wouldn’t be listed on the first page. Why? Because search engine spiders aren’t human. They can’t make the intuitive judgment that those who are looking for second hand college books might also be looking for used books as well. So people who are actively shopping for those products may not be able to easily find you.

How do you remedy this? You integrate that phrase into your website copy and perhaps even into the title and meta description tags. (You’ll learn how to do this in the next section.)

But before you do that, you need to find out which keywords potential customers are using to find websites like yours.

The biggest mistake that web-based business owners make is guessing which keywords potential clients will use for web searches. Usually the guesses are wrong or incomplete. For example, a friend of mine was launching a website featuring muffin recipes and associated products. He guessed right that “muffin recipes” was a popular phrase. What he didn’t realize is that there were more than 30,000 searches per month on Google for “blueberry muffins”—a phrase not mentioned on his website!

So if guessing isn’t the best strategy for finding the right keywords, what is? Remember that list I created for the used bookstore example in the previous section? To compile that, I used one of the many keyword selection tools available online. I simply typed in a few keywords associated with used books. (Okay, I guessed!) Then the selection tool automatically generated a list of keywords based on what people are actually using to find these types of products.

Here is a list of the most popular keyword selection tools used by web-based business owners.

The Google tool is free. The other tools offer free basic and paid premium pricing levels. In my opinion, unless you’re a serious keyword researcher you can do just fine using the free versions of these keyword selection tools. The Google tool is especially helpful because it not only suggests keywords but also provides you with monthly search volume statistics. That’s how I found out that over 30,000 of my fellow blueberry muffin lovers search for that term on Google each month!

When planning your website, use these tools to create a list of the most popular keywords that your potential customers may use to find you. Then lay a trail of breadcrumbs—or muffin crumbs!—to your website. How? The most effective way is to integrate those keywords into your web copy.

If your website visitors are looking for “blueberry muffin recipes,” doesn’t it make sense to have that phrase on one of your website pages? Not only will it help get your site listed higher in search engine results, but customers who go to your website will know they have come to the right place! So integrating keywords into your web copy is not only a good search engine optimization technique, it’s also a smart customer communication strategy. And that’s the attitude you should take when developing your web copy using keywords.

When writing the copy yourself, or working with an editor or copywriter, make sure that the keywords fit naturally into the text. This isn’t always easy. In fact, it’s a real skill to integrate multiple keywords into website copy without making the text seem convoluted or nonsensical. So spend the time it takes to get it right. Remember, the copy isn’t just for the search engine spiders; it’s also for the customers.

Pay particular attention to headlines. Search engine spiders closely analyze these for clues as to what your website is all about. Make sure the main headline of each page, as well as all the subheads within the body copy, are descriptive—and, if possible, include the popular keywords.

Some SEO experts say that the first 50 to 100 words of body copy on each page are the most important because some search engine spiders only crawl that far into the text. So, as with the headers, ensure that the first paragraph or two on each page includes the appropriate keywords.

Integrating the right keywords strategically into your web copy is the best way to ensure that your potential customers find you on Google, Yahoo!, AOL, and the other search engines. But there are many other things you can do to climb to the top of the charts in search results.

Your ultimate goal, of course, is this: someone types a particular keyword or phrase into a search engine and your site comes up on the first few pages. According to studies, more than 85 percent of web searchers will make their decisions as to which websites to visit based on what they see on the first five pages of search results. So making it into that exclusive club is crucial.

Here are some other proven strategies that will help.

If other people are referring their friends, prospects, and customers to your website, you must be doing something right. At least that’s the attitude of the search engines. That’s why inbound links play an important role in how well your website gets ranked. Search engines, especially Google, take a close look at how many other websites are linking to you.

An inbound link (also called a backward link) is simply a link on another site that directly points to your own. The more of those you have, the more impressed the search engines are with you. In fact, Google actually refers to them as “votes.”

However, not all links to your website carry the same weight. For example, search engines tend to not like reciprocal links, which is the practice of trading links between two sites. They’re considered to be biased. The best links are one way.

Hopefully, a lot of websites will want to provide a link to your site because your products, services, or information are so darn good! But there is a lot you can do to help this process along.

Cultivating inbound links to your website can take a lot of work. But if it helps you get even one page higher in search results—say from page five to page four—the effort is more than worth it.

There are three types of tags that influence search engine rankings and the likelihood that a potential customer will click on your listing to visit your website: title tags, meta description tags, and meta keyword tags.

Let’s start with the title tag because that guy is, by far, the most important.

Visit any website. Then look up, way up, to the top left corner of the web browser screen. You’ll see some words that (ideally) describe the web page you’re looking at. Those words—the title—are generated by the title tag embedded in the HTML code for that page.

Search engines rely on your title tag to learn what your website is all about. And so do your potential customers. Not only does the title tag display the title of your page to your website visitors, but search engines also use it to name the link to your site in search engine results.

Do a Google search for one of my websites: ForCopywritersOnly.com. The title that Google provides for the prominent underlined blue link is:

Why did Google create the link in that way? Because that’s what I put in the title tag to the front page of my website. Copywriters, my potential customers, looking to attract more clients and better-paying projects are going to see that link and know they’ve found a website that contains the information they need. Can you imagine what would happen instead if my title tag were simply my company name, Slaunwhite Communications?

So what you put in your title tag is important. In her special report, Turning Clicks Into Leads with Search Engine Optimization, my friend and SEO expert Dianna Huff provides these tips for title tags.

Compared to a title tag, a meta description tag is considerably less important. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. Many search engines use this tag to help describe your site in their search engines results. A meta description tag is simply a short description of your website that exists only within the HTML code. Your website visitors don’t see it. I suggest it be no more than 10 words. Here’s a typical example:

Of the three tags, the meta keyword tag is the least important. None of the major search engines give it any weight in determining search engine rankings. Still, just to be on the safe side, place five to seven of your most popular keywords in this tag. Hey, you never know!

No matter how diligently you optimize your website, you won’t get on the first few pages of search engine results with every keyword on your list. However, you still can get a link to your website displayed on the first page—by paying your way in.

None of the search engines accept bribes in return for a good organic ranking. However, most offer advertising options where your ad can be displayed next to first page search results. As I said earlier in this chapter, you can see these ads as sponsored links along the right side of the page and sometimes at the top shaded in a distinct color background.

Signing up for these programs is a relatively straightforward process. Here’s where you can get started:

How much do these ads cost? Well, that’s where things get a little complicated! Unlike print ads where you can expect to pay a flat fee, search engine ads are priced on a cost-per-click basis. That simply means that you pay a fixed fee, say $0.35, every time your advertisement appears in the search results and someone clicks it. That’s simple enough to understand. Where it gets complicated is that the amount you decide to “bid” for a keyword influences where your advertisement will be placed on the page or even if it will be displayed at all.

For example, say you want to place a search engine ad so that when someone searches for “running shoes” on Google, your ad appears. Google will ask you how much you’re willing to pay for each click you get. If you bid too low, your ad might not appear. If you bid too high, your ad might get displayed regularly and high up on the search pages; however, the increased expense might make the campaign unprofitable for you.

Let’s take a look at how Google AdWords works, since it is the granddaddy of all the search engine advertising programs and by far the most popular.

Once you open your account, you typically go through the following steps to create an advertisement:

Of course, these are just the basics. Google AdWords and other search engine advertising programs offer a dizzying range of additional options. You can, for example, focus your campaign on a specific geographic area, such as a town or city. (Especially useful if your site sells flowers in Philadelphia!) You can also bid to have your ad placed in a specific position among the other sponsored ads—perhaps the number-one spot. Google is even experimenting with a cost-per-conversion pricing model where you pay only when someone clicks on your ad and takes some action on your website, such as signing up for your e-mail newsletter or making a purchase.

Is your head spinning yet?

If you’re new to Google AdWords, I suggest you keep it simple. Start with just one advertisement for a few of your most desired keywords. Monitor the results. Learn how things work. Then build from there.

The biggest challenge in creating an effective search engine ad is size. You don’t have much room. A Google AdWords ad will allow you 3 lines: a 25-character headline, 2 lines of copy that are a maximum of 35 characters each, and the URL of a web page. That’s it! Not much room to tantalize a potential customer and motivate him or her to visit your website. You have to make each word count.

On my website for freelance copywriters, I’m trying to attract people who are relatively new to copywriting and want to learn more about this writing niche. So whenever anyone uses Google to find information on being a successful copywriter, I want my add to appear:

As I said, a search engine ad has three parts: the headline, the body copy, and the URL. Let’s take a look at how to write each of these effectively.

The headline is the most important element. It has to gain a web searcher’s attention and motivate him to read the ad and click on it. And you have to accomplish all that using just three or four words! Google and other search engines help by making the headline a hyperlink. That means it’s blue, underlined, and clickable.

Remember why a person is doing a web search to begin with. He is looking for something—an answer to a question, a solution to a problem, a fulfillment of an aspiration. So your headline should be like a hand waving in the air saying, “Hey, what you’re looking for is right here!” In my case, I wanted to attract those who are looking for ways to make a good living as a copywriter. So my headline, “Make Money Copywriting,” was my waving hand.

The next part of your search engine ad is the body copy. You only have two lines but still are working with very few words—typically less than 10. If a web searcher is reading the body copy, you’ve already got his attention. Your job now is to persuade him to click. How do you do that? I have found that the more effective way is to either make a compelling offer or a promise of some kind. In the example, my offer is for a free success kit of information.

The final part of the search engine ad is the link. Google doesn’t make this clickable like it does the headline, so you need to spell out this link completely. Why? First of all, if a web searcher doesn’t click your ad you at least want him to remember your website. Secondly, a small percentage of people will actually type in the URL rather than click on your ad! I don’t know why, but it happens.

The Least You Need to Know