You hear all the time that you need to get listed in all of the major search engines. You also hear that you need to be on the first or second page to really see any traffic from them.
The unfortunate truth is that for many this means using their favorite free submit tool to blast their URL out to the 10,000 search engines.
Click Go and walk away. Come back tomorrow and you have tons of targeted traffic dying to buy whatever you have to sell.
Another problem is that many of us just flat don’t know how to achieve high rankings. Worse yet is many of us don’t even know where to go and what to do when we get there.
You need to learn everything you can about search engines, and then come up with a strategy for promoting through them.
There are many misconceptions about promotion through the search engines. I’m sure you have heard most of them so I won’t bore you with them all.
A common one that you may have heard:
There are only 10 Top 10 positions, and with the millions of other sites competing for those same 10 spots you are wasting your time.
Well, obviously there are only ten of these for any given keyword….but there are virtually an unlimited number of keywords and keyword combinations!
More and more surfers are searching for 2, 3, and 4 word phrases. With the millions of bogus results for one word keywords, they are learning to narrow down their search for better results.
If you focus less on the most popular searches, but rather on less popular words and combinations of popular words in phrases, you will have much less competition for top positions. There will be less searches for those keywords, but it is much better to be number 10 for a less popular search term than 1000 for a hot term.
The key is the less competition for a search term or phrase, the better your chances for a top listing.
As an example here is some research I did for my new site FindSticky.com. I wanted to catch people searching for content for their website.
A quick search on Altavista.com produces the following:
content 11,900,370 pages found.
“free content” 345,287 pages found.
“free site content” 115 pages found.
Do you see how the competition drops as I get more focused with the searches?
Some of the engines are already bringing me a very nice stream of traffic for these phrases.
Another thing that you are seeing more often, especially with the popularity of Ask Jeeves and others, is full sentence searching, such as:
“Where can I find free content for my website?”
Planning your strategy around phrases and even full sentences can help tremendously.
You also need to make sure that each page on your site is setup to stand on its own. Meaning each page needs to be designed to focus on its own set of keywords.
Don’t get lazy and copy your header portion of your page to all the other pages. Create each one as if it was the home page for a completely separate site.
An example here is on my AffiliateMatch site. The focus of the site is affiliate programs.
I created this page: http://www.affiliatematch.com/website/ to provide very basic information on how to create a website.
I get a ton of traffic to that page from beginning webmasters trying to figure out where to get started on the Net.
Look at the title for that page:
“Where can I get my own website?”
Bet you can’t guess what a large number of the searches that hit that page are for.
If I would have just copied my affiliate programs keywords to that page (yes I’ve done this before) I wouldn’t have done so well on searches for website information.
Don’t forget to follow through with this strategy either. Make sure you create your pages to stand-alone, and then submit each of these pages one at a time to the major search engines.
Do this for your newsletter archives, articles, sales letters, and any time you add a new content page.
The bottom line is to actually take the time to truly learn how to create a search engine strategy, and then follow through with it!
Chuck McCullough is the author of a new ebook titled: “Affiliate Mistakes: Maximizing Your Profits From Affiliate Programs!” Get your free Email Course at: http://www.affiliatemistakes.com
