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Expert Author Alerts
Sep
15
Internet Marketing for your business
Filed Under Online Business
Welcome back!
Many entrepreneurs are unaware that simply publishing their new product or service details to a website does not form a strong enough online business strategy. Attention has to be paid to an effective internet marketing (IM) plan – without it you’ll go virtually unnoticed.
Here I’ll give you some top tips on increasing your chances of getting noticed through the e-clamor by the right people online – art directors, ad agencies, art buyers – the ultimate goal in building a successful online presence for your photography business.
First in this series is a quick ‘how to’ on Search Engine Marketing – subscribe to the CodeGuys feed so you don’t miss the upcoming Social Media Marketing and Blog Marketing articles.
SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (SEM)
SEM is the promotion of your website by increasing is visibility (pagerank) on popular search engines. This is achieved through the use of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategies. These SEO strategies include:
- Use of meta tag ‘keyword’ – choose good keywords to describe your site and more specifically your specialities. The keyword ’software’ is far too broad = 1,730,000,000 references on Google! Try thinking about your strengths, be more niche e.g ‘realtime software’ = a mere 41,000 references, ‘coding realtime software’ = 1. Try the free tools at SEOBook or KeyWordDiscovery for more keyword help.
- Avoid ’splash pages’ or ‘click to enter’ as the top level page on your site, also avoid website designs based round HTML frames. [tag]Splash pages[/tag] are a main entry page with either a large graphic image and a link instructing visitors to “enter” a Web site; or a [tag]Flash[/tag] animation with a link to skip the animation, and a redirect to a new Web page after the animation is completed. You really want your top level page to act as a table of contents for the rest of the site. Splash pages lack keyword rich text and anchor text apart from maybe ’skip intro’. Most search engines ignore redirects, splash pages are generally based on redirects.
- Do not publish a website that says it is ‘under construction’, you might find it gets indexed in this state and it will not get re-indexed when the real content appears
- Copy is vital on the front page of your website. Write and design your site using the words your target audience types into search queries – keep your product portfolio and any gallery sections away from the top level pages, as good as search engines are they can not tell what type of business you are from your images.
- Avoid Flash for the same reasons mentioned above, although you may have typed loads about yourself in your 100% flash based site, the search engines won’t be able to see a single word of it. It’s a movie, search engines can’t retrieve words from movies either.
- Keep a check on your linked referrers – a link from another page to your own website should contain keywords in with the [tag]anchor text[/tag] of the link. Google weights its Search Engine Results pages towards the anchor text of links to a page.
- Submit your URL to the search engines – you can either do this manually, use a free submitter service such as Submit Express or use a paid service like the one provided by NamesCo (clicking this link supports photosavings)
Where do I go for more information? The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) is a non profit industry organization for search engine marketing. SEMPO’s mission is primarily one of education – to demystify the various aspects of search marketing, to drive awareness of its incredible efficiency and marketing potential, and to help members and nonmembers to grow as professionals.
Finally give the SEO Page Tester Tool below a try, enter your URL and the keyword to test and see how your website performs.
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Guest Blogger
SEO and Internet Marketing for Entrepreneurs by Ian McGraw at Ian McGraw Photography © 2008
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