October 2003 Monthly Newsletter :: Anduro Marketing
Value of Maintaining Keyword Pages
Most things in life need to be maintained, whether it is your car, your relationships or your career. Similarly, once you start a Search Engine Marketing program it is critical to keep the program tuned and working at peak performance.
The paragraphs below outline a few reasons why your company needs to continually maintain your search engine marketing program and the keyword pages that are drawing visitors and prospective customers to your web site.
Improving Your Internet Presence
The Internet Presence of your web site is a sum of the number of in-bound links and the strength of each link. Another term for Internet Presence is "link popularity". As you may be aware, link popularity is a critical component for some search engines like Google in determining the rank of specific pages. Although we all know that link popularity is vital for high keyword positioning, many companies have hardly begun to make improvements. This is because the task of requesting web masters to add links back to your web site is tedious and never-ending. One solution is to implement an ongoing maintenance program to ensure that submissions and reciprocal links are implemented and managed.
A properly executed plan includes:
- Submission to industry related online directories
- Adding reciprocal links with complementary web sites
- Requesting links from suppliers and customers
- Paying for links from major business directories like Yahoo
- Adding a reporting program to track results
Changes in the Products and Services Your Company is Offering
Your company or organization is likely not standing still. As you change your products and services, you will need changes to related pages on your web site. But have you changed the keywords, re-optimized the pages, and re-submitted the pages to the key search engines? Changes to the web site will occur regularly, sometimes weekly. Most search engine 'crawlers' do not come back each time you make a change. You may need to 'summon' the spiders to re-index the contents of your web site.
As a result, an on-going maintenance program will retain strong keyword positioning and visitor traffic as you make changes to any of the following areas:
- Products and services
- Offers and promotions
- Target markets
- Business strategy or company mission
- White papers and product information
Refinement in What Customers are Using as Search Terms
Everyday, as customers and users get more refined in their searching capability, the lexicon in searching changes. This occurs as end users improve the quality of their search and aim for results with less clutter and more relevant information. Consequently, it is in your company's best interest to undertake a regular review of the keywords and other phrases that your target audience maybe using. This should be done in conjunction with a review of competitive web sites, to piece together a comprehensive view of your marketplace.
Ideally, a comprehensive review includes:
- Keywords that visitors are currently using to find your web site
- New keywords that potential visitors are using but because of low rankings, have not found your web site
- A list of search engines that are bringing visitors
- And a list of search engines that could be bringing more visitors
Changes in the Algorithms Used by the Major Search Engines
Contrary to what you might think, the search engines do not use the same algorithms year-in and year-out. In fact, all the major search engines endeavor to modify their searching and indexing ability to be more relevant and useful. In addition, different users use different search engines, and each search engine tries to differentiate themselves by doing something better than the others. It has been found that different search engines are used by different user bases, in different industries, geographies, interest areas and even by Internet Service Providers.
So, just as customers and users get more refined in their searching, search engines and business directories modify their indexing and cataloging algorithms, to make the search experience more useful to their audience and ultimately, more profitable for themselves. Paid submissions and rankings, for example, have become very popular and they have altered the search criteria for many search engines.
An experienced Internet Marketing company will be able to advise you as to how you need to modify your search engine marketing programs and adjust for changes in:
- Search engine technology
- Web page construction and optimization
- Pay-per-click programs
- Industry related business directories
For more information on any of the products available from Anduro Marketing, contact us at info@anduro.com or (403) 410-3803.
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