When you were five or ten years old you may have played the game of hide and seek where the object was to avoid being found. The longer you could stay hidden and the harder it was to be discovered the better.

As a business owner or someone responsible for marketing a business you want to do the opposite. Instead of remaining hidden from view, you want to make it as easy as possible for members of your target market to find you again and again.

You may have a PhD, worked for big name clients, provide outstanding service or have a new ground breaking product but if people can’t find you it is tough to build revenue. What you want is to be found so prospects contact you and you can convert them to client status.

What happens when someone is looking for a new product or service? More and more customers and consumers use the internet to search for the goods and services they need, to the point that ‘google’ has become a verb. They may also use the search engines provided by Yahoo, AOL and MSN.

A prospect types in a set of keywords, your name or your company name into a search engine, with Google being used by far the most frequently. Can they find your website? Go to www.Google.com and try the following three tests:

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1. If a prospect hasn’t heard of your company they won’t be searching for your firm by name. Instead they will be searching using keywords that describe the problem they want solved or the type of information they are looking for. If they are looking for ways to motivate employees, that’s what they will type in the search box. If they are looking for adventure vacation ideas for Costa Rica, they’ll enter that in the search box.

My prospects might enter, ‘attract more clients’, ‘marketing coach’, ‘web marketing plan’, ‘web lead generation’ or ‘marketing services’ in Google. When they do, they’ll find my site at the top or at least in the first 10-15 listings.

Type the problem you solve or the solutions you offer into Google‘s search box. Is your site listed at or near the top of the listings? Is it even in the top 100?

2. Type your own name in the search box. Does your web site come up at the top of the page or in the first 20 listings?

3. Type your name and/or your company name in the search box, for example, “Charlie Cook” or “Marketing For Success”. Did Google find your site in or near the top spot?

If you aren’t happy with the results of these tests, your search engine marketing needs work.

How to Avoid Playing Hide and Seek With Your Business
A Smart Domain Name
Choose a domain name that is simple and obvious or simple and memorable. If your company is called Bollard and Jones Realty (or whatever) try to obtain bollardandjones.com as your domain name. That way, a prospect who knows your company name can type it into their browser and easily find your site.

The simple and memorable strategy is to use your domain name to describe what you do. Once prospects have found your site through a search engine, typing in the domain name will reinforce the ways you can help them. For example www.marketingforsuccess.com or www.printondemand.com.

Keywords That Work
While they are many ways to improve your use of keywords on your web pages, you can boost your ranking in the search engines simply by using your keywords in your page title tag, your metatags and 4 to 6 times in the text on your page. Make sure to use them in normal, well-written sentences.

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Flash and Splash Pages
When you submit your site to the search engines, they are
looking for text. Pages full of pictures or with just your company logo (splash pages) or mini-movies (flash animations) may look pretty but they won’t help the search engines judge what your site is about. In addition, research shows that 90% of visitors find these entrance Flash and Splash pages annoying. Rather than move further into your site, most visitors will leave. Avoid home pages full of pictures, movies or with minimal text. They may look nice, but they won’t help people find you.

Build Links
One of the best ways to boost your site’s rankings and thus get more visitors is to get other sites to add links from their site to yours. An extremely effective way to do this to write articles and distribute them to sites visited by your target market. Most site managers and ‘webmasters’ are hungry for relevant content. Provide these sites content they want and they’ll be happy to use it and link back to your site, as they do to my marketing services site.

Stay in Touch
Offer an incentive to get site visitors to give you their contact information, and join your e-mail list. You can also follow up with a call or a mailing. Once a prospect has been to your web site, you want to regularly remind them of the problems you solve and the services you provide. Don’t let your prospects forget you when they are ready to make a purchase.

Avoid playing hide and seek with your target market. Help more people find you and you’ll grow your business. Tune up your search engine marketing strategy and your web site and you’ll have more site visitors, more prospects and more business.

You’ve got a web site; and you want to attract lots of people to visit it so you can grow your business. But you’re only getting a handful of visitors currently. What is the first thing to do help people find your site?

A top listing in the search engines, especially in Google, can increase visitors to your web site and help. Let’s say you sell web design services. If your site was at the top of the list when people searched for “web design” in Google, it could increase the number of people who know you exist and know what you do, by a factor of ten or more.

You may already know that a top listing in Google will help your business, but at present you are having a tough time even finding your site in the Google search engine listings. Your search engine marketing is just not working.

What can you do to help Google find your listing and put it as close as possible to the top of the list?

Submitting Your Site
Google uses a “spider” to look for links from one site to another and to add information about additional sites and web pages to its database. Google’s “spider” is very active and may already have found your site. If any other site has a link to your site and is listed by Google, Google may have found your site on its own. To find out if your web site is listed, just type in www.yoururl.com into the query box at www.google.com and press search.

If your site isn’t listed, you can prompt Google to spider to at http://www.google.com/addurl/ Submit your primary url and Google will find the rest of your site.

Getting your site listed by Google and the other search engines is the first step. Next you need to make it easy for the search engines to code your site pages correctly and move them towards the top pf their listings. Here’s how to improve your search engine marketing:

Picking the Right Keywords
If you want your prospects to find your site use the words and phrases most commonly associated with your product or service in your web pages. These are called keywords. In selecting your keywords, think about the problem your prospects want to solve. If you sell ergonomic chairs, which will work best, “comfy chairs” or “eliminate back pain” or
“ergonomic chairs”?

Pick keywords that people use the most frequently. Test different keywords and keyword combinations and compare the number of searches that result from each using https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Using Your Keywords
To help the search engines know what a web page is about, use your top keywords 6 to 8 times on a page. If you sell a number of different products and services, build individual pages for each set of keywords.

Make sure you don’t just repeat your keywords more than 6-8 times. In this case more repetition is not better. Search engines reject pages with too many keyword repetitions. Use natural sounding copy and integrate your keywords so the copy reads well for both visitors and the search engines.

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Linking Your Own Keywords
Once you have your individual product or service pages optimized for your keywords, link other pages on your site to them using your keywords again. If you have articles on your site on back pain, link your keywords to the corresponding optimized page from 4 to 5 other pages.

Building Incoming Links to Your Site
The above steps lay the groundwork for getting noticed by the search engines. The next step in getting your site listed at the top of the search engines, and particularly Google, is the number of links found from other sites to your site.

Your site’s “link popularity” is one of the most important factors the search engines look at in ranking your site. When the search engines see that hundreds of other web sites have links to yours, they rank your site higher than those with fewer links.

How many links do you have to your site? Use http://www.linkpopularity.com to see. You can also use this site to find the number of links to your competitor’s sites, and identify who has links to them.

Getting other people to link to your site is easy. Ask for a link, ideally one using your keywords, and offer a link in return. Create a links.html page and when businesses link to your site, provide a link back.

Link Example:
Get Charlie Cook’s FREE Marketing Plan Guide to learn how to attract more clients and grow your business. Highly recommended. It will help you develop a better marketing plan. Lots of great marketing manuals too. http://www.marketingforsuccess.com

Get noticed by the search engines to improve your web site marketing and many more people will visit your web site so you can market your products and services to them.

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FEATURED MARKETING TOOL
Want to learn everything there is to putting your site at the top of the search engines? Here’s the subscription service I use to stay current with the search engines. Well worth the money.

I had a great arrangement with an SEO firm, until recently, when they started charging me for their services.

Five years ago I developed a relationship with a search engine optimization firm. I helped them improve their internet marketing and they in turn gave me advice on how to boost the rankings of my site on the search engines.

When I first started working with this SEO firm, they had top positioning in the search engines, as you’d expect, and were getting a ton of traffic to their site. But they weren’t getting enough qualified leads. Their biggest complaint was that they were working way too hard with the clients they had and not making enough money.

We talked monthly over the course of a year.  They gave me search engine tips and I shared internet marketing ideas. I showed them how to change the layout and marketing copy of their homepage and explained how to qualify leads.

I recommended that they fire the small-time, annoying clients that were taking up most of their time and focus on the clients they enjoyed working with and who had the funds to pay for a wider range of services. And I talked to them about their pricing model, showing them how they could increase their fees substantially.

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During the year we worked together, I knew they were paying attention but I didn’t track how many of my ideas they implemented. We hadn’t been in contact for 12-18 months, so when I called them about an SEO task I needed done, I was shocked to find out how much they wanted to charge me.

What had gone wrong, or right, as the case may be?

Since, we had spoken last, the SEO firm had been gradually implementing most of the ideas I’d given them. They transformed their site into a lead generator that was providing them with top quality leads. They’d stopped taking low paying, high maintenance clients. And they’d increased their prices.

Bottom line: Using the web site marketing ideas I’d shared, the SEO firm had increased the number of qualified leads they’d generated online by over 300% and per client revenue by 400%. With fewer clients they were making more!

Want to make more with less effort? You can when you use the ideas detailed in Creating Web Sites That Sell. You’ll discover how to attract more people to your site and then how to convert site visitors into loyal clients so you can grow your business.

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Given the dramatic success of the SEO firm, our initial barter arrangement was history. Since they had more clients than they could handle, I had to wait in line and pay the same high fees as everybody else. While I expect my clients to succeed with my website marketing ideas, I hadn’t expected this turnabout.

I did end up paying the SEO firm to work for me and they’re worth every penny. They’re great people to deal with and do top quality work. Contact me if you need top quality SEO services and I’ll be happy to give you their name.

“How can I put my site at the top of the search engines?”

If you have a web site or are thinking of building one, this is a question you should be asking yourself every day. If your prospects can’t find your site in the search engine listings your sales will suffer. With the exception of those you attract with your advertising, hardly anyone will find your site, very few people will contact you and only a handful will buy from you.

With a top listing on Google, (twice as popular as Yahoo, the second most popular search engine) you could get one to two thousand visitors a day to your web site, depending on the popularity of the keywords associated with your products or services.

I get requests daily from business owners who want to know how to ensure their search engine marketing improves their search engine listings. They want to know how difficult it is to get a top listing and whether or not they should hire a search engine optimization (SEO) firm.

Some of them, like you, have heard about the importance of keyword use, keyword placement, meta tags, internal and external links and other variables. (Some SEO experts think that Google tracks up to 100 variables in order to rank your site.)

Putting your site at the top of the search engines sounds complex, and it is. I became an SEO expert over ten years ago when I launched my first Internet business, and I can assure you that keeping up with the search engines is enormously time consuming.

You’ve got a business to run. You don’t have the time to become a search engine marketing or an SEO expert. You just want to help your prospects find your site. What’s the answer? Do you need to hire an SEO firm and add another expense to the ongoing cost of your website, or is there an alternative? Which strategies really will work to put your site at the top?

Discover the truth about what matters. Learn how to create a top ranking site and sell more online  >>

Yes, some of these SEO programming experts are reputable, but I’m going to tell you a secret. For the most part you don’t need them, and you don’t need to learn a whole arcane body of knowledge about search engine optimization to have a successful website.

To get your web site to the top of Google listings, understand one thing; Google’s ranking system is designed to reward the sites that people want to visit.

Google gives top ranking to sites that have a lot of useful, relevant content; that add new content regularly and are likely the best resources on the topic. Google gives more weight to the variables that determine whether the site is a valid and accepted resource in its area of business or knowledge. Google looks at the:

• Amount of content.
• Frequency of changes,
• Amount of traffic,
• Amount of time users spend on your site,
• Historical ranking of your site pages,
• Keywords,
• Internal navigation links,
• The popularity of your site based on the number of link from other popular sites with relevant content.

How do you put your business site at the top of Google’s search listings? Create a site that your prospects and clients will love!

Don’t waste time on billboard sites that are all about you and your company. Build a site that is so helpful and interesting that your prospects click to it often and stay for a while. The key is to give visitors more and better quality content than your competitors are doing.

Skeptical? Look at the most popular sites on the Internet. 22 of the top 25 that get the most traffic are resource-based sites. The other 3 are ebay.com, amazon.com and apple.com.

Want to get more people to your site? Unless you plan to compete with ebay, or Amazon or Apple, your best strategy is to become the definitive resource in your business.

For example, one of my clients, Peter Keelty, has built a business niche in ski reviews, ski instruction and ski technique. Search under any one of these keyword phrases and you’ll find his site at or near the top of the Google listings. How did he do it?

If you visit his site, http://www.techsupportforskiers.com/, you’ll find more helpful content about skis than you ever imagined existed. Skiers search out this site and spend time there. Related businesses want to have links on their sites to this one.

How can you achieve the same success with your web site marketing and search engine positioning?

First, stop worrying about your search engine positioning and build a site that is the best resource on the planet in your area of business. You can go back later and optimize it for the search engines. Write and then write some more. Include articles, your daily blog, reviews, case studies, testimonials, tips and news on your site. You’ll create a site that will help you sell more online than you thought possible.

Tired of wasting time and money on your web site marketing without getting the results you want? Find out exactly how to create a site that your prospects and the search engines will love.

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