Saturday 17 May 2008
Are You Targeting People Or Computers?
There are many so-called experts in the marketing industry that have many opinions about the best way to drive traffic to a website. Face it, without traffic there is no business and no reason to keep your online business open. Determining the best vehicle to bring people to your site is still open for debate but for most people it boils down to two primary methods…search engine optimization or organic marketing.
.There are more people using search engines now than ever before and usually they have no idea what they are looking for or how to go about finding it. They enter a few words or a phrase into a search engine and then choose from the results, looking until they either find what they want or get frustrated with the results and type in a different search term. For a website to be successful, it has to be found online by users entering a search term that relates to their business website. For search engines, it is all about how relevant your website is to the search criteria.
With search engine optimization, special coding as well as web design plays an important part of making your website attractive to the search engine spiders. These creepy-crawly things are sent out by the search engines to crawl all over the web looking at websites and creating an index of the pages based on content. They also look at many other aspects of conducting a search to determine how popular a website is among users by looking at such things as how many visits the website gets, how many other websites link to this site as well as the type of content that is available on the site.
While many website owners swear by search engine optimization, there are many others that swear at it as they cannot seem to crack the top 50 in search results. Some try to cheat by plugging code into their website that has no bearing on the content of their website, resulting in a person looking for information about cars for instance, could find a result pointing to an adult-oriented website. Search engine managers change the criteria periodically, as well as send their spiders back into the fray frequently to maintain an updated index of available websites.
Organic marketing is a polite way of saying it is geared towards the human element. The people that actually sit down, type in a search term and then look through the results. Many businesses opt for this type of marketing as they claim people buy products and services, not computers and no one cares if the spiders are happy or not. They follow the search engine company's advice to make sure the content on their website is relevant to search terms in order to be lifted to the top of the results pages.
Search engines look for quality content in text form and usually ignore pretty graphics and fancy language that only pertains to how the message is delivered online, as opposed to the actual message.
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