Getting Listed With Search Engines

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Publicity is everywhere, even on the net

Just about every traditional (brick and mortar) company has a web site. Beyond the fact that you need to have a web site today to be recognized as a real company doing business, clients and customers want the ability to gather information or place orders via the web.

With that said, we need to now see how publicity coupled with marketing can make good things happen.

Web sites are only as good as the marketing that supports it. Just because you have a site doesn’t mean it will be picked up and listed at the top with the major search engines. It requires strategic planning and implementation to make things happen.

To begin, you need to have the site optimized. That’s an overused word, but it still needs to be said. This alone is not enough. The SEO’s are battling again for power and that means more challenging times for web masters and programmers. You now need to include a plan that includes “back end marketing”. This can be a series of things like a blog site, eNewsletters, and above all a strong publicity plan.

Yes, publicity is a major element in getting listed higher. There are two methods used to see a sites value. Page Ranking and Site Listing. Page Ranking shows how you are rated (ranked) on search engines, like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Alta Vista to name a few. It is based on a scale of 10. Sites with anything in the 5+ ranking is excellent. Even with a 3 you are doing fine. Remember, that there are over a billion pages, and several hundred million sites. Even in any vertical market, there are at least several hundred thousand sites.

Listings are where you are positioned on that search engine. Everyone wants to be on the first page of a listing, and not further than the third page. But again, with hundreds of thousands of sites, not everyone can be on top.

Once you get there, you need to be more aggressive with press releases, keywords added and updated, keep daily blogs going just to maintain a solid position (listing) with the engines. No guarantees can exist. The only way to stay near or at the top is to have an on-going plan.

A couple of our clients are getting their time in the spotlight. Partition Specialties now has a solid listing using several keywords such as modernfold, tate access floors and skyfold. They are listed with the various SE’s in either a #5 or #12 position with Google and Yahoo, MSN, etc. That’s out of 1,500,000 other web sites in a specialized industry. We are using several marketing tools with the publicity to maintain this.

Foundations Financial in only 6 weeks got a high PageRanking with Google of #3. We are using the blog site and a lot of publicity releases, TV interviews and links on the site to gain this positive momentum. Keeping this will be an on-going battle that we plan to win. Within a few more weeks, they will enjoy the high listings as many of our other clients do.

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