e_Marketing

If you've been involved in website marketing or online promotion for more than two weeks you surely must have heard or read that "content is king."

It is easy to gloss over the significance of this... to just say, "Good good, I know and I believe" and then do nothing about it. Because we get caught up in the mad scramble to promote our websites by getting "traffic" or "links", and we forget that nobody will visit our site - or if they do, they won't stay long - if we don't have something helpful or useful for them to see, read, watch or hear.

This is the other side of the Search Engine Marketing problem that is too often misunderstood or its significance too often underestimated.

Generally speaking website promotion will be successful and web traffic will come your way because people are interested in what you have to offer. The search engines analyze your content, draw conclusions about it, and then reward you for what they take to be the value of what you are offering.

Many of us in the web promotion business see Page Rank as a direct reflection of this reward. But Page Rank is only an indirect indication of your site's "value" as determined by Google.

It is much more important to score high in the search engine results for your primary key terms. This will turn directly and almost immediately into traffic, will begin to attract links, and will in turn influence your Page Rank.

This is what we call a Content Oriented Approach to Search Engine Marketing. Here is a basic outline of how it works:

1. Do a detailed analysis of your primary keywords, and settle on specific keyword groups. Each keyword group should be targeted to just one fairly narrow niche.

2. Create "web properties" that you want to drive traffic to. This is normally your primary website, but should also include other supporting sites such as a tightly focused blog, and/or a Squidoo lense. In other words, each keyword group might have three or four focused web properties all of which are aimed at pulling traffic on that keyword group.

3. Build content for each of your web properties. This is critical. Make your website's home page tightly focused on your primary keyword. Employ standard SEO strategy. If your primary keyword is, for instance, "carpet cleaning Chicago", then use that keyword within the title, headline and in several places throughout the article. Add variations and related keywords drawn from your initial keyword analysis.

4. Consider putting a detailed article on your home page that focuses directly on your primary keyword. You can safely assume that if the search engines see a long detailed article about "carpet cleaning Chicago" on your page with lots of related terms such as "carpet cleaning techniques", "carpet cleaning FAQ", "tips for carpet cleaning", etc., they will assume this is useful information that potential readers will be interested in. Do not use garbage content. Do not spam. Just use quality text drawn from your expertise. If you need someone to help you write it, then hire someone to do it. You will not regret it.

5. Do the same with your secondary web properties - blog, Squidoo page, etc. Add content that focuses on your primary keywords and optimize accordingly.

6. Continue to add content to your blog and Squidoo page until you have a number of articles which are tightly focused on your primary keywords or closely related keywords that are part of this keyword group.

7. Do not use these secondary web properties just to create links to your primary website. View them as "traffic bait" - places to draw traffic that can then be redirected to other target URLs if need be.

8. Once your targeted web properties are in place start an intelligent link building program aimed at building traffic, and search engine exposure for each of them....

More on this link building aspect in the next post.