How's your search engine optimization going? Good? That's super! If you've been cleaning up the pages of your website to make them more attractive to the search engines of the world, you have taken a really important first step to getting noticed on the web. Give yourself a cookie!
But while you're chomping away on your Chips Ahoy, take a minute to read about a couple of other things you might want to be doing as well. (And if you're doing them already, feel free to reward yourself with more nummies!)
Pay Your Way to the Top...Or at Least, to the Side
If only you could bribe Google the way you sometimes can bribe the maitre d' of a restaurant! It would be great to slip Google a $20 spot and get a place at the top of the page in return. Since that's not possible, Pay Per Click (PPC) ads are the next best thing. You write ads, identify the relevant keywords, and wait patiently for people to type the keywords into Google. When someone does, your ad will pop up on the side of his screen - and you pay nothing unless he clicks on it.
Setting up a PPC campaign is a great supplement to SEO because it can address issues that SEO can't. You can set up temporary PPC ads for special sales or promotions. You can also identify many more keywords through PPC than you ever could with SEO. PPC + SEO = Lots of visitors to your site.
Analyze Those Analytics
Google Analytics are, in a word, amazing. When you have analytics installed on your site, Google will track a ridiculous amount of information for you. Want to know how many people visited your site? How they got there? How long they stayed? What town they're from? It's a little scary, but you can find out all that information, and more.
And once you have that information, you can use it to improve your site and make it more enticing for the 289 people from New York, 28 people from Connecticut, 12 people from Maine, and 2 people from Japan who you now know have visited your site!
Help Them Land
In addition to using SEO strategies for your whole site, you might want to set up landing pages for special purposes and make sure those are search engine friendly. For instance, if you were a cookie baker who wanted to advertise his holiday cookie line, you could set up a special page for that and make sure everyone Googling "holiday cookies new york" finds your site. This will help pull visitors through a "back door" of your site, and directly to the page that's most relevant for them.
If you're on target with all of those, you deserve a real treat.
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