Promote My Site

Here’s a picture for you - customers can find your site using the names of the things you sell or talk about. Wait a minute, isn’t Google supposed to do that for you? TANSTAAFL. (There is Absolutely No Such Thing As A Free Lunch - Robert Heinlein) You have to promote your site to make it easy for your customers to find you. Obvious, yes, but have you really THOUGHT about it?

[This is the first article in a series - I’ll keep updating this to have the right links.]

Before we can even think about what to think about, we need to have some common terminology, so bear with me. If you know all this stuff, skip to the last paragraph. Married men may mutter: yes dear.

Let me introduce an important term:

SERP: Search Engine Results Page

All this means is what a user sees when they type in “Promote My Site” in at the Google prompt. Or the Yahoo prompt. (Yahoo still has 30% market share in search - are you sure you should ignore them?)

There are a number of things going on in the results: advertisements, etc, etc. But I’m going to concentrate on the “real” search results, or what are called “organic.” These are the results that google/yahoo return when they crank through about a zillion factors. And these are the results that people click on around 80% of the time.

I am not going to talk about the nitty gritty of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM). There are a lot of smart people out there who have lots of content. This series is about thinking about organic results.

Ok, so we get SERP and organic results. Let’s also assume that we understand that it’s better to be farther up towards the top of the SERP’s for important customer phrases.

“Important Customer Phrases” - roll that around for a while. What does that mean?

For example: if you type “promote my site” you will not find us for 27 pages or something crazy like that. But if you type “promote my site social networks” we are the number one result. That is not an accident. Sure, the first phrase is the most general, and people focus on that, but the second phrase is a more important customer phrase.

What makes “promote my site social network” more important than “promote my site”? Good question, glad you asked: which is going to deliver a reader more likely to buy our product? Exactly.

So there is the first point to think on: you need to promote your site above the noise by identifying the most actually valuable place to rank high in the Organic SERPs.

Let’s say you had a Yahoo Store that sold tires. Good luck ranking for “tires.” Plus, really, aren’t 99% of the people typing that in looking for something local? How about “tires internet” - still a lot of action there. But you get a good phrase like “tires internet overnight” and suddenly you have the ability to rank in the SERPs there. And you can iterate: “tires internet tomorrow” or “tires tomorrow” and so on.