Across the Universe

ATU's highest priority is ensuring that our Client's new website is accessible to search engines and is built and optimized in such a way that it helps improve the chance it will be found by people searching the web.

ATU website development strategies for your website optimization.

1. Attention to your website Page ‘Titles’. A Page Title will appear hyperlinked by the search engine when your page is found. ATU will work with the Client to ensure that the Page Title that appears is business keyword-appropriate and Client-approved.
2. Attention to the website ‘description’ and Keyword Meta Tags. ATU will build a search-engine-friendly Client-approved site description and provide appropriate Keyword Meta Tags.
3. Attention to your website Header Tag (H1 and H2). Search Engines look for ‘searched’ keywords in prominent font tags (H1 and H2 etc.). ATU will ensure that keyword-rich headers are prominent in the Client website pages.
4. Attention to website page paragraph content to ensure that desired keywords and phrases are included.
5. ATU recommends including your local business address, street, city, zip code, phone number and any other regional area your business serves on every webpage (most likely in the footer of the page). This will help people searching for a local business through a search engine more easily find you.
6. ATU builds your website with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommended Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and xhtml. Your website will validate with valid xhtml code and adhere to W3C web standards. Both Yahoo and Google recommend building websites to meet these standards. This also ensures that your website will work with current browsers as well as with future ones.
7. ATU will submit the Client website to the human-powered Open Directory . Directory listings list websites it deems closely related to a subject in its subject category list. The Open Directory submission is free, although it may take a few weeks before your website is reviewed and included. Research suggests that there is value in being included in a Directory listing. Yahoo Directory is the oldest and best-known directory, however they charge an annual fee for submission.

Additional strategies to get your website more traffic and ranked better by search engines.

1. Find business or professional complementary websites with which to request link swapping. Ask that a business add your website url to their website and ATU will add theirs to your website. Websites that link to many other websites (with reciprocal linking) are ranked higher by search engines.
2. Update your content frequently. Sites with frequently updated and new content rank higher in search engines typically. Topical writing, articles and imagery that change frequently can add variety to your website which may become a destination for potential clients.
3. Get big. This may not be possible for a small, focused business, however, according to Google Search Engine recommendations, sites with over 100 pages will attract more attention from search engines looking for sites with quality content.
4. Get involved and get your name out there. Write a newsletter or write articles for others to use in their Newsletters, participate as a Board member for a complementary organization and offer to speak at conferences and other events. You can dramatically increase your visibility when you participate in this way. Just ask that those to whom you provide your services include a link to your website with a short description of you and your services.

When you need to distinguish your website through additional, paid measures.

• Paid Directory Submission: Yahoo offers their own Directory submission as part of a suite of services that was created to service small business needs. Through Yahoo! Directory Submit, your website is reviewed and evaluated in a timely manner by Yahoo!'s editorial staff. A payment of $299.99, annually recurring will be paid by the Client. That payment guarantees that within seven business days a member of Yahoo!'s editorial staff will look at your site and prepare it for inclusion in the Yahoo! Directory. As noted earlier, there is research to suggest that there is good value in being a part of both the Open Directory and the Yahoo Directory.
• Paid Placement: Both Yahoo and Google offer paid website placement services where you bid against others to place your listing or advertisement at the top of the results. Yahoo offers Precision Match and Google offers AdWords. Note that these paid placement services generate billions of dollars for search engines. And, 95% of Google’s revenues come from these paid services.

How it works: You create ads and choose keywords, which are words or phrases related to your business. When people search Google and/or Yahoo using one of your keywords, your ad may appear next to the search results. These show up in the ‘Sponsored Links’ or ‘Sponsor Listings’ area of the returned search results. People can simply click your ad to learn more about you. And, only then are you charged a ‘cost per click’ (CPC) fee. Both Yahoo and Google provide keyword traffic and cost estimates information to aid in making informed decisions about choosing keywords and maximizing your budget.

Additionally, both Google and Yahoo charge a one-time account activation fee ($5 for Google and $50 for Yahoo). After that, you pay only when your ad is seen and clicked by a potential customer, who will then be sent to a website you specify. You control your ad budget. There is no minimum spending requirement. The amount you pay is up to you. You can, for instance, set a daily budget of five dollars and a maximum cost of ten cents for each click on your ad.

Paid Placement is like an auction: Each advertiser decides what a click is worth to them and then bids for it accordingly. Those bids, along with other factors like the quality of ads, are then used to determine which ad will appear in each situation. There are usually two bidding options. You can set a maximum click price yourself, or you can let the Yahoo or Google Budget Optimizer software set your bids to try and find you the most clicks possible within your budget. That means you set a budget, and Yahoo or Google will set your cost-per-click for you.

If you set your own maximum ‘click price; you might decide to pay as little as $0.01 (one cent) each time a potential customer clicks your ad. You can also decide to pay $1.00 or much more for each click. A very low bid your ad may not show very often, while with a very high bid your ad may show quite a lot. Your daily costs are determined by the prices you set and the number of clicks your ad receives. If you set a price of $0.05 per click, for example, and your ad is clicked 25 times in one day, then your total charges for that day would be $1.25.

In the same way, you might set a total monthly budget of just a few dollars, or as much as $5000 a month or more. If you set a monthly budget of $30.00, which is about a dollar a day, then your ad will be halted each day after it collects a dollar's worth of clicks (20 clicks at five cents each, for example). The exact amounts you select are yours to choose. In most cases, your currency's smallest denomination (for example, one cent in US dollars) is the lowest amount you can select.

You can change your cost per click and your budget at any time -- even several times a day if you like. There is no long-term contract or minimum spending limit. You can pause your campaign at any time, which means your ads will stop showing and won't generate any new charges.

Local searching: You can also set up your ads to appear only to people searching in a particular state, city, or region. You can target online customers within, say, 25 miles of your front door. People searching for information related to your business will see your location and contact information highlighted on a map of your area. This can be a very helpful feature when your business relies on local interest.

The costs of competition. Your ad will compete with ads from other advertisers who also have set their own prices. Your success will be based on how much you bid, the quality of your ad, how many other people want to advertise on the same keywords, and other factors.

Very popular topics and keywords (such as real estate or hotels) can cost more because so many other people also want to advertise on them. If you set very low prices on those popular keywords, your ad may appear only rarely or not at all. If you set higher bids on very specific keywords, your ad is likely to appear more often, and in higher positions yielding more clicks, at the price you want.

You can get a rough idea of costs and traffic for certain keywords by using Google Traffic Estimator where you can experiment with keywords, search engine placement and potential ‘hits’ and cost.

Summary

In summary, search marketing is big business. It is not only Yahoo and Google who make fortunes from their paid placement tools, but search engine marketing (SEO or SEM) consultants contract themselves out to large companies to do nothing more than handle all search marketing (at very significant hourly fees).

However, a small company can take advantage of reasonably priced paid placement tools and get potentially good results. This can be accomplished on a small budget, although it is best accomplished with personal (and purposeful) attention by the business owner. This individual will need to identifying the website goals, subsequently select effective keywords and then, most important, measure the results. Even though both Yahoo and Google offer ‘budget optimizer’ software to help automate bidding, books on the subject recommend that a business owner learn the ropes through initially (manually) setting bids and then evaluating results. Experimentation over time and learning from experience will yield the best results.