It is estimated that up to 60% of new traffic to your Web site will come from search engines. This means that unless you are already so well known that people will be using your name to search for your site, you need a search engine strategy. Thousands of new Web sites are created daily, so axiom "Build it, and they will come" does not apply.

Effective Web site promotion requires a serious and continuing investment of time and resources, whether you do it yourself, or hire a professional. It is not a one-shot deal, but an ongoing process, meaning you should evaluate return on your investment. You can collect a vast amount of crucial information about your traffic, and make strategic business development decisions, in ways that are unprecedented in real world.

Setting your goals

We've all met person who boasts of "thousands of hits a day" on his Web site, and maybe we felt a little envious. But let's debunk hype . . . .

It's important to distinguish between individual visitors, and "hits". The latter refers to every piece of your site that is downloaded, and this includes all graphics files separately. Thus, one visitor viewing your home page, which contains text and four images, will generate five "hits". If that visitor explores your site further, he or she will generate more hits, but it's still same user.

You want to ask yourself whether you want every visitor that you can get - which could be thousands of indiscriminate, unqualified people, or whether you would prefer 20 highly qualified decision makers per day, looking for exactly what you provide?

There are no right or wrong answers, but you should have goals for volume and quality of traffic that you would like, so you can measure results (more on this later!)

Designing keywords

The next step is to identify some keywords and key phrases that will differentiate you. Imagine if we all used "professional speaker" as our main key phrase. How many of us would show up on top of search engines?

Furthermore, there are too many results for typical search. So, visitors will be combining "professional speaker" with something that narrows down what they are looking for - perhaps "customer service" and "banking", or maybe a location, such as "teambuilding" and "Chicago". You will discover keywords that work best for you when you run a log analysis - for now, make your best guess.

Think about topics you offer, which industries you specialize in, which locations you serve, and anything else that sets you apart. Make sure that your keywords are in language that your clients use, and not industry jargon - I have never seen phrase "keynote speaker" in actual searches.

Then, build these into a set of keywords and phrases. Because of frequency of most single words, phrases often work better in narrowing a search. Include your name, common misspellings of your name, and any other key element of your site. Use both singular and plural forms, and mix capital with lower case letters, except for proper names (some search engines are case sensitive and will exclude lower case searches for words that you have capitalized).

As an example, here are key words and phrases for my site:

Philippa Gamse, Phillipa, Games, CyberSpeaker, internet speaker, internet seminars, Internet marketing programs, internet marketing speakers, search engines, online marketing strategies, Web site promotion, traffic logs, internet consultant

Not an exhaustive list, but a good start ;-)

When you have keywords and phrases, use those to build:

1. a page title containing your most significant keywords. It doesn't matter if title doesn't read well - it's piece that appears in colored bar of browser at top, and very few people see it. Contrary to popular belief, titles are for search engines, not people!

2. a brief "knock their sox off" description. This will be displayed in search engine results, and will attract visitors to come to you. Most search engines display 2 lines or less, so wording such as

"Welcome to My Company - a full service provider of . . ." is probably most of what you'll get - and you haven't said anything yet! So keep it pithy, and include keywords.

Now - do this for every significant page of your site!

Your site is (or should be) more than your home page. The spider search engines that index every word on a page allow you to submit multiple pages. So do it! This increases by many times your exposure, and angles that you can use to promote yourself.

For example, I have an article on my site about choosing an Internet Service Provider (if you want to read it, check out my list of articles). Many people searching for this topic find this piece as their entry point to my site. If they want to find out more about me, they can follow navigation aids back to get more information.

Reviewing and updating your pages

When you have your keywords, key phrases, titles and descriptions ready, it's time to insert them into every significant page of your site. You may need help from your Web designer to do this.

First, you need to incorporate these elements into header record for each page - in special places called "meta tags". These tags, which aren't visible to visitors, are used heavily by several of major search engines.

As an example, header record for my home page looks like this:

Also, make sure that text of each page includes main keywords again - but don't spam - that is, repeat them incessantly. At best, search engines will ignore more than about 7 occurrences of each word, at worst they may even exclude your site.

I'll describe most important sections of log report when analyzing your site's marketing effectiveness. Often, deciding what's right and what's a problem is a gut feel that you'll develop by looking at your log reports over a period of weeks or months, by trying some new tactics, and observing trends and results.

General Statistics

This introductory section shows overall traffic to site, including number of actual visitors, as opposed to "hits". This is an important distinction - one hit is generated for every page and every individual image that a visitor requests (e.g. a page with some text and five pictures will take six hits to download). So, ratio of hits to individual visitors can be quite high.

By way, it's also important for you to appreciate this distinction if you are selling advertising space on your site. You may be asked by a potential advertiser to prove your traffic levels, and if you happily say "millions of hits", they may look suspicious!

This section also shows average time spent on site, which should give some indication as to how engaging it is. If your site is rich in content, but time spent on it is relatively low, it may not be meeting needs of visitors it is attracting, or it may be targeted at wrong audience.

I had a client who earlier this year placed #1 in some major search engines. He was ecstatic! But his site had not been worked on for some time, and was very dry and boring. We discovered from his logs that average time spent on his site was less than two minutes - obviously indicating a problem. And to make my point again, without this evidence from logs, he would have continued to believe that his site was successful.

Most and Least Requested Pages

The most requested pages are a great barometer of "hot" areas of your site, and thus most popular aspects of your online products or services. These may be different from your original expectations, and so this information can be very valuable for overall business development decisions.

If least requested pages (i.e. ones that attract fewest visitors) contain important content, then something's wrong. Usually, it's either that their content is not interesting to your markets after all, or that site is not driving your traffic to these pages in ways that are attractive.

Top Entry and Exit Pages

If inside pages of your site are well promoted in search engines, there should be a number of top entry pages (i.e. first page that visitor sees), in addition to home page. This is a good reminder to include clear navigation back to other areas of site from every page, to ensure that first-time visitor gets a complete picture of your offerings.

The top exit pages are also an indication of your site's effectiveness - if these are not right places for most visitors to leave from, some adjustments are needed. Make sure that every page of your site has an objective, and that you clearly direct visitor to next page or to action that you wish them to take.

Single Access Pages

These are pages that a visitor views, and leaves without exploring any further. Typically, this will be home page, and I am often asked whether this is an issue. I usually give standard consultant's answer: "It depends . . ."