Yowsie! - Yowsie Marketing Course

marketing

Search Engines and Directories

Search Engines are extremely useful and very important tools with which everyone is now familiar. We are concerned here with how to use them to find targets for your marketing.

Among the many benefits of Search Engines is that they are a great way for you to find "leads". Begin by entering suitable words into Google (etc.)

To find potential new stockists in the Midlands for your lawnmowers you might enter something like "garden machines leics" and see what comes up. Expect links which fit logically, not helpfully, like someone selling ice cream machines from premises in Burrell Gardens, Loughborough! But you should get some useful results, some of which will be directories or other people's lists of stockists.

There are extensive directories on line and a search for "garden machines directory" will certainly pull out a few.

Using your imagination to prime the search engines with suitable words and phrases will produce useful results. Taking the effort to follow links and explore web sites will reward you. "Surfing the net" should not be scorned as just something young people do for frivolous purposes.

But we can't discuss Search Engines without at just a brief mention of how other people find you there.

To get your business appearing in searches

submit an appropriate "sitemap" to Google
include a good description of your website in a "metatag" (ask your web designer)
make sure that the search engines see people talking on-line about your website

You achieve the last part by having a website that tells people what they and their friends want to know and presents the information in an attractive and accessible way. Make sure you always mention your website when you publicise your business on and off line.

Although there are ways to tweak your webpages to make them more accessible to search engines, any good web designer will automatically include such enhancements in balance with making your pages informative and interesting. While some "search engine optimisation" is of value, you should not be taken in by those who try to take your money on the promise of getting you good "rankings". Many will ruin your pages, sacrificing good communication with your visitors to get responses to search phrases which normal people are unlikely ever to enter.

Just be logical - if there are more than ten shoe shops in the world, it's a wild goose chase trying to appear in the top ten results when people type in "shoes". But if you have a well-constructed site and people in your area are talking about it and you appear in on-line directories, sites about local trade fairs etc., then you don't need to spend a fortune on "search engine optimisation" to appear when people type in "shoes" and the name of your town.

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