Aside from email marketing and pay per click (PPC) advertising, there is one strategy that has been used by successful online marketers worldwide. And that is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.
Search Engine Optimization is an online marketing that proves to be very effective because it uses SEs (Search Engines) as its means of attracting website traffic. This traffic includes people who are searching for anything on the web. It is reported that more than 80% of American internet users are using search engines like google, yahoo, bing, etc. to look for stuffs to buy, or services to subscribe to online. This means that if someone wanted to outsource services, he would likely use google to search for companies who offer outsourcing services.
It is recommended for online outsourcing businesses to use SEO to market their services. Why SEO? Because it is more effective than paid advertising and PPC. SEO is one of the best online marketing strategies that has been used by multinational companies all over the globe.
Below is a rough draft on how to optimize your website in order for it to become search engine friendly. Note that I categorized each procedure as internal and external. Internal means you need to have access to the administration page of your website to implement the task, while external procedures don’t require admin access.
Internal
1. Identify Relevant Keywords - Let us take for example supportresort.com. The possible keywords that should be used in order for it to top the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) are support resort, online support, online support staff, hire staff online, outsource php programmer, outsource customer support and the list goes on. These keywords should be placed on your site as meta tags. If your website will top on SERPs, then a high volume of traffic will come in. This means greater chances of attracting new customers to subscribe to your services.
2. Sitemap - This is actually very important in search engine optimization because it allows web crawlers to easily access your website content.
External
1. Link Building - This includes exchanging of links if you have a blog, or if your website has a link category. This could also help increase traffic generation, thus increasing chances of getting new customers.
2. Submission to Directory Sites/RSS Sites/Social Bookmarking Sites - Another way of increasing the popularity of your site through the power of directory listing.
3. Article Submission - To maintain your online business credibility, it is also important to publish articles that are related to the services you offered. This is another way of informing the public that the company doesn’t solely exist for profit.
4. Blogs - It is one of the most effective SEO tool. This is because blogs are search engine friendly. Unlike static websites, blog sites have mechanisms wherein search engine web crawlers can easily penetrate. Most successful companies have blogs on their websites.
5. Forums - There are lots of online forums where you can advertise your services by putting a link or banner in your signature. There are also people who frequent in forums who are looking for cheap, yet high quality outsourcing services.
6. Social Networking Sites - Facebook, Friendster, Multiply and the likes are effective advertising mediums you can use to market your website for FREE. On the other hand, you can also tap bloggers to blog about your services. This is what other companies have been doing as part of their online marketing strategy. In my next article I will discuss in full details the importance of site mapping in search engine optimization.
