Marketing techniques

[Daan]

The company I work for has asked me to do a little research about
website marketing. In particular: they want to know what we (as the ones
building the website) can do to make sure that the site can be found
using popular search enginges and directories, using the most logical
keywords.

Now in the old days, the META element and that sort of thing were
recommended as *the* way to promote your website, but I have the feeling
(not sure though) that that is rather outdated.

Can anyone perhaps point me to some relevant, up-to-date information
about website promotion (the faq was not of much help here)? I realize
it's a complex business, but I at least want to find out what things we
as the web developers can do (and perhaps recommend to our customers) to
maximise the 'findability' of the site.

Thanks for any help.

 

[Barbara de Zoete]

The company I work for

If you want to call the University of Twente a company
from your headers:
Organization: University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
X-Trace: netlx020.civ.utwente.nl 1102002532 32026 130.89.162.160 (2
Dec 2004 15:48:52 GMT)
X-Complaints-To: (e-mail address removed)

has asked me to do a little research about website marketing. In
particular: they want to know what we (as the ones building the website)
can do to make sure that the site can be found using popular search
enginges and directories, using the most logical keywords.

Good content (preferrably as text), good site and page structure, good
content, semantically correct markup, a good rate 'content:code', (did I
mention good content yet?), incomming links from pages that already were
indexed, patience and then some more good content.

Try <or Google for SEO or SERP.

 

[Barbara de Zoete]

If you want to call the University of Twente a company
from your headers:
Organization: University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
X-Trace: netlx020.civ.utwente.nl 1102002532 32026 130.89.162.160 (2
Dec 2004 15:48:52 GMT)
X-Complaints-To: (e-mail address removed)


Good content (preferrably as text), good site and page structure, good
content, semantically correct markup, a good rate 'content:code', (did I
mention good content yet?), incomming links from pages that already were
indexed, patience and then some more good content.

Try <or Google for SEO or SERP.

Woops: should be <Sorry for the typo

 

[C.W.]

The company I work for has asked me to do a little research about
website marketing. In particular: they want to know what we (as the ones
building the website) can do to make sure that the site can be found
using popular search enginges and directories, using the most logical
keywords.

Now in the old days, the META element and that sort of thing were
recommended as *the* way to promote your website, but I have the feeling
(not sure though) that that is rather outdated.

META keywords and description can still be helpful - just not given a
lot of weight in value. Yahoo and MSN [in their beta search douments]
share they will look at those META tags. Keep those two, if used,
short, punchy, to the point, and being about the page they apear on.

Yahoo, if you are using META description, will display part of that in
the abstract shared - so you don't want to use the same one across all
pages as it looks boring if you have 3 or 4 pages land close together
in the results. Google has been known to display the META description
shared also from time to time - so that info is indexed, just may not
of a lot value "marketing wise".

Can anyone perhaps point me to some relevant, up-to-date information
about website promotion (the faq was not of much help here)? I realize
it's a complex business, but I at least want to find out what things we
as the web developers can do (and perhaps recommend to our customers) to
maximise the 'findability' of the site.

Realize that the search engines each use a different algorithem. MSN
currently uses Yahoo for its results but they are working on releasing
their own index/search.

Yahoo leans to on page thoughts in terms of optimization. Google leans
to off page touches with some on page thoughts still factored in - PR
still of value but not like in days of yore [such as a PR3 page can
beat out a PR5 page in rankings]. MSN currently seems up in the air on
which way their algo will lean towards.

Barbara already shared a link to a newsgroup that discusses search
engines. WebMasterWorld and HighRankings forums may be worth sneaking
a peek and lurking at also.

Carol