Successful Online Marketing of a website requires a very different approach than the conventional marketing techniques used to market most other products and services.
Historically products were made, perhaps based on some level of market research, and then they were taken to the marketplace and mass-marketed. To successfully plan, develop and market a Website to the search engines requires a completely different approach.
Many factors play a role in where your Website shows up on the search engines. This positioning is critical to most businesses’ success or failure. What most people do not realize is that you can greatly influence your Website’s positioning through some careful planning. We are referring to these specific activities as Reverse Engineering. We are defining this as “the intentional engineering of a Website, based on known factors which will contribute to its future success.”
So, what key reverse engineering steps should be taken before the creation of any Website?
- Keyword Analysis – This allows you to determine exactly what keywords are being searched for on the major search engines, how many searches are conducted each month, the approximate monthly budget you would need to be competitive under these keywords, and will help you develop a better (to score better on the search engines) content architecture plan for your Website.
- Review the top scoring sites for the search terms under which you want to score. During this reverse engineering analysis, you should review each of the existing site’s Site Saturation (how many pages they currently have indexed on the search engines) and these sites’ Page Rank (how many sites the search engines show linking to them.) By reverse engineering these aspects of your competitor’s sites, you can more clearly determine how large your site needs to be, what content you need to develop and what ongoing efforts need to be implemented for your site to achieve a top ranking on the search engines.
Once you have launched a great site, which has been engineered to score well on the search engines, there is an additional reverse engineering technique which will help you achieve better online marketing results.
- Reverse engineering of links. Many people believe that any link to their Website is a good link. This is simply not true. The search engines assign far higher values to more relevant sites. They give higher values to those sites with higher Page Ranks. The give higher values to informational Websites (i.e. .edu sites.) When it comes to your ongoing link strategy, rather than taking a shot in the dark, reverse engineer the links that the top sites you want to complete with have on their sites. Obviously, if they are scoring at the top of the search listings, these are the links that the search engines value the most.
By making sure you completely understand how the search engines work and to what they assign the most value when scoring your Website, reverse engineering gives you a huge advantage over everyone else who simply build a Website that they think is best and then tries to market it.
The reverse engineering process gives you the information you need to create a site with intention, which will always out-perform all other sites that do not follow this process. If you want to see an example of this, do a search on Google for “Online Search Reverse Engineering” and you will see how the simple title of this post influences its scoring on the search engines.
We welcome your comments and feedback about this post. Please feel free to comment below. Or, if you would like to have Webolutions reverse engineer and create an intentional Website plan for you, please feel free to contact us at 303-300-2640 for a free internet marketing consultation.
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