(PART ONE)

(RushPRnews 6-15-05) What does it mean to market: it means making visible and attractive your products and services in order to reach your target audience, resulting in sales.

In the age of electronic commerce and of search engines, the importance of understanding how search engines work and index your site is crucial. Moreover, to achieve visibility, you need to develop a search engine marketing (SEM) plan. 

This is a lot like search engine optimization (SEO), which is the act of optimizing a site for the engines but where SEO concerns itself mainly with how the site itself is laid out and organized, marketing ‘concern is selling the site to the world at large.

The primary difference between online and a brick-and-mortar business is that traditionally you must seek the customer out to generate sales, online they are seeking you out, looking for the likes-of-you. In other words, marketing through the engines is primordial tool. 

In the process of creating webpages, you will need to consider the following questions:

The "Copy" or text of the site:

The site itself must be able to sell  the goods, even if they are primarily service or news and information. Is the site well written? In regular English and not in business-jargon? Do all the pages contain keywords that viewers are likely to type to find you? Have you done the keyword research to see what are the commonly used words for your topic or industry ? Are the pages accurately titled to reflect the content?  Today's surfer is sophisticated  but pressed for time, so the best sites are the ones where the information sought-after is easily located, which brings us to my next point.

Website Usability:

Usability has several meanings.  Is the site  user-friendly? Is your site being created in a familiar industry-style to put your viewer at ease?  Is the font readable and large enough in all screen resolutions?  How easy is it to navigate from one page to another? Does it follow a logical and  predictable pattern? Can it be converted or translated into other languages? Did you refer back to a translator?  Can persons with disabilities use the site? How well the content does takes into account your target viewer? Its age group? Its socio-economic factor? 

For every site, the answers and solutions to these questions will be somewhat different, but over all they are issues that you must take into account if you wish to market your site on the engines. 

Remember that good sites are planned and organized.
/end of part one

Article written by Esta Weiss The Web Witch
Edited and proofread by Anne Laszlo-Howard
Distributed and published by RushPRnews.
RushPRnews, Press Release and Search Engine Marketing Services Made Easy.