Re: UKNM: Search engine promotions

[Sean Clark]

One thing I've found is that your ratings will vary from week to week, so 

good monitoring tools are essential to keeping your search engine entries 

up-to-date. We use "Position Agent" at http://www.positionagent.com/. 

This site allows you to track your position in various search engines.


As mentioned earlier, the choice of keywords and keyword combinations is 

vital. For example, with the British Magazines Direct site we knew 

perfectly well that we would not have much of a chance getting near the 

top of the "magazines" listing in any search engine, but "british 

magazines" would be more achievable.


After creating search engine pages, deleting dead links from search 

engines, refining the page content and title etc. we actually achieved 

number one spot in all 10 of the main search engines when searching for 

"british magazines" - albeit for 1 week only (I have the screen grab!). A 

couple have fallen slightly since then but all engines still put the site 

on page 1.


As for how important search engines are. Well. On this site estimate that 

1/3 - 1/2 of all new traffic originates via the search engine route. With 

another 1/3 from promotions (a banner/keyword campaign on Yahoo US worked 

well) and the remainder from personal referrals, links, off-line 

promotion, reviews and so on.


What we have found, though, is that the key to keeping the traffic high 

(on the British Magazines site at least) is repeat visits - once you've 

got 'em (by whatever means) the trick is to keep 'em coming back. I did 

some cookie analysis on this site recently and found that during any one 

week over 1/3 of all visitors had been to the site before...


Oh dear, I'm starting to sound like a statistician!


Sean




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sean clark          |

seancheadland [dot] co [dot] uk

 | tel 0115 9551155

headland multimedia | www.headland.co.uk   | fax 0115 9551156

cuttlefish          | www.cuttlefish.com   | pgr 01523 106554

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