Maki & Brian DeLaet EduCyber founders

In this Issue we continue examining the top 10 essential questions to answer when you are ready to take your site to the next level with questions five through seven.

Question 5: What will keep people coming back to my web site?

This question has a simple answer. In a word "Good content". OK, that's two words. Taking the time to write or get good content on your site is the single best way to keep people coming back. A larger site with lots of visitors can create a forum where people can come to create community . If your site is smaller, this can be counter-productive though.

Having a stale site, with out any fresh content, certainly isn't going to help people come back although it might not hurt your search engine rankings . But having a fresh site with new or regularly changing content will provide a hook that keeps people coming back for more.

Here are 5 ways you can provide people a reason to keep coming back:

1. Offer seasonal / monthly / weekly specials for your products or services.
2. Become an expert in your field. Publish an e-newsletter demonstrating your expertise.
3. Write your very own web blog - (blog). It isn't nearly as difficult as it may sound and it is another way of becoming an expert in your field while also demonstrating your mastery of cyberspace.
4. Write articles for other web sites. There are article directories that would be happy to help you share your expertise.
5. If you're not a writer, you can get good articles from a variety of sources and post them to your web site.

6. What words do I expect people to have searched for when they click through to my site?

Now the conversation turns very clearly to Search Engine Marketing (SEM). There are many facets to SEM. Two of the biggest are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC).

So first you must determine what key words your customers search for. Notice how I worded that. Not what you think they search for but what they actually do search for. Many business owners are so focused on what they are selling that they don't take time to realize what their customers are buying. For example, a hair stylist might think she is selling "professionally styled hair" while her ideal customer might be searching for "good haircut" at a "good price".

There are several good free tools that will help you determine other related keywords. We really like and recommend the Google Adwords Keyword Tool . When I visit this site and type in "good haircut" and then add one more word so that I don't get jobs in Australia or Alaska: "Denver". The tool returns 34 possible other words I should look at. Some are obvious like "beauty salon haircut" and "best haircut Denver" but there are a few very nice surprises there as well, like "prom haircut" and "wedding haircut" that would probably be very customers.

The beauty of this tool is that you can also see what the competition is for a certain keyword. If you find some that have lots of searches but little competition, you have just found a niche that you can capitalize on.

Work with your website designer to optimize your site and then you are ready to with SEO and PPC. We'll deal with both of these with the next question.

7. Is my site currently ranked in the search engines?

In this seventh question in the 10 questions to take your web site to the next level , we look at how to determine whether your site is ranked or not.

A simple search can show you if your site is ranked in the top 10 or not. But you have to know what people are searching for. For example, we recently redesigned the smithlaws.com web site. A part of that redesign was preparing it for the search engines. Through one of our research tools (Nichebot), we discovered a combination of key words that people are searching for none of the competition is optimizing their sites for. We'll just come right out and tell you. The law firm of Kevin C. Smith is a personal injury law practice . One of the terms we were researching was denver workers compensation lawyer. The research showed that adding Pinnacol (the state of Colorado's largest worker's comp insurance company) to the phrase could get some highly targeted traffic, we knew we were on to something.

So when you ask yourself "Is my site ranked?", you need to think carefully, "ranked for what?"

Doing keyword research is very important but you can also get get ideas about how your site ranks for key phrases by examining your web statistics. Google analytics or awstats are two methods that we use to track what happens on sites. By looking at the stats, you can see what people are actually searching for in the search engines when they click through to your site. This information can be used to figure out if and how your site is ranked. This in turn can help you determine how and what search engine marketing strategies you need to implement in your site.

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