Marketing Without Search Engines

Marketing Without Search Engines

Build your website for visitors, not for search engines.

Let's take a quick look at this idea. What if you completely forgot about search engines and simply built your website for your visitors. This would mean that you take a great deal of care in understanding who your visitors really are and design your website's look / feel / navigation carefully and specifically tailored to the needs of your site visitors.

Defining your visitor domain:

You have to use several attributes to define / document your visitor domain. Some of these attributes can be as follows:

• Age Group:
• Academic Qualifications:
• Technical Qualifications:
• English Language skills:
• Work Experience:
• Their Technical Interests:
• Sex:
• Geographical Area:

And so on.

The more granularly you decompose your visitor domain the more accurately will you be able decide what your website:
Should look like
How it will navigate
What content will it carry
How the content will be presented
and so on.

The look and feel of your website and the content of its web pages is determined by your visitor demographics.

If you've got a lot of young, well qualified, technically strong visitors, the content of your website must be attractive to them. Additionally website navigation should be simple to use, i.e. everything should be between a click or two clicks away. 

Once your visitors decide that they have a lot to gain by coming back to your website because of its content, your visitors will drive traffic to your website by commenting about it on their social networking forums and encouraging their peers to visit.

This kind of third party marketing for your website is almost always value driven. This is a really amazing way of driving a stream of focused - repeat and new visitors to your website.

Never forget to make posting your page content to the social networking and social bookmarking websites easy for your site visitors, i.e. This should be a one click job.

If you ignore search engines and simply craft and deliver what your visitors want, people will do what they’ve always been doing i.e.

They relie on each other
They relie on their community of peers
They relie on the content of publications known within their geographic location or industry
They relie on word of mouth
They relie on getting information from trusted sources such as their social networks

Only after all these sources fail do they turn to "Search Engines".

Hence the new matra is go where people that belong to your core focus domain gather, this could be LinkedIn, Orkut, Facebook, YouTube or any other Internet based social gathering  place. It's there your website will have to be heard about regularly.

When you:
Ignore search engines
Turn your focus to marketing techniques to Internet determined gathering places
Market your website there
Then you will realize how valuable this is.
Especially how this can drive focused traffic to your website, and gain registrants to your Newsletter.  This can be a pretty amazing revelation to most website owners.

There are a ton of forums, social networking websites, technical blogs, (especially for vertical technical niches ), often created and run by thought leaders in their domains, that you could be ignoring when attempting to drive traffic to your website. 

It's pretty likely that by NOT being active on these online communities that you are losing out on perhaps a few thousand visitors every day. 

An intelligent comment, clear and lucid,   a well thought through "Thank You" note. Any of this can catch the attention of a potential visitor.

Now if your website URL is part of your signature, your website is just a click away. You would be amazed at how many people will actually click on your URL and hop across to your website. That's you driving traffic to your website.

Believe me, this beats:
Waiting for your site to be indexed
Rank for long tailed phrases
Hopefully have search engines drive traffic to your website depending on "Keywords" being searched for and your website position in the search engine result page
THEN
Hopefully converting this into an ad click or sale to drive revenue to your bank account

The earlier approach is definitely proactive and worth the effort.

Occasionally, the thought leader on reading your comment, may be curious enough to come across to your website ( incoming traffic ) and perhaps leave a comment there in return. Wow, you've just been endorsed by a thought leader in your domain.

Visitors who are driven to your website from your social networking page ( or from your Comments ), they know more than your page name, url and meta-description.

They have a rough idea of who you are. They know your history of contributions. Your words are in their face before they even click over to your website. You are already partially presold by making yourself familiar and ( more importantly ) trustworthy.

The whole experience of marketing without search engines is educational.

It forced me to climb out of my shell and represent me ( i.e. my brand ):
i.e. This is me
I own this website
Here’s what I do
Take a look
Here’s why this will be interesting . . .
And so on.

Nothing revolutionary really but when you’re not depending on search engines, it’s not just how to get clicks but also how to get the most value out of each click?
i.e. What web page should be linked to
Who should be targeted
And so on.

When I began this approach it forced me to work hard at writing copy to persuade on a social level, to try and understand what the other person wanted, especially to think carefully before I posted anything.

I learned:
Never to post rubbish
Always focus on adding value
All the while knowing that I was building a strong brand for myself and my reputation.

I would recommend that you believe that search engines don’t exist, especially if you’ve got a new website.

There are a lot of visitors out there just waiting for you to show them your site. If you've reached a plateau using search engines to drive traffic to your website why not focus on promoting your website outside of search engines?

Ivan Bayross
SEO Tutorials | Search Engine Optimization Tutorial