Being discoverable is all about being found, the more places you hang out, the more places people are going to find you. Don’t hang out anywhere - hangout where your customers are. You need to be found by customers who are looking for the products and services you sell.

The first step to being discoverable is to talk the talk, or mirror the search keywords, and search terms customers use to search for your site in your sites copy. This puts you in sync because you are talking the same language.

This article discusses the steps to take to be discovered off site, a process known by various terms such as online marketing, Search Engine Marketing or SEM.

Now that your site talks the talk and is SEO optimized with search keywords and search terms, you need to walk the walk and get on path. The path marks the way that internet surfers jump from site to site following links. Links that are in banners and buttons - the type that appear on most websites - one minute your looking at cars, you click on a banner and book a holiday. It’s called serendipity and we all do it. Banners aren’t the only things that catch our attention - articles, blogs and forum post may contain links within the body of a piece of text - called deep links - which we follow for more information.

Getting on path with banner ads and buttons can be achieved by a process known as affiliate marketing. Affiliate Marketing is where you agree to pay sales commission to a third party website when their visitors click through to your website to make a purchase from you. It’s like paying a salesman, only the salesman is a website. There are a number of ways of setting up an affiliate marketing scheme. You can do it yourself, or pay commission to a third party, known as an aggregator. Aggregators are effectively banner brokers.

Press Releases - Aren’t they just for big companies? Absolutely not, a press release or news releases is a great way of getting on to the path that surfers walk, and they are accessible to all. A well written press release will contain the search keywords and search terms that your customers use - talking the talk - and links to various pages on your website. This is a great way to communicate with your customers directly and drive action such as registering for a news letter, subscribing to a blog, or enquiring on a product. Whatever action you want to invoke - press releases give you that ability. Earlier I used the term ‘News Release’ as opposed to ‘Press Release’, for the reason that you aren’t really interested in the press. It’s not that you don’t want the press to write about your company and its products or services, it’s because your release isn’t aimed at journalists and editors - it’s aimed at your customers.

Press releases are distributed by press release hubs that send your news out to news rooms, websites and blogs. This means that your news will travel all over the world and will appear on all kinds of websites who link back to your website with the links you embedded in your news release. Is that cool or what? Aim to send out one press release per week, and you will become very discoverable. You may think that you don’t have any news to tell: Rubbish, of course you do. If you have no news nothing is happening, and if nothing is happening - you’ve got problems, which is news - so you can tell the world about that.

stuart anthony atkinson www.duprez.co.uk

cost effective online marketing and pr services, search engine marketing - sem and search engine optimization - seo. increase site visitors and grow your business.

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