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02/20/2008 02:56:20 PM
Ways to build Voice Over Website Traffic
You can have the best voice in the world, the best delivery, the
best voice over equipment, but what if no one can find you? Are you
depending on web traffic to supplement your voice over income? Web
searches are important to us all. You can have the fanciest voice
over website ever created, but its wasted money if your site doesn't
show up on search engines.
It takes hard work to maintain a popular site; it also takes money
to make money. BUT, it doesn’t take a ton of dollars to generate
website traffic for your site.
Some voice over talents get big hits on their sites and not every
one of them is a Don LaFontaine or Joe Cipriano. A lot of the big
hit voice talents are spending money on Google ads or banner ads,
some of them even have an entire marketing plan implemented. If you
have a ton of money and hire the right people this is definitely
easier. This is, of course expensive and not necessarily the best
way to go about it.
Then there are the other voice talents out there that get lots of
traffic to their voice over websites by using SEO techniques. SEO,
stands for search engine optimization. Do a Google search on SEO and
183 million sites pop-up. There is a complete industry out there
dedicated to what you can do for little or no cost. Is SEO worth it?
You bet, and if you have the money to spend go for it. Otherwise,
let's get to work on some easy things you can do.
Here are some words and concepts you should know:
Title tags – These are the words that appear in the upper left of
your browser. Make sure they are short, sweet and to the point and
more importantly, keyword rich. When your site appears on a web
search this is what is displayed. The closer this is to what people
are searching for, the better your chances for being found.
Keywords – Keyword and keyword density should be top priorities.
Keywords are the things people type into the various search engines
to find relevant web pages. Take the time to figure-out the words
you think people would use to find your page. Keyword density is
making sure your page uses these particular words in its content.
Sitemaps – Sitemaps are not only a good idea to help people navigate
your site, but it also tells the search engines which pages to
index. The more search engine indexing, the better the chance your
site will pop up on a search.
Content – Search engines LOVE content, the more the better. Make
sure you update the content often. Search engines want to provide
the most relevant pages for their users, that's why they give higher
priority to sites that are active and informational. Maybe you are
good at one area of voice over work or you have great technical
knowledge. Blogs and podcasts are special favorites of search
engines—start one today.
Links – Do whatever you can to get people to link to your site. The
higher ranking a site has that links to you, the higher your rank
becomes. Search engines feel that if other people are linking to
your site your site must be important. Do whatever you can to build
links and the closer on topic the referring site is to your keywords
the more they are worth their weight in gold.
I barely scratched the surface on this topic and most of the value
to you might be simply making you aware that SEO exists. A college
course could be given on each one of the items, but the good news is
there are countless resources on the web.
Next post I'll try to write a little bit about "off-site" voice
over website optimization. |
