Introduction
Every IAC member farm is provided their own web space on the Ideal Alpaca Community website. This offers each member a powerful marketing tool for promoting your farm, announcing events, and exposing your herd. This article provides valuable tips on how to take full advantage of your IAC web space and tie it to your own farm’s website. By mutually linking the IAC site and your farm’s site, your online marketing efforts will be more effective and your site will gain more traffic and online exposure.
The IAC website ranks high for alpaca-related search terms in every major search engine. This is a great chance for you to get your farm information out to alpaca prospects that are searching online.
Utilizing your IAC Web Space
If you have already published your content on your IAC web space, that’s great. If not, now is the time to do it! Excellent content organizational structures are in place and editing tools are provided to help you create an interesting and productive site.
As you compose the text for your farm, events, and animals, it is vitally important to consider adding important “keyword phrases” directly into your content. Remember, other search engine ranking factors aside, keyword phrases in the content will help search engines “see” and “know” what your page is all about. A blank page is of no benefit to your page visitors or the search engines. Your goal is to provide detailed farm information that will give visitors a reason to contact you. Put yourself in the site visitor’s shoes. If you land on a page with no beneficial information to you, how likely are you to leave and go to another site?
Step 1: Decide on the keyword phrases to use (please refer to the next section: Choosing Your Keyword Phrases). A target of 2-3 keyword phrases per page is recommended.
Step 2: Prepare well-written copy for your farm section. This includes Mission Statement, Farm Description, and Farm Directions. Well-written copy should have your targeted keyword phrases naturally placed throughout the content. “Events”, “Gallery”, and “Alpacas” should not be neglected. Remember that the more beneficial information you can provide to your page visitors, the higher the chance they will be interested in contacting you.
If you have your own web site, considering linking out from your IAC page to important pages on your own site.
Step 3: Complete your Meta Description field and Keywords field provided in your editing page. Meta Description clues the search engines in to what your page is about. Your Description field should contain 2 or 3 sentences about your page that contain the major keyword phrases. Your Keywords field contains the major keyword phrases separated by commas.
Choosing your keyword phrases
A better-targeted and more specific keyword phrase tends to yield better-qualified prospects. If you run an alpaca farm in Ohio, targeting regional keyword phrases may be a better option. Phrases such as “Ohio alpaca farm”, “alpacas for sale in Ohio”, and “Ohio huacaya alpacas” are phrases that come to mind.
If you want to see actual search phrases that searchers use to find alpaca-related terms, SEO companies can provide you with a detailed keyword study. Feel free to contact me if you would like to learn more about this service.
Having a site for your own farm is a good start
Putting a site online is relatively easy. But this does not mean people can find it. If your goal is gaining online exposure, you really need to plan a solid foundation for a user friendly and search engine friendly web site.
Many alpaca farm clients come to us for online marketing after their farm sites have been online for few months, or even a few years. They typically find their site has gone largely unseen. It is not found anywhere, even under the company name. This results in disappointment and lost business. After having made a significant investment in site design and programming, it’s pretty hard to swallow. Just like offline businesses that need promotion, new online businesses need exposure. And the best exposure you can get is through search engines.
Consider these factors for your own alpaca farm site
· Is the copy well written with your major keyword phrases naturally inserted throughout every page?
· Is the site structure, e.g. the page URLs, search engine friendly? What’s a search engine friendly URL, you wonder? In layman terms, search engines are wary of very long URLs or dynamic URLs with a lot of gibberish letters (session IDs, for example). They’ll index it, but there’s no guarantee that it will be comprehensive indexing. Some may just stop and leave your site. And yes, there are ways to get around this. So talk to your SEO provider about the cost and the programming involve in fixing any URL problems.
· Are your page meta tags optimized? Meta tags are HTML tags that provide information about your web page. The important meta tags I am referring to are Title, Description, and Keywords. Many web sites still have “Untitled” or “Welcome to My Farm” as their title tag. I strongly suggest changing your title tag to support the content that you have on a page, using keywords that appear in your copy.
· How popular is your site? Beside well-written content, “Link Popularity” is another major factor that will help “boost” or “lose” your presence in the search engines.
o Are you linking back to a good authority site, e.g. Ideal Alpaca: whttp://www.ideal-alpaca.com or The Alpaca Library at Northwest Alpacas: http://www.alpacas.com/AlpacaLibrary/ or the AOBA: http://www.alpacainfo.com/
o Are other quality alpaca or livestock related web sites linking back to you? That’s considered a “vote of confidence” in the eyes of the search engines.
o Other ways to gain “votes of confidence” are by submitting your site to major search engine directories i.e., Yahoo, The Open Directory, etc. If you have not done this yet but plan to do it yourself, think about your keyword phrases and how you can fit them into your submission. Plan out a strategy. Or talk to your SEO provider.
Linking Your Farm Website to the IAC Website
Using the IAC logo and hyperlink on your own alpaca farm website provides credibility and allows your farm to be identified as a quality conscious breeder using scientific principles to produce elite alpacas with fine fleeces and superior cutting weight. Every IAC farm is expected to have a link on the farm’s home page to the IAC site.
It is a simple task to add an IAC link. For those of you who use high-level web development tools, you can just add the IAC logo (either cut and paste the image below, or cut and paste the logo from any IAC web page).
The hyperlink text should read: “Member of the Ideal Alpaca Community”. The actual link should point to http://www.ideal-alpaca.com/ .
If you prefer to work in HTML, here’s where you can find the instructions:
http://www.ideal-alpaca.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=feature.display&feature_id=251
Successful Online Alpaca Marketing
Feel free to explore the marketing articles on SEO Alpaca (www.seoalpaca.com) to find out how you can market your site online. Visit our Alpaca Marketing Tips >>
Good luck in your successful online promotion!!!
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Parichatra Reuning is Senior SEO Associate at SEO Advantage, an SEO firm serving the Ideal Alpaca Community with alpaca SEO and web design services since 2000. Learn more about custom alpaca website design and search engine optimization today at www.seoalpaca.com
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