Since the purpose of having a website is for people to find you online, I wanted to go over some basic strategies for ensuring that people searching for your types of services/products find your small business’s website.
The goal of optimization is to have your website listed before your competitors ("ranked highly") (ideally on the first page of search results, which most people don’t look beyond).
Most search engines report the result of searches in two groups: sponsored ads and normal ("organic") searches. Sponsored ads appear because the company has agreed to pay the search engine (via a pay-per-click [PPC] ad campaign) money whenever people click on their ad for specific keywords. PPC is a great way to generate traffic quickly, but it’s often not cost effective long-term. Long-term you want your website to appear organically highly ranked.
When a person does a search, the goal of the search engine is to show the most relevant websites that likely match the person’s search terms. The goal of optimizing is to make your site highly relevant for specific search terms.
1. Identify the search terms you want to rank highly for . As in all forms of marketing, you need to think like the person who’s looking, not as the business who’s selling. That means you need to know what keywords people use to search for businesses like yours. This information is easy to find from pay-per-click programs, such as Google Ad Words Keyword Tool . Don’t forget to also spot trends (using a tool such as Google Trends) in keyword searches, since you want to catch "up-and-coming" searches that might be ranked low now.
2. Use the keywords in relevant pages in your website. Keywords are seen in: the main body of the web page, meta tags (less important, but still worth having), and the alt-text in your images. Use keywords naturally - remember the point is to have more customers. If your website isn’t human-readable, then all your work will be for naught. Also, make sure that if you want to target customers in a region, you use your region in your keyword phrases.
3. Get links to your website. Search engines rank websites by their "authority". One way they measure authority is how many (and which) other websites link to them ("backlinks"). One backlink from an top-class website is worth hundreds of poor-quality links. You can get backlinks from a wide variety of sites: organizations that you’re a member of, blogs, and directories. One tool I recommend is Directory Submitter, a free tool to get backlinks. Be warned: Google is in the process of penalizing websites with paid backlinks. Also: submit your websites to the search engines (if you have not already) so they can explicitly add your site to their directories: Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
There is a lot more to search engine optimation (SEO) that these tips. Don’t forget there are professionals that can help you with your search engine optimization (I’d be happy to recommend some).
Optimize Your Website For Search In 3 Steps - To learn more about this author, visit Jay Hamilton-Roth's Website.
Like this article? Share it with your friends
 |
Related Articles |
|
 Ways to Optimize Your Web Site
|
| |
Search Engine Optimization is a technical process which is used to raise the rank of a website in the search engine index. SEO makes a website easier for the search engines to read and also helps the users in findin...
|
|
Internet Marketing Basics-1,2,3
|
| |
It's the ABC's of internet marketing, except it's the 1,2,3's! Here are some fundamentals you'll need to know.
|
|
Maximizing the full potential of your website.
|
| |
Many people invest in a website and months or years later they complain, “my website is worthless, I never get any business from it.” Creating a website without search engine optimizing it is like creating a newspap...
|
|
Basic Introduction to Proper SEO
|
| |
One critical element of internet marketing is performing proper SEO on your website. When optimizing your website, there are many on-page and off-page elements that need to be attended to on in order to rank well in...
|
|
Essential SEO Tips To Boost Search Engine Positioning & Increase Online Profits
|
| |
In very simple terms, search engine optimization (SEO), is the process of making your website site and its individual pages visible and relevant to search engines and search engine users. If you want to successfully...
|
|
|
Jay Hamilton-Roth
(Visit Jay's Website)
Jay Hamilton-Roth founded Many Good Ideas
(www.
ManyGoodIdeas.com) to help small
businesses brainstorm, design, and
implement effective marketing strategies.
He combines creativity with common sense
to demystify the process of getting great
results. He has used his high-tech
background from MIT to help him launch
five businesses. He consults with
companies in a wide range of industries
and publishes a monthly marketing
newsletter and daily marketing blog (ask.
ManyGoodIdeas.com)
|
|
|
|
![[Get Copyright Permissions]](http://license.icopyright.net/images/icopy-w.gif){kind=small}
