Articles @ Long Grove Web>> Getting Found
Once a Website is up and running, the biggest concern is getting found. Just like a physical store, the more traffic the more sales--although you may find that the number of browsers per purchase is a lower rate than in your physical store!
Google is by far the most used search engines, and submissions are free. Unfortunately, it is no longer an easy thing to be listed near the top for your most likely keywords and key phrases. The main reason is that large, well-known sites will bump the little guys down. They spend perhaps thousands each month to accomplish this. The level playing field of the old days--where small businesses could compete with the big guys--is gone.
Regardless of the difficulties, you need to get listed in Google. The best way is through their webmaster tools and by creating an XML sitemap. It takes a while, weeks at least, before all of your pages start appearing. To see how much of your site is listed, type site:yourdomain.com.
To do your best, there needs to be a lot of content on your site and that content has to include your likely keywords and phrases. A vacation-area motel could have pages about the area, nearby attractions, travel tips, or even relatively unrelated things like local recipes. The more that you have on your site, and the more it uses keywords, the better chance you have that the automated search engine indexing programs will believe your site is relevant to your keywords and serve you up in a search.
Search engines can't "see" a site. They can only "read" a site. Pretty means nothing to a search engine. What "talks" to a search engine are the words, the content, the material in your site that explains, shares, informs, educates, and babbles. Make sure you have quality word content for a search engine to examine and compare with all the parts and pieces to give you a good score in the various engine's ranking systems.
Content needs to be written with Searchers in mind. Consider how you find information on the Internet and compile the words and phrases someone would use to find your information. Use them more than once as you write, but not in every sentence.
There's been talk in the past couple of years that increasing the number of sites linking to yours is essential to good search engine listings. The result is a lot of link exchanges. For this to be true, the site linking to yours also needs to be relevant to the keywords. Links from unrelated sites won't help.
Regardless of your ranking, you can come up high in the listing by appearing in a site that provides or sells listings. In the example of the motel, if a travel site gets high ranking, then get listed on that site and pay for a premium listing. The same would be true for association sites. Are there forums that deal with your type of merchandise or store? Make postings and include your Website address in your signature.
Conclusions:
- Get listed in Google and DMOZ.org. The second one is a reviewed search engine that is at the heart of other search engines. Its content is licensed in an open fashion allowing it to be syndicated through out the Web and it is used directly in some fashion by almost all of the major search engines.
- Build your content up to have a "deep" site.
- Promote your own site through signs, business cards, letterhead, emails, etc. Getting your own name out there, and having it at the fingertips of consumers, will be beneficial and inexpensive.
- Consider pay-for-click advertising in Google. Google adwords are a good way to move your Website to the top of the list (or side of the list) with a fixed budget in mind.
The next article will cover pay-for-click advertising.
Published in sections: Marketing Articles :: |
