Doing business on the internet is not much different than doing business on Main Street. The various elements of any normal business have to be met both on the internet as well as Main Street. Putting up a business building intended to sell women’s fashions in the middle of a corn field is probably not a good move. When you build a website it’s like that store in the corn field, no one knows that you just uploaded your website (like finishing that beautiful store).
You need traffic (potential customers) at least out on the sidewalk looking through your windows. In the internet world that means being in the search results presented to those searching for your goods or services. These days Google is so good at returning useful results to their customers (the person doing the search) that there is seldom the need to look on the 2nd or 3rd page of results. This is why Google gets the lions share (85%) of search engine users. So being on Google’s first page of results for your chosen keyword is the same as having your store positioned right on Main Street.
So how do you get on Google’s “Main Street”? First of all you must have a website that is focused on no more than 5 keywords or keyword phrases. Your content (the words on your site) must involve the use of the keywords worked into very good information. The content should be written for your human visitors, not Google. Your visitors must find your content worth reading. Then look to see how you can work the keywords into the text in a way that still flows naturally when reading it.
There are many on site search engine optimization (SEO) things you can do to improve your situation. The easiest things that you can do are the following:
1. Be sure to include your keyword in the Title of your page. Each page should focus on a separate keyword with an appropriate title.
2. Your description (one of the meta tags in the header of the HTML for your website) will be picked up by most search engines and this is the snippet that searchers get to see. This is your ad, write it to entice your “Window Shoppers” to come into your store and look at your goods or services.
3. If you haven’t secured your domain name yet, try to get a domain name with your keyword in it. It is easier to rank in the search engines for the keyword “emergency plumber Ottawa” (people using this keyword really are ready customers) if your domain name was something like www.bestemergencyplumberottawa.com . This might seem a little unwieldy but you can tell them when they visit your site that your company name is Immaculate Plumbing Services or whatever. If you already have your domain and website built, you might consider owning a second or third site with keywords in the domain just to funnel traffic back to your main website.
The above things can be accomplished in a few hours, but the part that takes a lot of time is the promotion of your website. Without promotion it will stay out in the corn field. What is promotion? Well on the internet it is simply having many places or websites that refer back to your website. It might be a very timely article you write with links in it back to your website. This article might be picked up by some of the big traffic sites like MSN or Sympatico and you will get huge amounts of traffic. Posting articles to article compilation sites will give you at least one back link from that article to your website. Join various online social network groups like facebook or the thousands of others that are not so well known. You will be allowed to fill out your profile, and most often are allowed to include a link to your website.
Every link pointing back to your website is a vote for your website. The search engines will find these back links and will credit your site with them. The more back links the higher your website will be in the search engine results.
This can be an onerous task for most website owners. After all you are probably up to your ears in the day to day management and work of owning your own business. Learning a whole new skill set for just one website is not high on your work priorities. It is usually smart to delegate something like this to those with the knowledge and skill to do the tedious but necessary work of building your back links. Honeywood Promotions provides affordable website promotion that will pull your website up the search engine rankings.
