Making Sure People Find Your Site

When it comes to owning and operating a successful online business there are three very important words – Search Engine Optimization.  It’s how people find your website because if they can’t find you, they can’t buy from you and that after all is what business is all about.

Step One:  Understand what search engines do.  Search engines are essentially programs which index all of the pages on the internet.  When someone enters a phrase into their search engine of choice, that search engine searches their database and displays their results.  Different search engines store what they index differently.  For example, Google stores a portion of the webpage and Yahoo stores every word on the page.  How they store this information affects the results.

Your goal as a business owner is to achieve the highest results possible because people typically only look at the first couple of pages

Step Two:  Finding Your Keywords

Keywords are the words your prospects use to find your products, services, and information.  Keywords can be one or two words, for example, “Miami vacation.” Keywords can also be a phrase of many words, for example, “Miami Family Vacation On a Budget.”  With more than 80% of internet users researching purchases online before they spend a dime, the right keywords make all the difference.

To find the right keywords:

Brainstorm ideas.  What words do you think people use to find your website and your products or services?

Take advantage of keyword research tools like WordTracker and the Google keyword tool to do a bit of specific keyword analysis.

Step Three:  Placing Keywords

We mentioned in the beginning that search engines scan the internet and index web pages.  They look in a few key places including:

* The Title,
* The Headers,
* The Body Content
* The Meta Tags.

Step Four:  Add Content

Content is what the search engines search.  Therefore it pays to upload relevant and keyword optimized content on a regular basis.  It’ll motivate the search engines to index your site and those pages thus pushing you up on the search engine rankings.

Here are some of the types of content you might consider using on your site:

* Articles
* Special reports
* Interviews with an industry expert
* Product reviews
* Discussion forums
* Blog posts
* “How to” guides
* Tips lists
* Training courses

Step Five:  Get Links

Search engines typically skip listing websites if they do not have relevant incoming links.  A link is a website address which someone can click on to go to another site – in this case your site.

There are different types of links.

Standard link – typically considered a direct link which looks like a basic website address – www.yourwebsitehere.com

Text link – link where the website address is embedded in the text.

Deep link – a link to an internal web page, for example an article published on a website, rather than the home page.

In order for a link to provide value it must be both relevant and credible.  Meaning, the site linking to you has a lot of visitors and a lot of incoming links the search engine will give credibility and weight to the value of that link and it must also be in a website which shares a common interest or complimentary subject matter to your website.

Take these five steps and you’ll be well on your way to making sure people are able to find your website.  It’s one of the most powerful business building strategies available.