Are you tired of trying to get your website to bring in the new business that you expected when you started it? Are you sick of making changes in hopes of fixing it? Are you tired of trying to get the search engines to list your website in their search results?
You are not alone!
Most small business owners have the same issues with their website. You’ve read books, blogs and articles on how to generate traffic to your site but still no luck. I hear these problems from new clients all the time, so I’m going to try to give you some easy, practical advice that will help you start to turnaround your website.
What to do first.
The first thing we need to focus on is getting people to your website. Let’s face it; if no one is visiting your site, you can’t sell them anything. So how do we do this?
I’m going to assume that we are trying to target visitors who are searching the internet for your type of product or service. So the first thing we need to do is make sure the search engines know you exist. Each of the major search engines, Google, Yahoo! And Bing, allow you to submit your website’s URL.
You can submit your website at these links:
- Google – http://www.google.com/addurl/
- Yahoo! – http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
- Bing – http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx
Hopefully, after the search engines have crawled your website, they will index some of your web pages.
This brings me to our next topic…
…Search Engine Optimization
What do I mean by “Search Engine Optimization”? Making sure the content on the individual web page is as specific as possible to only one main subject. Most people think the search engines rank your entire website, but they actually rank each individual web page separately. When they crawl your website they look at each page, strip away any pictures or graphics and only look at the written words.
Here is an example:
How a normal web page looks.
Web page as the search engine's see it.
As you can see above; the first page is a normal web page and the second is only what the search engines see. So it is very important that the content on any specific web page stays as narrowly focused as possible. The search engine needs to know exactly what the page is speaking about so when a user enters a search term the search engines can return the most accurate information.
The Web Page Title
Another important item is the title of your web page. The page title is a “Meta Tag” that is in the Head section of your HTML code. It is what shows on the browsers page tab and at the top of the browser. The search engines pay attention to this Meta tag so it is very important that each page has a different title and the title should be short, but describe what the page is about.
The Web Page Description
Like the page title, the Meta Tag for Description is very helpful in letting both the search engines and the people searching know what the page is about. This information is very often what the search engines will use when showing your page in their results. It is the short sentence of two that follows the link in the search results.
The Page URL
The page URL is another important factor when trying to get your web pages listed in the search results. The page URL should be descriptive. You don’t want to name your pages page1.html, page2.html and so on. You want to give them a meaningful URL. If the web page is about black widgets, the URL should be black_widgets.html. It’s another point in getting that elusive first page result with the search engines.
Local Search
More and more the search engines are returning more localized search results. What do I mean by localized search results? The search engines know what geographical area you’re in when you search. They can tell this by looking at your IP number. They are using this more and more, so it’s a good idea to let them know where your place of business is.
We accomplish this by adding a Meta Tag in the Head of the web page’s HTML. The tag looks like this; <meta name=”geographic location” content=”YOUR LOCATION” />. This tells the search engines exactly where you’re located.
Conclusion
What we’ve discussed here is only the tip of the iceberg, but it’s a start. We didn’t discuss the very important topic of inbound links. I hope this begins to help you drive traffic to your website and as always, if you have any questions please email them to me at info@123webconnect.com.
We here at 123webconnect are available for a no obligation telephone conference to discuss how we can help you reach your business’ online goals. Give us a call, 845-877-0559.
Good Luck