Wondering how to get your website seen? If you are a small business
with big plans you probably had a website built and expected the orders
to roll in. You may have already tried some Pay Per Click advertising
and even paid to be listed in some online directories.
Hopefully you have figured out that people shopping online don’t go
through a directory to find you. They go to a Search Engine, like
Google, Yahoo and MSN Live. They type in a keyword or phrase describing
what they want and the Search Engine gives them a list of websites,
starting with what the Search Engine believes are the most relevant
results.
It is these results, rather being found in the first group of them
that drives traffic to your website. No matter what you have to offer
the key to success online is to be found on the first page of these
search results when someone is looking for what you have to offer.
The great thing about those search results is that they are working
twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred sixty five
days a year. The down side is that if you can’t be found in those
results, your neighbor across the street could be looking for what you
have to offer and you’ll never know.
If you have tons of traditional business experience the things you
have used in the past to promote your store are going to be pretty much
useless online. For instance, before the internet, it was not unusual for a business to spend thousands dollars per month on Yellow page advertising.
When the internet first went public that business had to be sure that those ads pointed to their
website. Now after only a few years, most households don’t
even know where their phonebook is anymore.
If you have a traditional store, say sports equipment, you may have
a few selections for athletic shoes. In your store you may display
these shoes according to cost. The typical online shopper is not
looking for every shoe you have to offer. They are searching for one
brand and one style at every store that offers that one shoe.
A local sporting goods store owner who complained that he would
typically get one of the high end shoes from his supplier and it would
never sell until he discounted it at the end of the season. Where that
same shoe would have customers lining up around the block in the big
city, hoping to get a chance to buy that pair of shoes as soon as it
was delivered.
Putting his inventory online allows the kids in the big city to find
the shoes they want regardless of what small town store has them. It
takes a bit to wrap your head around the concept, but suffice it to say
that the online shopper is going to be more specific about what they
are looking for and they don’t really care where your store actually is
as long as you can get the product they want delivered to them.
If you are a traditional store that wants to sell your products
online, it is going to be vital to your success to offer your products
from the top down rather than trying to use your website to sell the
stuff you could not move in your store. The structure of your website
has to break down products and categories and present those images in
an appealing way. A good SEO will be able to research the products you have to offer that match up
with the hottest searches performed and help you to target your
campaign.
Again, just having a cool website is not enough. You are going to
need to build that website in a Search Friendly manner. Let’s use the
shoes one more time. Say you put a great picture of the latest shoe on
your website. It is the very one that kids across the country would go
get a job for. But if all you have is a picture, the Search Spider
can’t read your picture. It is not human. It searches for text. Text in
the form of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and in the form of
content on your page. These are spider food.
The Search Spider goes through your site, following your linking
structure, recording what it finds and takes it back to the Search
Engine Database. The Search Engine runs that data through its algorithm
to determine what searches your data might be relevant to and how
relevant your data is compared to other websites it has recorded.
Confused?
What’s it all mean? The world has changed my friend. Changed in ways
we could not predict. If we had computers in
the eighteen hundreds, they would have predicted that every city in
America would now be twenty feet deep in horse manure.
Your website is proof that you are trying to be a player in the new
way of doing business. But now you have to index your site in the way
that can be found by the Search Engines, your products can be
identified and produced as relevant when a search is done.
Rather than showing a picture of your product and writing a caption
under it that says something like “This is a very popular item this
year,” use the terms that someone would type in when they are looking
for this exact product. This will more than likely take some effort and
refining but diligence and persistence pay off.
The other thing that takes some understanding and patience is to
know that the Search Spider does not live on your website. He has other
places to go too. You have to allow him time to get around to checking
out your changes.
Don’t be afraid to do some investigative work on your own. Check out
your competition. See how they describe the products on their site. A
little homework on your part will also help you get an understanding of
what you’re up against.
If you are using Pay Per Click advertising they will provide Keyword
Suggestion Tools. But please use caution. These tools are really
focusing on getting you to pay to show up in as many searches as they
can. Although that might sound like exactly what you want too, the
truth is that aside from being expensive, if your site does not exactly
match to what the searcher is looking for, you are wasting money.
A Search Optimization Service will be help you focus your energy and resources in the areas that will
get you more conversions because you will be showing up for the most
relevant searches all the time rather than just when you can afford Pay
Per Click advertising.
