Small Business Resource: All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go

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November 15, 2006

All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go

If you have a great website, but no search engine or web presence it is like getting all dressed up on Friday night without anywhere to go.

How many people do you know that put on their best duds to prepare for a Friday night on the couch? Probably none, but website owners do it everyday when it comes to their business sites. They spend thousands – if not tens of thousands – of dollars building incredibly ornate and functional websites but they are missing one important, if not the most important element of all for their website: TRAFFIC.

If you build it they will come...

Having a nice website does not guarantee quality traffic. Driving traffic to your site takes work day in and day out. Did you see that movie with Kevin Costner "Field of Dreams"? If you did it, then I am sure you would agree that it was a great movie. One of the lines in the movie went something like this... "If you build it, they will come". Well, that may work in Hollywood, but it does not work so well online where there are over 18 billion websites (3 for every human walking the planet today and growing at an exponential rate.)

Why is traffic so important? Traffic is essentially the flow of people who are actively searching your website for either your product or service. If you are most relevant to what the client is looking for and are able match the client's needs with your product or service, then a marriage takes place and you will turn a visitor into a customer. Ka-ching!

Do you sell gadgets? Then you want everyone looking for gadgets, not widgets, to find you. Problem is, there may be thousands of other companies selling gadgets. You need to distinguish yourself on the search engine placement list. This could mean spending hours of your precious business time running reports, tweaking your ads and adding content to your website. You can use your time selling your goods while we spend our time doing all the "technical stuff" and get you higher up the search engine placement list.

Search engines work as the yellow pages of the information age, connecting those looking for something with those selling something.
In fact, search engines are used more than newspapers and yellow pages these days.

One of the great benefits of advertising through search engines advertising through search engines is that you can control where your ad shows up on the web. Once the yellow pages are printed you are locked into the ad space for a year.

You can constantly change what your web site and what your online ads say because they exist in a dynamic environment. The yellow pages are static. What if you run an ad in the yellow pages that does not sell?
You can't change it for an entire year. This could be potential business suicide in the information age.

Even if your visitors don't buy your products directly from your website, many consumers begin the buying process online as a way to research products, compare prices and make decisions. They then head to their local brick and mortar store to buy the product they researched. Even if you don't sell your product or service online, it is imperative that every business have a well stocked website – stocked full of information.

You may have heard the term "search engine optimization" or SEO as you began to research online entrepreneurship. Your website, if created for SEO, is your single best and least expensive advertisement. Search engines are constantly sending out crawlers, like roots from a tree, to search the vast Internet for content. While the actual measuring stick they use to compute the strength of content is proprietary and heavily guarded, we do know they place sites with the following features (or lack thereof) higher on the search engine placement:

• Original content – write or hire a writer to create content that is unique to your site about your product, your industry or your service.

• Keyword dense content – we'll help you discover which keywords are being searched and together we'll create content rich in those words.

• Readable content – articles should be written for a reader, not for a search engine. They will lower your search engine placement if they find keywords strung together. Example: "Use our green gadget to pick potatoes" scores higher on the search engine placement test than "green gadget potatoes".

• Text sites are best – crawlers can't read pictures, graphics or fancy features. If you must have these, offer everything in written form as well.

• Single frames are a must – crawlers can't read frames so avoid them.
With so many other ways to display multiple menus, pages and section your web pages, frames aren't needed anymore.

While these "rules" seem very simple, they are actually quite complex.
Sure, you could do it on your own but we have the tools in place ready to put to work. We know how to achieve higher search engine placement, that's our business. You know how to sell your gadgets, that's yours.

So don your best duds and get ready to head out. We'll help you find your way to the bank on Friday night, and every night.

Owner of 3 profitable web businesses, Joshua Geary also helps his clients improve their search engine placement through the proper use of Search Engine Optimization Services - SEO. To get more information about his company visit his website, BestOnlineResults.com.

Posted by David at November 15, 2006 9:34 PM