Archive for the ‘Internet Marketing’ Category
The Importance of SEO for Your Business Website
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is critical to ensuring that your business website gets in front of the eyes of your potential customers. You may have the best widget out there, but if no one can find your website when they are looking for widgets, you won’t make any sales.
Search engines like Google and Yahoo send out “spiders” to search for content across the World Wide Web to add to their collection. The search engines decide the quality and relevance of the content by the use of keywords, or words that the site uses repeatedly. Too many of the same word repeated over and over again, and the search engine may decide that the content is spam and downgrade its importance in a search. Too few keywords and the search engine may decide that the site is not relevant to that keyword search.
Search engines have become more sophisticated in the last few years about how they rate content. Keywords alone are no longer the sole determinant of a site’s “value”. Keyword phrases and related words and phrases are reviewed for a more sophisticated assessment of what the site is all about.
So what does this mean for your website? In order for your site to stand out and be found, it is important that you practice good SEO when designing and writing for your website.
Start by thinking about what words or phrases your potential customers would use to search for your product or service. For example, if you sell MP3 players, likely keywords and phrases that your customers would use include music storage, downloads, portable music, etc. By ensuring these phrases are woven into the text on your website, you will have a better chance of being ranked higher in search engine searches.
If your product or service must be purchased locally, make sure that your city, state and zip code are repeated often on your site. Customers may search for local stores using the product and the zip code or the city. For example, people might type in “restaurants Boise” into the search to get a list of restaurants in the local area.
Another important way to have your site ranked higher in search engine searches is to have quality inbound links. This means that other websites have links to your website. This strategy will only make a difference if the sites that link to yours are ranked higher than yours by the search engine. The philosophy is that if quality sites are linking to your site, yours must also be a quality site. If you are involved in an industry organization, find out if they can provide a link on their site to yours. You can also exchange links with other sites, but be sure that the links and sites are relevant to yours. If your site contains too many seemingly random links, the search engine may determine that your site must be spam and it can “punish” your site by dropping its ranking.
Taking the time to ensure that your website uses solid SEO practices will provide long term benefits as it will be more discoverable to those who may buy your product or service.