You’ve got a website; and you want to attract lots of people to visit it so you can grow your business. But you’re only getting a handful of visitors currently. What is the first thing to do to help people find your site?
A top listing in the search engines, especially in Google, can increase visitors to your website and help. Let’s say you sell web design services. If your site was at the top of the list when people searched for “web design” in Google, it could increase the number of people who know you exist and know what you do, by a factor of ten or more.
You may already know that a top listing in Google will help your business, but at present, you are having a tough time even finding your site in the Google search engine listings. What can you do to help Google find your listing and put it as close as possible to the top of the list?
Submitting Your Site
Getting your site listed by Google and the other search engines is the first step. Next, you need to make it easy for the search engines to code your site pages correctly and move them towards the top of their listings. Here’s how:
Picking the Right Keywords
If you want your prospects to find your site use the words and phrases most commonly associated with your product or service in your web pages. These are called keywords. In selecting your keywords, think about the problem your prospects want to solve. If you sell ergonomic chairs, which will work best, “comfy chairs” or “eliminate back pain” or “ergonomic chairs”?
Using Your Keywords
To help the search engines know what a web page is about, use your top keywords 6 to 8 times on a page. If you sell a number of different products and services, build individual pages for each set of keywords.
Make sure you don’t just repeat your keywords more than 6-8 times. In this case, more repetition is not better. Search engines reject pages with too many keyword repetitions. Use natural-sounding copy and integrate your keywords, so the copy reads well for both visitors and the search engines.
Linking Your Own Keywords
Once you have your individual product or service pages optimized for your keywords, link other pages on your site to them using your keywords again. If you have articles on your site on back pain, link your keywords to the corresponding optimized page from 4 to 5 other pages.
Building Incoming Links to Your Site
The above steps lay the groundwork for getting noticed by the search engines. The next step in getting your site listed at the top of the search engines, and particularly Google, is the number of links found from other sites to your site.
Your site’s “link popularity” is one of the most important factors the search engines look at in ranking your site. When the search engines see that hundreds of other websites have links to yours, they rank your site higher than those with fewer links.
Getting other people to link to your site is easy. Ask for a link, ideally one using your keywords, and offer a link in return. Create a links.html page and when businesses link to your site, provide a link back.
Get noticed by the search engines and many more people will visit your website so you can market your products and services to them.
