Why have a website if no one can find it?
Your company website is the best marketing and sales tool that you will use, bar none—but not if no one can find you. Most companies are concerned with design, colors, logos, and other visuals, but know little about how to make their site show up when someone searches for their product or service using Google or any other search engine.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is something of a black art, mostly because the search engine companies make the rules about what they think is important on a web page, and those rules change frequently. That being said, there are things that you can do today to potentially better your position in search results:
1. Title Tag: This is the text that appears at the top-left corner of your browser when you visit a web page. This text should reflect the content that is on the page you are viewing. If the page is about your dog grooming business in Portland, the tag should say something like “Portland Dog Grooming”. Each title should be unique and specific.
2. Keyword-Rich Content: Make your individual pages as specific and keyword-rich as possible. If your page is about Kona Coffee, the content on the page should say “Kona Coffee” as much as possible, and of course, so should your Title Tag.
3. Inbound Links: You score extra points if there are links from popular sites to your website. Make sure that you have a link from any site that is appropriate to your website. These may be from associations that you are a member of, business partners, etc. One way to develop links is to join online forums that are related to your business and post questions or answer the questions of others. In the footer of your posts, you can include a link to your website. Do not subscribe to link farm services— they are the fastest way to get your site dropped from Google’s site index.
4. Change Your Content Frequently: Search engines like new content. If your site content has not changed in the past 3 months, Google will consider it a “stale” site and will delay coming back, or will stop coming all together.
If all of this sounds great, but you do not have the time to do it yourself, give us a call and we can apply the same best practices that we use for our websites to yours. Give us a call at 503-241-3499 and we will get you where you need to be, and get your phone ringing again. Δ