Online Search is On; Is Your Website Ready?
Teena Rose is a columnist, personal branding expert, public speaker, and career-marketing guru. She's author of a book on "How to Start a Resume Writing Business," entitled "Starting a Home- or Office-based Resume Business" ... a major tool you'll need to start, operate, and profit from a resume service. The book covers all the "nuggets" you'll need during the start-up and daily operations of a resume writing business.
If you're the owner of a brick-and-mortar store, your business depends on getting customers through the door. If you run an online business, increasing traffic on your website is priority No. 1. And the three letters synonymous with expanding the amount of visitors to your site are SEO.
Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the results of a search engine. The higher a site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that site will be visited by a user. So it doesn't take a Master's degree from Harvard to figure out that more visitors means more business. On a base level, it's like flipping through the phone book. The ads near the front of a particular section will likely generate more business than those in the back.
The owners of Web-based businesses are on a constant quest to improve their standings with search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo, and there are several ways to accomplish this. Rankings can be influenced by the page title, meta tag description, the text on a site and meta tag keywords, which are targeted phrases.
"The basics of search engine optimization are surprisingly basic," says Peter Kent in his book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. "If fact, you may be able to make small changes to your website that make a huge difference in your site's ranking in the search results."
What Kent is trying to say in his Dummies book is that it doesn't take a genius to improve their search engine standings. If you're just starting to create a website, it's best to start from the beginning. Do the preparation by defining the keywords that will reflect your site the best. And there's no need to include the entire Webster's dictionary into your keyword list since most search engines have limits on the amount of meta keywords that can be viewed. Therefore, the keywords should be short, sweet, and as specific as possible.
If you want to nail the best keywords for your site, there is professional help. Wordtracker.com, which puts out a weekly keyword report of the top 500, helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant and likely to be used the most by search engine visitors. For instance, if have a website relating to golf products, Wordtracker finds keywords and their combinations, and then ranks those words by popularity.
The title of a Web page says it all. After keywords have been established, include the two or three most important words in the title, which should be between 60 and 70 characters long. A title that's longer will likely get cut off when indexed by the search engines, resulting in a ranking that plummets.
The page title is only the beginning. The body copy on Web pages is even more relevant than meta tags. Search engines look at this text and any applicable content will improve rankings more than just meta tags.
If a higher ranking can mean more profits for your Web business, keep in mind that not all search engines are created alike. While you may rank high in Google or MSN, you may find yourself nonexistent on Yahoo. Search engines have different methods of ranking, so don't avoid the small ones and always stay on top of the technology in order to get complete optimization. Sales & Marketing
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