Optimize Now, Or Get Lost!
It used to be that designing an attractive website to promote your
company and products was fairly straightforward. After you designed
your site and built a few keywords into the code, you would simply
submit the site to the search engines or a directory, grab an iced tea
and wait for the traffic.
That model worked fairly well in 1996 but if you are still
following this strategy in 2005, you are effectively non-existent on
the internet. Why? There are now dozens of search engines and
directories and somewhere in the area of 80 million websites on the
www. Still think folks are finding you?
So how does the average consumer find your company? They type in a
couple of keywords into a search engine and are then presented with
thousands of your competitors’ websites.
Let’s say your company is Walt’s Widgets. You have a pretty website
with pictures of your widgets, a nice “about us” page, maybe some
employee pictures and a picture of your beautiful building. It all
looks good on the website but when Mr. Consumer types “widgets” into
Google, poor old Walt’s Widgets is on page 620 of the search results!
How can this be? Your site is not optimized for the search engines
and is not being indexed by the search engine spiders and robots so you
aren’t being seen!
Research has shown that the average surfer will only review the
first three pages of search results and will not drill down any deeper.
If you are on page 62, you effectively don’t exist!
Surfers and search engines view a website completely differently
and for you to appear on the first three pages of search results is
critical to your continued profitability. You must know what the search
engines are looking for, what relevance they are placing on your
keywords, what elements of your site have a “welcome sign” for the
spiders and, most importantly, know what keywords the surfer is using
in his search. Just because you sell widgets it doesn’t mean that
“widgets” is the term being used the most by surfers when looking for
your product.
SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is the process of analyzing
keywords, reviewing search trends, analyzing link popularity, building
code tags, analyzing your competition, optimizing pages within your
website to be search engine friendly, editing web pages, submissions to
directories and search engines, and reciprocal link building…just to
name a few.
What you are after with SEO is not getting the highest number of
website visitors. What you are actually seeking are qualified site
visitors who have an interest in buying what you’re selling.
Professional SEO can help deliver a targeted audience to your business.
After all, what would you rather have? 500 site visitors with a 1%
conversion rate or 100 site visitors with a 10% conversion rate?
Professional SEO is critical to your company’s web presence so if
your site was designed by your summer intern in 2002 or your
bookkeeper’s son as part of his high school “media class”, I assure you
that you have some work to do.
Start with a good website design featuring good content and
navigation. Then, utilize an SEO professional who can wring the most
out of your website and deliver dollars to your doorstep.
Author:
Allan Gunnneson is the CEO of Gunner Web Group - www.gunnnerweb.com, a website design and marketing company based in Kansas.
Online reprint rights granted as long as the article is published in its entirety, including links - www.gunnerweb.com. Copyright © Gunner Web Group, 2005 Terms:Articles may be reprinted provided content is not edited and links are kept live
Source: www.articledepot.co.uk
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