Search Engines, Love Them or Hate Them All Businesses Need Them

One of the trickiest things to master, or even just get a lose grasp on, for small business owners and web designers is the art of SEO. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of making your company’s website a favorite of the search engines, most specifically Google. Conducting internet searches using Google, Yahoo and Bing primarily has become the favorite (and almost sole) way consumers research their favorite products and the best places to get them. With a new and better search engines coming out all the time, like Google’s Caffeine, this trend is only going to get stronger. You may be thinking to yourself, I don’t really need this, I can survive on just putting out a good product and having great customer service. You are going to need those things as well, but on their own they won’t be enough. Even the companies with the most recognizable brand names (Apple, Microsoft, Toyota, etc.) are without a doubt investing time and money in search engine marketing. Chances are your company already has a website, but if it doesn’t, find yourself a web site designer and get one immediately. After this is done, think about your target market and who you are trying to sell your products to and try imagine how they may go about an internet search for products like yours. What you are doing now is identifying potential keywords for you to target that will help get your website a high ranking with the search engines. You can use a tool like Google’s Adwords to help you figure out which keywords are best for you. Getting a high ranking is important because when someone “Google’s” the keywords you have chosen, you want your listing to appear as close to the top of the results as possible. This will help you get more clicks to your site which may lead to more conversions, but not many people will find your site if it shows up in the results on page 202 of 350. Remember to choose popular keywords that people actually use but at the same time don’t target the most common ones because you will be competing with too many other companies for them. Once you have identified the keywords you want to go after it’s time to get them onto your page. The most important thing to remember here is to treat the content of your site like it is a newspaper story and put the most information at the top. This is where you want to place your keywords, preferably in the header or sub-header of the page, so when a user who has searched that word clicks on your site, they see it right away. The average person who visits isn’t going to read everything on the page, rather they will skim over the information looking for what they searched for. The farther down the page they have to look, especially if it’s past the fold (the location on the page where the user must scroll down), the more likely it is they will move on to the next search result. This doesn’t mean though you erratically throw the keywords in as often as humanly possible all over your page. Believe it or not the search engine will recognize that is what you have done and it may get you black listed or at least penalized with a low ranking. Even more importantly though, it makes the page unattractive to the users who click on it. You can have the number one ranking and get a higher click rate than every other site on the web, but if it’s not user friendly and doesn’t read well, none of those clicks will become conversions. Conversions after all, are why you have a website to begin with.