by Mike Boman
Wondering how to get your website seen? If you are a small business with big plans you probably had a website built and expected the orders to roll in. You may have already tried some Pay Per Click advertising and even paid to be listed in some online directories.
By now, you have most likely figured out that people shopping online do not want to go through a directory to find you. They go through search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live. They type in a keywords and phrases that describe what they want and the search engines give them a list of websites, starting with what the search engine believes is the most relevant result.
Being in the first group of results is what will bring traffic to your website. It doesn’t matter what you have to offer, the key to success online is to be found on the first page of these search results when someone is looking for what you have to offer.
The great thing about those search results is that they are working every hour of every day. The bad thing is that if you cant be found in those top few results, your neighbor across the street could be looking for what you have to offer and they’ll never find you.
Things that you have used in the past for traditional business experience, are pretty much useless online. Before the internet, businesses might have spent thousands of dollars per month on Yellow page advertising. When the internet first went public that business had to be sure that those ads pointed to their website. After only a few years, most families don’t even know where their phone book is anymore.
If you have a traditional store, say sports equipment, you may have a few selections for athletic shoes. In your store you may display these shoes according to cost. The typical online shopper is not looking for every shoe you have to offer. They are searching for one brand and one style at every store that offers that one shoe.
In a small town, a local store owner is probably complaining that he has a specific item that he bought from his supplier, and that it will not sell until he discounts it at the end of the season. However, this same item is being sold in the big city and has customers lining up around the block hoping to get a chance to buy this specific item as soon as it is delivered.
Putting his inventory online allows the kids in the big city to find the shoes they want regardless of what small town store has them. It takes a bit to wrap your head around the concept, but suffice it to say that the online shopper is going to be more specific about what they are looking for and they dont really care where your store actually is as long as you can get the product they want delivered to them.
If you are a traditional store that wants to sell your products online, instead of trying to sell things online that you can not move in your store, it is going to be vital to your success to offer your products from the top down. Your website needs to promote your products in an appealing way. A good SEO will be able to match up the hottest searches performed and help you target your campaign by researching products.
Again, just having a cool website is not enough. You are going to need to build that website in a Search Friendly manner. Lets use the shoes one more time. Say you put a great picture of the latest shoe on your website. It is the very one that kids across the country would go get a job for. But if all you have is a picture, the Search Spider cant read your picture. It is not human. It searches for text. Text in the form of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and in the form of content on your page. These are spider food.
The Search Spider searches your site, following your linking structure and recording what it finds then it takes it back to the Search Engine Database. The Search Engine then runs that data through its algorithm to determine what searches your might be relevant to your site and how relevant your data is compared to other websites it has recorded.
What does this mean? The world has changed and is more advanced than it was 10 or even 5 years ago. It has changed in ways we could not ever predict. If we had computers in the eighteen hundreds, they would have predicted that every city in America would now be twenty feet deep in horse manure.
Your website is proof that you are trying to be a contender in the new way of doing business. Now you have to index your site so search engines will find it. Your products will then be identifies and produced as relevant search results when the search is over.
Rather than showing a picture of your product and writing a caption under it that says something like This is a very popular item this year, use specific terms that someone would search for when they are looking for this exact product. This will take a little more effort and refining but diligence and persistence pay off.
The other thing that takes some understanding and patience is to know that the Search Spider does not live on your website. He has other places to go too. You have to allow him time to get around to checking out your changes.
Dont be afraid to do some investigative work on your own. Check out your competition. See how they describe the products on their site. A little homework on your part will also help you get an understanding of what youre up against.
If you are using Pay Per Click advertising they will provide Keyword Suggestion Tools. But please use caution. These tools are really focusing on getting you to pay to show up in as many searches as they can. Although that might sound like exactly what you want too, the truth is that aside from being expensive, if your site does not exactly match to what the searcher is looking for, you are wasting money.
A Search Optimization Service will be help you focus your energy and resources in the areas that will get you more conversions because you will be showing up for the most relevant searches all the time rather than just when you can afford Pay Per Click advertising.