When I built my first website in 1996, promoting the site consisted of sending out a mass emailing announcing the ‘launch’! Soon enough, the site appeared in AltaVista search. We submitted the url to various web directories and that was it. The site was up!
Times have changed, and since then millions more websites have been added to the world wide web.
One service that you may not be aware of but you receive automatically by being a client of Tom Stier Web Development is our website promotion services. All the sites we build are optimized from the start for search engine indexing.
Most users of Google Search enter keyphrases, since they know from experience that searches on single keywords can bring too many results that are not really relevant to what they are interested in.
So, if someone in Manhattan was looking to find a business or service in western Massachusetts, they would likely search on “(business or service) berkshires massachusetts” or perhaps would even narrow it down further “(business or service) great barrington massachusetts”
In a sense, this increased sophistication level of the average searcher can work for you. A more targeted search, with geographic area included, can return a much smaller set of results to choose from.
As time goes on, competition in certain keyphrases increases. Perhaps you find that your ranking in the organic search portion ( thats the part under Google’s Paid AdWords section) of the results has fallen below some newcomer.
Google uses a complex and ever-changing method to determine which web pages best match what it believes the searcher is looking for. They also factor in their own bottom line in services such as AdWords, which we’ll examine in a future post.
The best way for you to increase traffic to your site is to have text content directly on the site pages that contains the keyphrases your customers are searching on.
Knowing what are the best keyphrases (and realizing they change) requires knowledge of where to research and how to find out what can work best for you. It’s a time-consuming process, as is writing content that contains those key phrases, but that’s the way you’re going to get more traffic to your site.
Beyond this bedrock requirement, there are a number of techniques and strategies for increasing your business visibility on the web.