Having A Website Is Just The First Step
While having a website today is as important today as being in the phone book and advertising in the local newspaper used to be, a website without any visitors is useless. Generating traffic and consistently appearing in the top rankings of the search engines for your targeted keywords is crucial if you want your website to be successful.
This means, in addition to having a website with nice design and valuable content you need to search engine optimize it. In order to rank high in the search results of Google, Yahoo and Bing a website needs a to be optimized ‘on-site’ and ‘off-site’.
On-Site Search Engine Optimization
On-site search engine optimization needs to be done while your website is being created. This means, you have to decide about the ‘keywords’ you want to target. If you are e.g. a dog walker in San Diego County, California, you would want your website to show up on the first pages on Google, Yahoo and Bing every time somebody searches for ‘dog walker San Marcos’, ‘Carlsbad doggy day care’ or ‘dog walking Vista, CA’. So you need to optimize the ‘invisible elements’ and the content of your website for these search terms.
Off-Site Search Engine Optimization
If your website is optimized ‘on-site’ chances are good that it will be positioned high in the search engines if strategic ‘off-site’ optimization is done in a regular basis. This means, you or somebody you pay to do it, needs to consistently ‘promote’ your website online by building ‘backlinks’ from other websites to your site. The more backlinks from high ranking quality websites your site has, the higher it will rank in the search engines. Off-site search engine optimization can be done without any costs for advertising, but it is very time consuming and needs to be done on a consistent basis, so you need to set up a strategic plan to follow, either yourself or by outsourcing it.
Instead of doing off-site search engine optimization you can also pay Google, Yahoo or Bing for clicks to your website. By paying for advertising programs like ‘Google Adwords’ your website will instantly show up on the first page of the search results, on the top and along the right side to the ‘free organic’ search results. Depending on your business, the price you have to pay when somebody clicks on the link to your site varies, starting from $.01 all the way up to $50 and more for very competitive fields. If that person clicking on your link leaves your website without action you just lost your money.
If you learn how to effectively search engine optimize your website, you may be able to rank it at first positions while your competition still has no clue why their website is nowhere to be found on Google.
We dare to say that even after reading this short introductory post, you already know more than 90% of all persons having a website and even more than 60% of all professional web designers. Search Engine Optimization is a complicated mystery in many website owners minds, but if it’s done correctly and continuously, it is a sure-fire way of getting positioned within the first search results – and you can imagine what this will do to your business!
