Getting Noticed by The Search Engines
Copyright © Charlie Cook

You've got a web site; and you want to attract lots of people to visit it so you can grow your business. But you're only getting a handful of visitors currently. What is the first thing to do to help people find your site?

A top listing in the search engines, especially in Google, can increase visitors to your web site and help. Let's say you sell web design services. If your site was at the top of the list when people searched for "web design" in Google, it could increase the number of people who know you exist and know what you do, by a factor of ten or more.

You may already know that a top listing in Google will help your business, but at present you are having a tough time even finding your site in the Google search engine listings. What can you do to help Google find your listing and put it as close as possible to the top of the list?

Submitting Your Site

Google uses a "spider" to look for links from one site to another and to add information about additional sites and web pages to its database. Google's "spider" is very active and may already have found your site. If any other site has a link to your site and is listed by Google, Google may have found your site on its own. To find out if your web site is listed, just type in www.yoururl.com into the query box at www.google.com and press search.

If your site isn't listed, you can prompt Google to spider to it at http://www.google.com/addurl.html Submit your primary url and Google will find the rest of your site.

Getting your site listed by Google and the other search engines is the first step. Next you need to make it easy for the search engines to code your site pages correctly and move them towards the top of their listings. Here's how:

Picking the Right Keywords

If you want your prospects to find your site use the words and phrases most commonly associated with your product or service in your web pages. These are called keywords. In selecting your keywords, think about the problem your prospects want to solve. If you sell ergonomic chairs, which will work best, "comfy chairs" or "eliminate back pain" or "ergonomic chairs"?

Pick keywords that people use the most frequently. Test different keywords and keyword combinations and compare the number of searches that result from each using http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Using Your Keywords

To help the search engines know what a web page is about, use your top keywords 6 to 8 times on a page. If you sell a number of different products and services, build individual pages for each set of keywords.

Make sure you don't just repeat your keywords more than 6-8 times. In this case more repetition is not better. Search engines reject pages with too many keyword repetitions. Use natural sounding copy and integrate your keywords so the copy reads well for both visitors and the search engines.

Linking Your Own Keywords

Once you have your individual product or service pages optimized for your keywords, link other pages on your site to them using your keywords again. If you have articles on your site on back pain, link your keywords to the corresponding optimized page from 4 to 5 other pages.

Building Incoming Links to Your Site

The above steps lay the groundwork for getting noticed by the search engines. The next step in getting your site listed at the top of the search engines, and particularly Google, is the number of links found from other sites to your site.

Your site's "link popularity" is one of the most important factors the search engines look at in ranking your site. When the search engines see that hundreds of other web sites have links to yours, they rank your site higher than those with fewer links.

How many links do you have to your site? Use http://www.linkpopularity.com to see. You can also use this site to find the number of links to your competitor's sites, and identify who has links to them.

Getting other people to link to your site is easy. Ask for a link, ideally one using your keywords, and offer a link in return. Create a links.html page and when businesses link to your site, provide a link back.

Link Example:

Attract more clients with Charlie Cook's Free Marketing Plan Guide and grow your business. Learn how to generate more leads and increase sales with the articles and marketing manuals on this site. Highly recommended. http://www.marketingforsuccess.com

Get noticed by the search engines and many more people will visit your web site so you can market your products and services to them.

2004 © In Mind Communications, LLC. All rights reserved.

The author, Charlie Cook, helps service professionals and small business owners attract more clients and be more successful. Sign up for the Free Marketing Plan eBook, '7 Steps to get more clients and grow your business' at http://www.marketingforsuccess.com