Congratulations! You’ve invested the time, energy, and resources to design and develop a website for your enterprise. You now have a “home “on the Internet—a virtual real estate. Website addresses are called “domain” names, and there are many similarities between a website and a home. If your site has been well-built with strong programming and software, it will withstand attacks from hackers trying to blow the house down. If it’s hosted in a high-quality server environment, this “good neighborhood” will provide uptime and security. Your website creates a good image with your customers and your competitors, but the best thing it can do is to help build your business. To do that, people have to find your site. There are about 200 Million domains registered. How do you get found among so many sites?
Organic SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) or PPC( Pay Per Click)?
Most people–including your prospective customers–find websites by using a search engine. Google is the most popular, with about 400,000 searches per day. As most people know, you can pay to have your website’s info displayed prominently on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages),while the rest of the page is filled with info about websites that appear organically—the search has found them, and no ad fee has been paid. If you have paid to have your ad appear, you will be charged every time someone clicks on the ad , which takes the person to your site. Thus the name, PPC—Pay per Click. The other websites listed–the organically-generated ones–will also take the person to their website, but there is no charge when that happens. Search engines are smart, and they remember. They’ll remember, for example, that today, when someone searched for “homes for sale in Montgomery County,” it found your site organically. Next time somebody does that same search, it will quickly post your website’s info. In fact, your info will gradually get listed higher and higher on the page. Your website builds equity in the organic search! If you use a PPC program, once you stop paying, you were not building equity—it’s like you were renting that spot on the page, not earning it. Once the PPC payment ends, it’s like you are brand new and your info goes to the back of the line.
Make Your Website Work for You
You can improve the performance of your website on organic searches by making it easier for the search engines to find you. Search engines are smart, and they have “spider” programs that crawl around the web gathering information… Cute, eh? Spiders crawling around the web? Spider programs look for info that will help them link searches to websites. So, they look for words and phrases that are typical of what people type into the search for box. Most of the time, people type in pretty simple words or phrases that are related to the target of their search. We call these words “keywords.” To make it easy for the search engines to find you, you need to place appropriate keywords in the content of your site. Picture the spider program scanning the pages in your site, reading what it sees. What words and phrases might jump out at it? For example, you might want to have titles on your pages and paragraphs, and place keywords at the beginning of the title. As you can see, the concept of keywords is simple. Next some work needs to be done to develop a program. The first step is to determine what keywords in your business processes that people will be typing —those things for which we are seeking prospects and leads. As we said above, for a realtor, it might be “homes for sale in Montgomery County,” or “homes for sale in Boyertown.” Determine the markets , products, and services, in which you want to compete most aggressively. What are our priority strategic market targets? Then, the next step is to imagine what words or phrases people would type into the “search for” box in the search engine to try to find websites for providers of those services or products—you and your competitors.
Put Your Website to Work
Once you have determined what keywords the prospects will enter, then it’s simply a job of placing the selected keywords in the content of your site. As we mentioned above, you may want to use titles for pages or paragraphs, but just including them in the prose content will also get noticed by the spider programs. You should not sacrifice the quality of the writing in your content to include the keywords. The content has another, more critical job to do—-Attracting the prospect and motivating them to contact you.
Once you have added the keywords to your site, they will start to work for you, and they will continue to keep working, 24/7/365——your website is doing the work! For Free!
Building Equity vs. Immediate Results
For those of you for whom instant gratification is too slow, however, there is one drawback to using an organic program as opposed to a PPC–Like most things with genuine value, it takes time for the organic, equity-building program to work. It can take up to 16-20 months for a keyword program to show results in where your info appears on the SERPs. With the pay-now PPC programs, you’ll see your ad placed very quickly. Expensive, paying a premium for immediate results vs, do it the old-fashioned way and working hard for lasting results that take a while . Renting vs. owning and letting your website home do the work.
Make Yours a Website that WORKS
You can start today—Make a list of the keywords for your highest priority strategic markets. That’s a valuable exercise anytime. You can also help your website with its organic SEO work by adding a blog to your site . Keep your keywords in mind when writing the blog, which will act like hyper content for the spiders. Adding links from other websites will also help. Blazing Systems is a web services company. Please call us to arrange a free consultation for help in making your website work for you.
Bill Patch
10/05/2013
