SEO ensures your website is found!

Building or revamping a website can be an arduous task, as there are many aspects to address: finding a designer, choosing designs, colors, functionality, hosting options, creating content, hiring someone to write content, program, etc. Often search engine optimization is last on the list, if on that must-do list at all.

Make Search Engine Optimization a Priority

While you’re focused on getting your website up and running, don’t let SEO become a rainy-day task to be put off until later. Later may never come, and you will soon wonder why people are not visiting your new and improved site.

If an objective of your website is to drive traffic from search engines, meaning a search on Google, Yahoo, Ask or Bing culminates with your website high on the list of results, then SEO must be a mandatory part of your initial planning.

It is easy to spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours developing a decent website, but what will it matter if no one can find you? Regardless of how fabulous and functional your new site is, the effort will be futile if search engines cannot index your website.

What is Indexing?

Search engines develop automated programs, called robots or spiders that crawl the web searching for content. These automated programs follow links from one web page or website to another, continuously seeking new content. When new material is discovered, the programs index, or save, all information found. Then, when a prospective customer types words or phrases into a search engine, the matching information saved is reported in the results page.

Your overriding goal should be to have your website appear first and foremost in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) the person sees on their browser.

How high your website appears in the search results depends on how relevant your website’s information is to algorithms and programming factors used to rank the comparable importance of your website within the web universe. That rank is impacted by as many as a hundred factors that search engines keep top-secret. It’d be easier obtaining the Coke recipe than cracking the search engine algorithms and programming.

7 Pitfalls to Avoid When Optimizing Your Website:

1. Hiring a writer who doesn’t understand SEO. Content is king. If your content doesn’t support the search terms that drive traffic to your site, you’ll end up having to rewrite the text later, costing more time and money.
2. Hiring a web designer who only works in Flash. Search engines cannot index content of Flash sites, regardless of how fancy, flashy and innovative they appear. This is a major disadvantage, and will probably result in your complete site being recoded in search engine friendly HTML.
3. Hiring a programmer who uses Ajax or other code language that search engines can’t read and don’t recognize.
4. Not including basic page titles, descriptions and keywords in your websites meta-tags. This is SEO 101, but you’d be amazed how many websites don’t incorporate this key information.
5. Going the do-it-yourself route and using free templates offered by your hosting service to build your website. Many times these use frame architecture, which again search engines can’t read.
6. If you’re hiring a SEO firm, check them out.  Get someone reputable with proven results.
7. As mentioned in my previous SEO blog tip, stay away from SEO firms that promise results that seem too good to be true. They may be using use “Black Hat” SEO methods that may deliver short-term results, but cost you more in the long-run.

Every business needs a website. Plain and simple. It’s a brave new world out there, and if you don’t have a website, you’re not living, playing, and you certainly are not working in it.

I don’t care if you’re walking dogs or designing aerospace navigation, your website is window-shopping for any prospective client, employee, or employer. You can hand out business cards and cold call all day long, but few will consider you without a website.

A website makes you legit. Even if you’re just starting out and working out of the trunk of your car, a website is arguably marketing’s best tool in communicating your message. Some basic information your website should provide is who you are; what you do; why you do it; and why you’re best at it! It should provide a number of ways a prospect can contact you.

If you can’t afford to have custom website built for your business, there are inexpensive alternatives to utilize. For example when you register a domain name, at register.com or other domain registration websites, you can choose a pre-coded and formatted website template for a small monthly fee. You must provide text and images, and choices may be limited, but you will now have a site to direct customers and inquiries too. Don’t expect your website to end up on the first page of Google! Most templates don’t include search engine optimization that rank your website to appear first and foremost.

When ready to take your website to the next level of sophistication by including e-commerce, search engine optimization, or redesigning and reworking content, InSight Marketing is well-positioned to make that happen for you.