Guest Post by Thomas Farley
Everyday business owners are bombarded with messages that point to online commerce as not only a potent arena in which to garner revenues, but soon-to-be dominant marketplace for all things retail. These messages have certainly resonated with the commercial and industrial sectors of society as more and more take to the web to help sell their wares. Unfortunately, as the webscape becomes more and more cluttered it is no longer sufficient for entrepreneurs to simply throw up a few web pages and let the orders roll on in. Business owners must now seek to draw web users to the website through several means, one of the most important of which is known as search engine optimization.
Make Sure Google Knows Your Site Exists
Search engine optimization (or SEO as it is more commonly known) is the process of strengthening a website within particular Google guidelines. While simple enough to define in a sentence, SEO is anything but. Google uses over 200 individual factors in its algorithm and they all carry a different weight. Furthermore, Google keeps all of these items hidden from us under the guise of legalese known as ‘trade secrets’. Thus, you have an industry built around the scientific method and the small little snippets which Google releases to the web. Suffice it to say that with the cacophony of voices out there claiming to be experts it can be pretty easy for the layman to find their head spinning in a whirlpool of 301′s, metadata, and bounce rates. The purpose of this article is to help get you on your way in the world of SEO.
Getting Indexed By Google
First and foremost, you have to make sure your website is getting indexed by Google. Google your company’s website. Did it come up? If you’ve had your website up for more than a month and you don’t see it, look through your website’s source code for something like this <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>. If you find that, remove it; it’s your worst enemy. This step is done to make your website available to search engines.
Now, we can proceed with making your website full of all those little things that search engines love. The best mindset to adopt for the rest of this conversation is an awareness that Google seeks to only connect users with best result for their search. This can be interpreted to mean anything from page loading speeds, to information contained on the page, to how many pages a visitor jumps to during the course of a visit.
Getting Found Online
The first step to being found online through search is to inform the search engines what you want to be found under. This is done by entering in keywords in your website’s title tag and meta fields. These fields are typically set aside and easy to find in most site-builder software. It is also possible to enter them through an FTP program and HTML coding. Once that is done search engines will begin correlating your website with those keywords. The best bet here is to not chase a keyword or phrase for its popularity, but instead choose to target a phrases which best represents your product or service as this will end up delivering the most actionable leads to your website.
Secondly, begin filling your website with pages full of informative text and intricate descriptions of your products or services. Search engines will index every word of text visible on a page. In doing so they will strengthen the ‘trust’ search engines are willing to place in a web page, since your web page will now be more informative for the reader. Now the next step is to start gaining inbound links to your page.
Getting Inbound Links
If you have studied anything previous to this post about SEO then you likely have seen the words ‘inbound links’ tossed around quite a bit. While this is a very important aspect of SEO, it is also the realm that has the most misinformation floating around about it. Many people will tell you that inbound links to a website are like ‘votes’, in that the more you have the better your site will perform. This is a foolish and useless analogy and should be disregarded immediately. A more fair comparison would be to describe inbound links as references on a job application. One glowing reference from Barack Obama will far outshine 20 amicable references from Burger King shift leaders. Thus, links are given weight considering who or what is endorsing the content from the original link. In this mindset it is always better to try to earn links from the most trusted of websites. One link from CNN will do more for your site than 20 links from Debbie’s Crafts Blog and her ilk. To help you on this mission Google has something called PageRank. You can find any number of available web programs to help you find this measure on most websites. Just use Google to locate them.
This brief introduction to SEO is exactly that; brief. While this acts as a great basic framework as to how SEO generally works, there are entire schools of thought and strategies devised as how to best implement the pillars stated above. There is a host of philosophies and data out there to help guide you through this world. Your best bet is to always operate with the thought mentioned above “Am I making my web page better for the user?” and in doing so you’ll be on your way to online retail dominance!
Thomas Farley has been working in SEO for close to 7 years. He current resides as the chief online marketing consultant for a Buffalo, NY Dumpster Rental Company You can learn more tips and tricks by following him on Twitter @nerf_mittens
