google loves your website
photo source: pixabay

The old adage “build it and they will come” may work well for brick and mortar businesses or baseball fields, but when it comes to websites, not so much! There are literally millions, if not billions of websites on the world wide web, so this begs the question of how in the world wide web are you going to get people to visit your site!

Search Engines

Think of your website as a piece of virtual real estate. It has an address and takes up space. In order to find your specific site, people are either going to need to know your exact web address or they need to utilize the Internet’s equivalent of a map. Your map to all things web page is the search engines, of which Google is definitely King (or is it Queen, does anyone know?)

Search Engine Optimization

Will Google or Yahoo or Bing simply direct people to your website out of the kindness of their heart? Sadly, no, there are only two ways to rank at the top of the search engine pages for relevant searches. One way is to pay for sponsored results for relevant keywords and the other is to optimize your page so that it comes up to the top of results.

The second option is best since once you are fully optimized, it will not cost you money on an ongoing basis. Sponsored results can be a great marketing ploy in the short term, but for the long game, the cost is usually prohibitive.

So, exactly how do you get search engine optimized? It starts with good content that is keyword rich but not stuffed and continues with good links to other reputable websites and pages and all of this should be spread over weeks, months, and even years to be totally effective.

Invest in SEO

Can you learn to optimize your website and make Google fall in love? Of course, if you have the time, patience, and willingness to constantly monitor your progress. However, not everyone has the time or the patience to invest in effective SEO, which is where a good search engine optimization professional comes in quite handy, and here are a few reasons:

  • They fully understand the steps required to get your website to the top of search engine results for several of the top key word searches related to your business.
  • Have experience setting up new websites with SEO
  • Understand that SEO has changed to include social networking profiles

You want Google to be so in love with your website you can hear wedding bells! All joking aside, Google is the premier search engine today and that does not look to change any time soon. Doing business today means doing business online, and if your website cannot be found, you are not doing business!