My Virtual Blog

It used to be that when we wanted to locate goods and/or services, we would look to the Yellow Pages to find local businesses. They were alphabetically listed by category and once a potential was found, we would call or visit them for what we needed. But this is now a virtual world and more times than not customers will turn to the internet to locate their goods and services. Some have turned solely to the internet for all their purchasing needs. Typically, they will choose a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, type a few keywords based on what they’re looking for, hit enter and BAM, 10,000 – 100,000 hits are brought back in the blink of an eye with websites and related items based on what they entered in the search line. A quick scan down the list for a possible choice, a click on the link and you’re instantly visiting the related website. This is today’s shopping experience. It is uncommon for this type of customer to look past the first few pages of the returned result.

If you are a supplier of goods and services, and you have a website, you want YOUR website to show up on the coveted first page of the potential customers search and the one that is clicked on. This is a tall order and most times, your website is found 10, 20 even 50 pages down the list and because of that, it is basically never seen. So how do we get our website viewed by those that don’t already know it exists? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the answer. SEO is a technique of designing your website to be search engine friendly. When you publish your website to the search engines, they use what is called a “Spider” or “Crawler” program to examine your website for things like material content, keywords, links in, links out, links within, age, frequency of maintenance, and this program finds all the places your website is referenced throughout the entire internet. The better your content, the more links and external references that are found, the higher the score assigned to your website and the higher the ranking in the pecking order of results.

A great many business owners are unaware of the potential marketing impact that exists with a website. You should take advantage of all the capabilities that the internet has to offer. This includes not only website design and SEO tuning, but also blogging and social networking. If you invest the time to learn and set up accounts with networking sites like “Facebook”, “Linkedin” and “Twitter”, AND take the time to maintain the information there, it will not only help with your social networking efforts to build contacts and business relationships, but it will also help with SEO for your website. At the end of the day, you want your name and your website mentioned online as often as possible and in as many places as possible.

If you don’t have the knowledge or the resources to do these things on your own, you should enlist the assistance of someone who is trained in this area. You’ve spent time and money on putting up a website, now go to the next level and actually use this tool and the internet to your maximum advantage.

Thoughts?