Search Engines: How They Work and What You Can Do to Attract Attention to Your Web-site
We pride ourselves on giving small-business owners such as yourselves an edge over the competition. One of the first places to start is with a professional looking and well-designed web-site that enables users to easily find your company in search results and entice them to buy your products or services.
All too often, though, our clients think their new web-site will appear in Google searches as soon as it goes live. As much as we wish that were the case, in reality, it could take anywhere between four days to four weeks to show up. Here’s why:
Popular search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and others all have a highly-detailed method of adding web pages to their web search results called indexing. Think of indexing like going to a library to find a book. If it’s a new novel you are looking for, you may not find it immediately because the librarian first has to log it into their system, classify it into a specific category or genre, and place it on its proper shelf for you to eventually rent it.
As stated, the Internet is like an ever-growing library with billions of books. In layman’s terms, web crawlers or bots crawl the web every second of every day looking for new pages and then bring those results back for proper indexing based on keywords and the content of each page of your site. This information gathering process organizes search results, so searchers are provided with relevant information.
So how can you attract attention from Google so that your web-site is as relevant as it can be in search results?
- Make sure you have fresh web copy – A critical piece to any web-site is having unique and engaging web copy for every page on the site (Home Page, About Us, Services) to convince visitors to do business with you and keep them on your site longer. Identify your target keywords and make sure your copy is SEO friendly.
- Continually add relevant content – Beyond standard web copy, there is no substitute for value-added content that is published regularly, is informative and engaging, and sets you up as the authority on your subject. Blogs are a great way to create content specifically for your intended client.
- Get listed – Ensuring that your business is located on as many online directories (Google Maps, Yelp, CitySearch, Yellow Pages, Manta, etc.) as possible increases your company’s visibility on the web.
- Hire an experienced web-site designer – This really shouldn’t be the last one on our list, but a quality web-site designer (like us) will ensure your web-site has the proper meta descriptions, title tags, links, is mobile friendly, etc. to make you stand out in Google’s eyes. You can hire a really cheap developer, but CAUTION… you will get what you pay for and chances are you won’t enjoy the experience.
The more inviting your web-site is, the more credible you look, the easier it will be for your business to be found online, and the least likely it will be that someone will lose interest and move on to a competitor’s website. For more than 25 years, Blue Troop Web, Print and Video has been dedicated to helping business owners add more oomph to their marketing toolbox, and now is as good a time as any to invest in your next web-site project. Contact us today to discover how we can help.