Search Engines are the best advertising – Make the most of your web presence
A companies primary web address is a missed opportunity if no one can find it. That is why companies use Web-Atlanta to manage their web presence. The first search you want to fullfill with your web-site is to find you by your company name, or company name plus state of incorporation. The next is your primary ‘sic’ code and your city and state. These are a must.
One aspect of a web-sites utility is SEO, or search engine optimization. Strictly defned this is the process of inspecting and refining the internal and visible elements of your web pages to be ‘friendly’ to the search engines, of which there are only two important engines currently, the google and yahoo. Google accounts for about three fourths of all search traffic, and the yahoo engine that also powers Bing searches accounts for almost entirely the remaining search traffic.
The cost of optimizing a web-site for search engines can be as little as less than one thousand dollars for a small site. Unfortunately, this is less important to the search engines than the importance of your site.
Search engines evaluate a web-sites importance by looking at the entire internet, a daunting task. Google and Yahoo over the years have built large inventories of data that give them the ability to gauge this and google used to use a term call ‘page-rank’ to label the relative importance of web-sites. A pagerank of 1 meant a site was not seen as important, and a page rank of 10 meant that the site was super important.
There are several web-sites that sit at the very top of the importance ladder. Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Ebay all have page-ranks of nine or ten. If these websites all contained article on their from page about how important you business is, you rapidly would become number one for the search terms pertaining to your business. There is a little more to it than that, but that would be good enough.
Website optimization involves meta tags, keyword research, placement of web-site elements, keyword optimized content with a balance and not saturation, and for local businesses, a targetted set of criteria to help the search engines identify your company, where you are, to the point of GPS positioning.
Companies that send out trucks need to further develop a local startegy of internal or external web pages that specifically address cities you work in.
Backlinking, which is the process of getting those page rank 10 sites to link to your site, should be done gradually. You should not sign up Amazon and Ebay on the same day. Wait a couple of days between signing those deals. The search engines use the number and importance of the web-sites and the specific web pages that may send visitors to your site in calculating the importance of your site. Google says “Webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages”.
Social media is a newer element of marketing, but it is really SEM, not SEO. SEM stands for Search Engine Marketting and within you marketting plans you can consider what you want to spend on Facebook and Twitter. Some businesses have a full time employee and others can ignore it completely. While we will run a social media campaign for you, we first need to discuss whether this is a logical expenditure.
The web strategy you require depends on your business. When you join our web presence management network, with plans ranging in cost from less than one hundred dollars a month to several thousand, we will help you to see where we will see the best return on our web presence.