Who Knows Anything? The blog of Chip Gallent. eBusinessman.

Why Search Engines Are So Important to Your Business

How many times do you find yourself searching for something at Google? Most of the time you are satisfying a need. And, most of the time you aren’t necessarily familiar with the company whose goods or services you’ve found to fit your need.

This is exactly the same case for your potential customers in cyberspace. You have no idea when they are going to require your services. Plus, nearly 80% of first time website visitors find those websites through a search engine.

However, I am still amazed at how many companies and websites I see who haven’t incorporated a basic search engine program into their marketing mix. They aren’t aware of the keywords and phrases that their potential customers might type in to find them. With a little digging and some robust online tools, we now can actually see how many times certain words and phrases are searched upon at the search engines.

If you will make a couple of modifications to your website, you can ensure that your quest for a top 10 rank will come easier. First, switch your navigation/menu to a text-based system. The search engines cannot interpret “pictures” of words on your site. And, any content using Macromedia’s Flash technology can’t be read by the search engine either. The text in the blue underlined links is the best way to tell a search engine what a page is about – which is what they want to know.

The second technique is to title your pages correctly. Every page on your website should not have the same title. They should reflect what information is on the page and have as many relevant keywords as possible.

And the third technique is one of the most often overlooked – get as many other websites as you can to link back to you. Many of the search engines use what is called “link popularity” to help rank your website. It will make a huge difference in your rankings if you can get all of your friends, associates, vendors, partners and clients to put a link to your site on their website. In turn, you should kindly reciprocate the favor.

Traffic is the lifeblood of a website. You cannot convert your website visitors into customers without it. Search engine optimization has been proven time and time again to be one of the best marketing tactics for driving website traffic. Putting a sound search engine program in place is relatively easy and can be facilitated by working with a reputable search engine optimization expert.