The Secret to Search Engine Success

July 20, 2008 in Search Engine Optimization | Comments (0)

Like it or not, most people use search engines to find information on the web, and the search engine they use the most is Google.  If your site cannot be found in the search engines, look what you may be missing out on:

  • People who perform web searches follow up with an off-line action such as a visit to a store or a phone call at least 82% of the time. (TMP Directional Marketing)
  • Of all in-store purchases made in key categories, 89% of them were made by people who had done research on the web prior to making their purchases. (BIGResearch)

Clearly, your business needs a web site that can be found in the search engines!

Big Picture Thinking

Since the search engines are constantly changing and upgrading the way they deliver search results to their users, it’s nearly impossible for most small businesses to stay completely caught up. But one thing that does stay constant is the importance of good visibility in the search engines.

Rather than obsessing about how your site performs for your top one or two keywords, look at how all of your keywords are performing, and how many pages of your site are being regularly crawled by the search engine spiders. Monitor your search engine stats at least monthly, and make sure your site shows up for a variety of keyword phrases and pages across multiple search engines to ensure good visibility.

Search engine visibility is determined by a number of factors, including:

  1. How many of your site’s pages are referenced in the search engines (also known as saturation)
  2. The number of inbound links pointing to your site from other quality sites on the web
  3. Where else your site is referenced on the web (industry profiles, directories, news sources, etc.)

It can take a lot of work to get your site listed in the top 10 results, and of course that is the goal for most businesses no matter how big or small.  But before you can land a top spot, you must make sure that your pages can be read and indexed correctly when the search engine spiders come to visit. (And in the case of Google, you cannot achieve high rankings without a good inbound link building program in place as well.)  All of these factors directly contribute to your site’s search engine visibility, and a visible web site is more likely to be found by customers who are searching for products and services like yours.

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