Driving traffic to your web site!

I have been researching Search Engine Optimization and recently set up a way to advertise my consulting company whenever someone searches for the terms I select. This is a very powerful tool to attract new customers. The goal of this Blog entry is to share what I have learned and help you the readers set up your own web sites.

First we need to define what are keywords?

When you set up a web site, you can select specific words and groups of words which will lead potential customers to your site. For example, I have selected the term “Outsourced Sales Management” as one of my keywords. I use Microsoft’s web site development tools which are part of Office Live Small Business to host my web site. For each page you set up on your web site, there is a Properties selection. When you click it, you can then enter you keyword into a box. Microsoft refers to the keywords as Metatags, and gave this description:

Metatags are invisible bits of code that search engines often use to index Web sites. These metatags can help search engines return the most relevant results for a particular search. The two important metatags are the keyword tag and the description tag.

Meta keywords should be keywords and phrases that your customers would likely use when searching for your page. Each word or phrase, usually between 5 and 10 words, should be separated by a comma or a space.

Try to think like your target customer.

What are they looking for?

hat is the problem that they are trying to solve?

Make up a list of words that prospective customers will be looking for that. These are the keywords to enter on your site.

Spiders!

The major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are constantly searching the internet for new web sites, and creating indexes of the keywords. They use software robots called Spiders to search the web for these works and then update their databases with the results. When your potential customer types a term into Google’s web site, Google searches over its index database to find web sites that meet the search criteria, and then display the results.

Now the secrets!

There are ways to move your web site up to the top of the listings! If you have a new web page or only a few keywords, you may be on the 47th page of results that Google displays. Usually people only react and use the search results on the first or second page, so your website is lost without any traffic.

By placing the keywords on your site the robot spiders will find your site and move you up towards the top of the results. This technique is also called organic search results.

Next Chapter in the Blog will be about targeted advertisements called Pay per Click.