Lost & Found

“We’re out there somewhere” is not enough. Web presence is as important as your business presence in the community. In this Internet age, every business needs an online presence to reach potential customers. Your website not only showcases what your business is about to the Web community, but also has the ability to perform for you 24/7. Think of it as an investment that works for you constantly, day and night.

Having a search engine optimized website that shows up high in search engine results pages when people search for your services is like having a name in your industry. If people have never heard about your business, they likely won’t trust you. Same thing online: if Google has never “heard” about your website, Google will think it’s not relevant and won’t make it “findable” in search engine results pages.

Here’s what’s relevant for search engines and what you can do about it:

Strategies beyond your site
Have link authority. Get quality websites, related to your industry only, to link to your website. The easy way to do this is by having a web page where you put all the websites of partners you work with, the associations you are part of, the Chamber of Commerce, the Better Business Bureau, and any other reputable companies you’ve done business with. Then, ask them to link back to your website. This establishes relevance and trust in search engines.

Have a presence locally and worldwide. When someone searches for “nursery,” under the paid ads, search engine results show local results by recognizing your computer’s IP address (where you are located). To be in those local results (very significant position), submit your website to local places like: Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local. Also submit your website to social networks for local businesses: Merchant Circle, Patch, Yellow Pages, CitySearch, Local.com, Yelp.com. On these websites, you can create a profile page of your company and include a logo and website and why customers should use your products. Your business can show up high in search results with the profile page you create because these websites already have lots of web traffic and an established web presence. Best part of this strategy: it’s free. Also submit your website to online directories like Dmoz, Joe Ant and others.

Blog and engage in social media, often. Many times when you search something, you see first the Facebook page of a business instead of that business’s website. That’s because Facebook and other social networks have web presence, so use Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google+ and other social networks on a regular basis. Also, have a blog and post relevant content frequently. Write guest posts on other blogs in the industry. Most importantly, connect your website to your blog and to all the social network pages you create.

Start a Google Analytics account. It’s free. This way you know who clicks on your website, who your customers are, where they are located and in which areas you need to concentrate to reach more customers. You can also see how your website performs online and how much traffic you get from search engines.

Web page tactics
Have great content on your website. First, have a clear and short call to action telling the viewers what you can offer them and why they should choose you and not the business two miles down the road. Your homepage needs to have a headline, a call to action, contact information and logo. You have seven seconds to grab the viewer’s attention and convince them to click through.

Update content often. Search engines love new, relevant content. Educate the viewers about your business and services, your role in the community or any promotions. Write relevant information often. Include powerful pictures.

Optimize your pages with keywords. Pick a keyword or two for each web page and include those keywords within that page. A page talking about a particular crop should have that crop name in the URL (ex.: www.companyname.com/roses), headline, sub-headline and body text of the page.

Review your website’s metatags. A metatag is a line of code that is contained in the background of a webpage. Search engines look at the metatags to learn about the web page and provide Internet users with a specific search experience. These metatags are very important to coincide with what your website’s pages have as content. Websites that use these tags the right way can get high positions in search engines because, by effectively using metatags, they show search engines how to populate the results pages. To be able to manipulate these tags you need to do more research or contact an SEO professional or an HTML code editor.

The internet community has been growing rapidly in the last 10 years. Your job is to facilitate the process for potential customers to be able to find your website. And then, once they’ve found you, you have to keep them interested. Search engine optimization is one of the processes you need to integrate with your social media plan, marketing, blogging, website content and design to have a successful online presence and to drive traffic, leads and sales.

Camelia Clarke is a web content associate for GIE Media.