Internet Business Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

Does your website show up in search engine listings? If you can’t find it, neither can your customers. Lucky for you, there are easy steps to take that will solve this problem.

This is Part 1 in a series on the basics of search engines and what you can do to make your site findable. It’s easy; I promise.

Where is my site?!

I was recently contacted by a panicked organization. Their website did not show up in search engine listings, but their competitor did. In fact, if you searched for the group’s site, you found the competitor.

After a little investigation, I explained the problem. Their site was not developed with any consideration for search engines. It looked nice and had good content, but it wasn’t findable.

If you’re in a similar boat, keep reading. Search Engines 101 will teach you the basics to get your website on the map. It’s written in plain English with thorough explanations. Let’s get started!

Think like a robot

Search engines are robots. They’re increasingly smarter, but they are still dumb compared to humans. Your website must spell everything out for them.

More importantly, these robots can only read text. Images and fancy animations get ignored by search engines. But that’s OK, because we’ll go through the key things your website needs.

Put up a big sign

Brick and mortar businesses have big signs, right? Your website needs one!

Look up at the top of your web browser and read the text that is displayed in the title bar. This is called the “title” for the page. You can change what it says. Sadly, many website designers forget this important step. The title might be something like “home” or jibberish letters.

Your website’s title should contain something like you’d put on a real-life sign. You’ll want your website name, along with a short description or witty slogan.

Here’s how you change your website’s title. You can open your page in an HTML editor and change the title with the menus (FrontPage instructions). Or you can simply edit the HTML directly, by pasting this code in between the “head” tags (they should be at the top of the page):

<title>Your Title Text Goes Here</title>

Remember that every page on your site has its own title, so you can customize the title for each page’s content. In fact you should do this. Tell the robots what that page contains!

Describe your content

After your sign is in place, you need to give search engines more information about each page. This info is put in “meta tags.” That’s just a techie name for little descriptors of your content.

There are two descriptors for every web page. First, you need to write out an actual description. Make it a simple sentence or a couple phrases. Maybe something like, “Bob’s Doorknob Shop sells custom and special-order knobs in Richmond and Henrico County.” Easy, right?

The second descriptor is called your page’s key words. These are words and phrases that describe the page’s content. To help think of these, put yourself in a potential customer’s position: what terms would you enter into a search engine? Make a list of key words and phrases, including different spelling variations. Don’t forget geographic terms that might be important, like cities and counties you serve, etc.

Your website editor can now update your “meta tags” for you, or you can edit them yourself. You should add this code directly below your “title” tags from the previous section:

<meta name="description" content="Your Description Goes Here" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Your Key Words Go Here, Separated By Commas" />

Just like every page has its own title, they all have descriptions and key words as well. These will definitely help you be found.

Feed the robots text

The search engine robots are hungry for your text. Like I mentioned, they ignore images and animation. If your content is all done in Flash or graphics, the robots can’t find it very well, even with your titles and descriptions.

The best way around this is to make the heart of your content plain text. You can spice it up with colors and different fonts if you want, but keep the foundation basic.

Now it’s time to make sure your site is designed in this manner. If it’s not, you can always add some extra text at the bottom of the page that describes your content. Don’t go overboard, but a little bit can help. Just make sure to integrate your additions into the overall site.

Stay tuned for more

Now you’ve got a great start on making your site findable. What you’ve done so far is considered part of the “on page” optimization process. It’s about making sure the site itself is ready to be found. In Part 2, we’ll start looking at things you need to do in other places.

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