So you have this great idea for an online store or product. You just know that you can make a ton of money off of it. So you put up a website, or maybe you call that whiz-kid friend of yours from college and have him put it up. You design it, buy the hosting, invest in Dreamweaver, get the Flash, put it up... and now what?
Do you realize that every successful website out there does more than just sit waiting for customers? Whether you're selling products or services, political opinion or coffee, you have a lot of competition out there! The only way you are going to get visitors and their dollars is if you grab their clicks with search engine optimization.
Basically, search engine optimization, or SEO, is an industry term for anything you do to make search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo! put you higher in their search results. As you probably expected already, no one winds up on the top of the Google search results by sheer luck. It takes planning, hard work, and above all, a consistent application of SEO services.
You can spend months of hard work and lots of hours optimizing your site for search engines. Or you can hire a great search-engine optimization services company to do the hard work for you! Either way, you can be sure that the time and energy you invest in search engine optimization will be amply repaid by the extra clicks you get.
So what are the important things that you need to know when you look at your SEO options? I like to look at it from the perspective of a turtle. You can sit like a lump on a log with your head inside your shell, waiting for your visitors to come to you. Or you can S-T-I-C-K your neck out and thrive!
S - This stands for Search. As part of your search engine optimization, you need to look at your site from the search engines' perspective. What is Google going to find in your site? What are visitors going to see when they find the link to you from Google? To make your site great for Search, be sure you fill in the meta name of your site. Create an.xml sitemap so the search engines can tell what's inside your site. And try to create a logical flow inside your site so that visitors - and the crawlers that search engines send out - can see what you are all about. This is critical to search engine optimization.
T - This stands for Today. It's important to add content to your site constantly. Whether you have a blog, a commerce site, or a news site, fresh new things on your site attract Google. The more you add to your site, the higher you go in search engine rankings. So every day, have something new for Today. A good SEO services company can provide you with content to put on your site, if you're not a writer.
I - I is for Inside linking. Make sure that every link works. Connect all your pages in logical ways. If nothing else, connect links from the front page of your site to images on the inside pages. This gives your sight more "depth." Search engines look for sites with "depth" because it shows that someone is actually there doing things and deserving their traffic. Think about it. You know all those sites that you come across on the Internet, the ones that are just collections of links to other sites? (You know the type: "What You Need, When You Need It" and so on.) These sites are known as placeholders. They don't actually do much of anything. But you constantly run across them. Why? Because they are put together by very savvy SEO marketing people. These people know the value of inside links. They might not point to much, but the links on these sites point to something other than themselves. That's smart Internet marketing.
C - C stands for Creative. If you want to stick above your competition, you had better get creative with your Internet marketing. You can't sit around like a shy turtle, waiting for people. We've said this before, but it is so important, and it's something too many webmasters neglect. Do crazy things. Use funny titles. Take advantage of some of your many Internet marketing opportunities and network with other sites. Post links to your content on sites like Digg, Propeller, SheToldMe, and other aggregators. And be consistent. The more you do these things, the more people will come - and come back - to see what you're up to now.
K - K is for Kickstart. Get your Internet marketing and search engine optimization into high gear. Use our SEO services company. Take advantage of the awesome connecting powers of Internet marketing on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace. As you get out the word on your company, the sky is the limit! Awareness about you, your site, and your product can literally explode overnight. Just look at how fast Farmville went from a little oddity no one really knew about to the "must have" Facebook app. I get Farmville invites and gifts from my Facebook friends all day long, and I don't even have Farmville. But people are spending money, real money, on the silly game! The people who created Farmville understood the importance of Kickstarting their marketing. They created a brand, a buzz, and a product. Today, they are raking in literally billions.
The Internet is a big place with a lot of competition. But if you play the game right, there is no reason why you can't make a lot of money. With some savvy Internet marketing, a good dose of creativity, and maybe some help from a search engine optimization services company, you could be the next Facebook. Or maybe Farmville.