Small Business Websites

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When you have a website built, your webmaster will enter page titles and meta tags. These are very important to the search engines in being able to find and identify what your website is about and targeting. Search engines have ’spiders’ or ‘bots’ that search the web constantly for new and updated sites and information. These ’spiders’ are basically just programs that go out searching and retrieving information on the internet. The information they get comes primarily from your page title, meta tags and text content. The search engines will store the info they learned about your site and when someone does a search with the keywords it found, your site will come up somewhere in the list.

It’s important to understand that a new site takes a while to get itself established and in a decent position on the search engines, so things don’t happen overnight.

If I’m selling ‘cat clocks’ on my site, those two keywords and others related to it and my products will need to be in my page title and meta tags. For successful sites, these tags and keywords are researched using different web tools to identify what words people are searching for and how they fit into your business. More on that in another article though. If I’m selling cat clocks, I’m obviously going to talk about and describe them somewhere on my site, so they’ll be in my text as well (another important spot).

Now, let’s say Jane is searching for a cat clock for her niece’s birthday. She’ll go to Google (or her search engine of choice) and type in ‘cat clocks’. On Google, the listings that come up at the top are on a slightly beige background and these are sponsored links. It means that the companies paid to be listed there. Below that, in the white section, are the ‘organic’ results.

• ‘Organic’ results are those that come up naturally in the search engines. They are from the information the ’spiders’ gathered when visiting your site.
• ‘Paid’ results are those that people paid for. They show up at the very top and in a line along the right. These programs are usually known as Pay Per Click (PPC). The company is charged each time someone clicks on the link and visits their site. It’s search engine advertising.

There are many levels of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but the fact is, without even the basics done, your site will not be ‘indexed’ properly. ‘Indexed’ basically means that the search engine found information about your site and stored it in the appropriate places to be found later when a user searches for certain words. Like when Jane enters ‘cat clocks’, the search engine pulls your site from its stored data.

If your site has no page title, the search engine comes up with nothing, or may even store it as ‘untitled’. What does ‘untitled’ have to do with your business? If you’ve missed the key elements the search engines use to learn about your site, you’re showing them nothing. And nothing can’t come up in a keyword search. You wouldn’t order a package and not give them your mailing address. Just as you wouldn’t build a website and not give it the necessary info for the search engines to find you.

One last thing to understand is that search engine optimization isn’t something you do once and forget. You have to stay on top of it, at least once a quarter, though monthly is better. New companies come in, the competition gets smarter, things change, the search engines change their rules and if you were once #1, you will topple from that position without maintenance. It’s the same as having a yard. You put down sod, plant flowers and trees (build a website). To keep your yard looking nice, you have to mow, trim, pull weeds, water and rake leaves (search engine optimization and site updates). You CANNOT just build a website and leave it and expect it to work for you. It’s a myth. Don’t buy into it and shortchange yourself when it comes to success.

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