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By Ginny Stibolt, consultant and owner of www.sky-bolt.com (Published May 3, 2004) "Build it and they will come…" NOT when it comes to your website! Create your own website PR campaign Put your website address in your email signature, on bookmarks,
business cards, postcards and in your articles. Give people maximum
exposure to your URL, a reason to look at it and look at it yourself. There is no substitute for a human spending the time to find good, relevant places to get listed. There are professional organizations in your field. There are directories that specifically cater to your most likely potential clients. Get listed there and write articles that link back to your on-line content. Try to think like your customers and make sure that you and your website can easily be found. Your website PR campaign is an ongoing process, not a one-time event.
85% of surfers find information through search engines: Google is the most used right now. But, like the weather, if you wait a minute that may change. Yahoo dropped Google and developed its own engine; MSN (Bill Gates) is thinking about jumping into the search engine fray; and more buying a selling of searching technologies will keep things hopping. What does this mean to you? It will become even more difficult
to use trickery or deceptive methods to be found in the first few
pages of a search engine result for keywords that describe your
business. So here are a few action items to give your business the
best chance of being found: This way the search engines will find some keywords right in the title and that title will be listed in the search engine results. It should be a headline for your content on that page. • Provide metatags to supplement your content. Use both the "keywords" and "description" metatags. To be most effective, your metatags should be typical words (including misspellings) people might use when searching for you or your business.
(For specific metatag examples and instructions: www.sky-bolt.com/book/metatags.htm.) • Search engines cannot "see" a graphic. Use the alt tag (text) for each graphic whether it's a photo or a logo. This is also another opportunity to provide keywords and phrases to further enrich your content. • Make sure your content is available on the homepage. The metatags and the title (as discussed above) are at the very top of the HTML code and will be found by the search engine spiders first. If your site has flash and java code or if it uses frames, your real content might not be easily found even though the human surfers can see it. Look at the source for your site to see what the spiders see. Ask your web designer about this if you don't know. • Search Engines use your site popularity (the number of
links to it) as part of the ranking calculation. Do the work
to be listed on directories and swap links with relevant sites.
Just find one or two a day - pretty soon, you'll have a fair number
of websites linked to yours. I discussed this above, but if you
wish to be found by a search engine, it is important. An effective website is one of the most useful marketing tools a business can have. The Internet has changed the marketing landscape. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity. You don't have to be a technical wizard or rich to have an effective business website, but you do have to pay attention. Ginny has a mission to help small businesses maximize their web presence through practical design and good marketing and PR. She's been known to contact perfect strangers to point out errors on their webpages. www.sky-bolt.com Previous DHO columns on effective websites by Ginny: |
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