Get your Web site to top of search engine results

Your potential customers are online right now searching for your product or service - are they finding you or your competitor?

Business owners who want to ensure they are found implement a search engine marketing strategy. SEM is the umbrella term that encompasses search engine optimization, paid search advertising, and other online visibility strategies that help promote branding and increased name recognition, and ultimately bring more qualified visitors to your site.

The ultimate goal of any SEM strategy is to get your site near the top of the search rankings of Google, Yahoo, MSN and others.

These "organic" or "natural" searches are coveted because they literally cost you nothing and provide the best return on investment.

Search-friendly design

The first SEO technique is to have a search-friendly design to your site, where the site's content, its navigation and its meta-tags (think of the behind-the-scenes source code) are relevant and informative. This allows a search engine to find your site and include it in its listings. Search engines can only "spider" text on your site, so such things as building the site using Frames, Java and Flash can hinder an engine's ability to find information about your site and could actually prevent your site from being listed.

Keywords are key

In addition to your design, select about three or four keywords per page and then optimize the content of each page (including text, headings, titles, descriptions and links) for those select keywords. When selecting keywords it's important to know what your potential customers are actually entering into the search engines when looking for your product or service. If you can find unique keywords or phrases that customers are searching for but that are on few competing sites, your site will rise to the top of the rankings.

Link popularity

Another critical component of search engine optimization is link popularity. As search engines spider Web sites across the Internet, they travel through links from one Web page to the next. The more sites that link to a site, the more important the engines believe that site to be. You want to focus on getting many important sites to link to your site. This can be accomplished through several approaches, including submitting to online directories, exchanging links with business partners and industry-related sites, and link building.

A well-implemented SEO strategy can take several months before the desired results are realized. Be patient, stick to it, and before long your site will be on the first page.

Jonny Buroker is an Internet Marketing Consultant with WSI - We Simplify the Internet, serving south central and southwest Wisconsin.