Build It And They Will Come
How many times have you thought that famous phrase when someone says the following about their website, “We have a website, how come no one is visiting?”
We developers in the web design business tend to think, “Great. How effective do you believe your Internet marketing strategy is?”
This is usually followed by either, “What Internet marketing strategy?” or “My website is my internet marketing strategy!” from the website owner.
This is when we want to scream, but don’t.
There are well over 240,000,000 websites. Shall we type that again?
There – are – over – 240,000,000 – websites – on – the – Internet.
Quite frankly we should all feel lucky that we get found at all by search engines.
If you’re the web site owner, that last sentence doesn’t bring you much comfort especially when you’ve just spent well over $5,000 getting your website to look better than your competition. Unfortunately, having an attractive site doesn’t guarantee that you will be found found on Google’s front pages. Your site may be in the search engine’s database, but if doesn’t show up in the first few pages of search results, your pages are probably going unnoticed. A difficult, but true fact.
And . . .
There is NO way to guarantee you a front page ranking on the search engine results pages – especially when you believe your top keyword phrase is Artisan Contractor or Discount Skateboards.
Let us type that again.
There is just no way to guarantee a front page ranking on the search engine results pages.
Anyone that tells you they can guarantee you a front page listing on Google is selling you a load of sand.
“No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap . . .”
But we do believe that you can greatly increase your ranking with some proven internet marketing techniques, particularly the following:
This is where a network of other related web sites link to your website. Link popularity is the search engines’ primary measure of your web site’s significance and a major contributor to your site ranking. One of our first questions to you is, “Who do you do business with and will they link to you in exchange for you providing a link to them on your website?” Another important link building factor is utilizing links within your site content directing your visitors to other relevant pages within your own website.
SEO is the process of modifying your web pages with key word “hooks” or phrases that will hopefully grab your target customers.
When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.
There’s no doubt that the Internet offers unprecedented business development and sales opportunities; however, you still need to apply a stratigic marketing plan to your overall website design plan if you want Internet marketing to bring targeted clientele to your business.
Which brings us to the point that SEO and an Internet marketing strategy should be the first item you think about BEFORE you design, build or re-design your website. Once you have this in place, you should build your site around what you are trying to achieve by having a website and build content which supports that goal.
Building a profitable website takes planning and time. It doesn’t happen overnight.
And when you do think about your web design, you should design it for your customers – not for you.
But we’ll save that rant for another day.
About Forward Motion Studios
Forward Motion Studios™ is a Santa Rosa Web Design company that builds, hosts and supports custom websites for businesses. This includes simple, brochure-like web pages to highly complex, software and database-driven eCommerce websites with B2B shopping carts.
Contact us for a free estimate / consultation by calling 707-578-1390.
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