Make your Web site easy to find

As we’ve mentioned several times in the past, it’s so important these days to have a Web site that your clients have the ability to access. Whether you’re a Realtor or a small business owner, you want potential prospects and customers to be able to find out information about you online, and even order directly through it if they’re not local to your area.  However, these days, having a site isn’t enough.  You need to make it easy for your customers to find.  Don’t get lost in the “needle in the haystack” of all online postings.  Here are some tips to help make you stand out.

1. Make your site easy to find online.  You want your site to come to the top of the list when someone searches on a search engine.  This is called SEO, or search engine optimization.  You will come higher up on the list if the searches have keywords that match a lot of what is on your site.  This Google tool will help you choose popular keywords based on your site content.  Also look at keywords that your competitor uses. 

The other way you’re ranked is by having a lot of traffic through your site.  One way for the search engines to pick this up is if you have a lot of people with your site linked to theirs and vice versa.  Contact your affiliates to see if you can add their links on your site.  Make sure they agree to put yours on theirs, too. 

2. Register as many similar sites as possible.  You want to help your customers out who misspell your company name or put the wrong ending (.biz, .net, .org at the end of your Web address).  Try to register as many sites that are similar to yours as possible.  Try to obtain ones that are off by one letter or two.  That way, if somebody inputs the wrong information, they’ll still be directed back to your site.

3. Market your site offline.  Make sure it’s visible on everything you do, including in your e-mail signature, your letterhead, return address labels, etc.  Have you ever seen a commercial or an ad where they direct you back to the site for more info?  That’s what you want to do.  If you can afford to market it in the weekly paper or on the radio, by all means, do.  If not, make sure you find every free way to get it out there.  And remember, word of mouth is great free publicity!

4. Set up a fan page on Facebook or MySpace.  You can put your site information on there as well as advertise to all your friends and fans when a new product has come in, you have a new listing, or there’s important news in your industry.  This is also a great way to find out what your customers are looking for from you and reach hundreds or thousands of people at once with new information.

More tips on how to stand out can be found in this article. If you need help developing your Web site, or making it rank higher on the search engines, please visit us online.