Web Site Solutions - Search Engine Friendly

Not Being Found in the Search Engine Results?

Situation: 

The situation could be one or more of the following:

• Search Results Do Not Return any Appearance of your Website, or they Appear on Pages 4+
• Search Results based Only your Domain Name, Company or Organization Name, or on a Very Few Relevant Keywords
• Search Results Bring the Site Visitor Only to the Home Page
   

Problem: 

Deploying a web site on the Internet is only one task in using a very powerful business media.  Just because you have a very attractive design, a convincing message, a desired product and reliable host server, it is meaningless if no one knows the website is out there or they cannot find it through Search. The latter is extremely critical if people cannot find you. It is very important that at minimum the major Search Engines (Google, BING and Yahoo) can recognize your website and index the site associating it with keywords applicable for your website.  Consequently, your website must be Search Engine friendly or often referred to as Search Engine Optimized.

All too often, the site was not structured properly and not coded with good programming practices to ensure a search engine friendly web structure.

Unfortunately, you cannot explicitly specify your keywords to the search engines, or tell them how to categorize and index your website. The search engines crawl your website (examine your website code) and based on what they find, they implicitly determine what words are key and how the site should be indexed and that is where the problem exists.

Search Engine Unfriendly sites cannot be indexed/categorized properly due to one or more factors:

• Little or no spider bot (software that crawls the Internet) recognizable textual content
• Content embedded in images, video and flash
• ALT Text parameters not used to define images, videos and flash objects
• No keyword focused pages
• Pages have too much information addressing many topics thus not focused
• Pages have very little content
• Keyword density analysis is impacted with the two above conditions
• Location information (Search results take into consideration location of the person searching for websites thus your business location can be an additional parameter for the search engines)
• Non-compliance Search Engine Optimized coding
• Little or no use of properly structured program code: anchor text, H tags, etc.
• No unique page titles
• No Meta Tags (Description, Keywords) or unique tags per page
• Little Intra-site linking thus breaking a crawlable path through the site by the spider bots.

Beyond the website structure identified above to index your site, there are other factors that can affect placement of your website in the Search Results (Page 1, 2, 3.... etc.). The Search Engines want to return the most relevant and best valued websites for a specific SEARCH. As such, they consider numerous other factors to implicitly determine the site's value such as but not limited to:

• Amount of traffic to and through the site
• Amount of content
• Number and types of backward links (note: reciprocal links are no longer heavily weighed by search engines if at all), and if the links are from valued websites.
   

Solutions:

SEO solutions generally can be addressed through one or both of the following areas:

• Internal Website Attention
• Traffic Generation

BUT determining which area should be addressed and which deficiencies need to be fixed should start with an analysis of your website and coding structure. Additionally, review of traffic data and visitor behavior on your website will assist in homing in on problem areas. Unfortunately, the latter is also a deficiency as that information is typically not collected by website owners.

Once the deficiencies are identified, then the appropriate actions can be taken; why spend money needlessly otherwise.

• Internal Website Attention - Basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Compliance:
  • Add valued content
  • Add or revise focused page content
  • Utilize public or target audience recognizable text and keywords; i.e., not words you may be familiar with
  • Add or emphasize business location
  • Utilize common search engine friendly coding practices
  • Employ intra-site in-line linking beyond the menus
  • Employ traffic monitoring and analysis, especially if not done now.

• Traffic Generation

The search engines consider the amount of traffic to your website in their placement of your site in search results; unfortunately, there is a “Catch 22” situation, you need traffic to appear in the top search results but you need to be in the top search results to get more traffic. Consequently, you need to rely on a number of other actions (on-line and off-line) to increase traffic to your site.

Possibly one or more of the following factors may be implemented:

• Create Google Plus, BING or Yahoo Profiles
• Populate Google Places
• Create BLOGs, open an account on Google Merchant (for retailers selling on-line)
• Referring Website –
• Add links from other valued websites (backward linking)
• Utilize linking from industrial portals and associated membership directories such as chamber of commerce, industry specific organizations, etc.
• Email and Social Media Marketing1 -
  • Create, build and manage an Email Address List
  • Add Sign-up form link to website
  • Define, develop and manage an Email Marketing Campaign(s) for all or target markets in accordance to your overall Marketing Plan; e.g., Newsletter, Specials, Announcements, Coupons, etc.
  • Coordinate email marketing with Social Media campaigns
  • Institute “Like Our Site” specials offering pages
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising -
• Create an PPC Campaign
• Define advertising budget and advertising duration
• Focus on specific goals and products/services, or target market audiences
• Define set of keywords per Ad Group & create one or more Ads per group
• Utilize unique Toll Free Number (800#) for tracking
• General Marketing –
• Embed website address (URL) onto promotional marketing items
• Include website address (URL) in letterhead, bulletins, marketing material, etc.
• Include website address (URL) in hard-copy media, radio and TV advertising

The best way to acquire new visitors to your site is with utilizing the basics for your website and then determining your marketing plan and the level of on-line and off-line advertising to fit your budget. So start by phasing in your approach; however, to help your efforts going forward, you need data: traffic data, site visitor behavior. Implement data collection, monitoring and analysis as part of your efforts. Then focus on the areas that are not performing well.
ToppingTheWeb LLC can help you with many of these services; some items can be performed by yourself, but the first thing is to contact us to get a free analysis of your site.

¹   Email & Social Media Marketing can be performed through your website or using Constant Contact^®.  Get 2 months free of Email Marketing through Constant Contact^®. Go to http://www.toppingtheweb.com/email_marketing.html and under the section for Constant Contact^®  sign-up for the Trial with Constant Contact^®.  Free Trial has a limit of 100 email addresses but unlimited emails within the 2 month trial.

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Our Business has expanded to add more services to better meet your Internet needs and to integrate with your Marketing Plans. The industry is always changing, so if you don't see what you are looking for, please contact us so we can help you.

For a free non-obligation quote to develop a new site, revise or upgrade an existing site, or for an analysis of your current site, please send an email to or call on (888) 241-1926.