So You Have A Website…Can Anyone Find It?

Last week we discussed using visual stories to convey your message. But even when you have a message, how will your prospects find you?

One way that business people find goods and services is to search the web. It’s up to you to optimize your site to make it easy for search engines to serve up your site when prospects go searching.

Think you can get people to contact you by just writing about your new technology, great ideas, or by giving away white papers? If what you do is new, what makes you think prospects are searching for it? Rather, consider what prospects are thinking, and typing, when they are in a frame of mind to care about what you offer. You need a strategy. Otherwise, your site will become just one more dark corner on the Internet.

Search engine optimization: Your competitors aren’t doing this!

Now that you’ve got a website with great marketing content, how is anyone going to find it? What exactly are your prospects searching for? How can you get search engines to show links to your website in the first few results pages? Find out how you can get ahead of your competitors in search results.

Search engine optimization is part of a managed lead-generation program.

Getting noticed on the web takes know-how, and work. The fifty-cent term for it is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Your competitors may not be using SEO, which presents you with an opportunity for competitive advantage. This article gives you a few tips to help your site be found before competitors’, the first step if your web site is going to generate sales leads.

Learn more about search engine optimization as part of a lead-generation program

You need execution. Structuring pages and documents correctly, eliminating common mistakes and getting links on related sites is all part of a managed lead-generation program that includes search engine optimization.

Contact us if you want to learn more

Want leads from your web site? Learn how to get noticed!

Each of your pages has an opportunity to attract prospects. To assign relevance and give your pages top position, search engines look for frequent keywords and phrases, textual patterns, how much competition there is for keywords, length of copy, links from similar sites, among other factors. Here are a couple ways to optimize your web site:

Develop relationships with organizations relating to what you do. Ask them to add links pointing to your site. This is called off-page search engine optimization.

Find out what words and phrases your prospects are searching for, and use them liberally throughout your site. Keep in mind that the name or description of your product may be unknown to prospects. So do some research to find out what prospects are thinking before they know about you. This is called on-page search engine optimization.

Meta Tags
Not nearly as important as they once were, search engines still examine these index terms associated with your pages.

Page Titles
Most search engines assign extra weight to page titles, which can help your pages land on top.

Navigation
Good navigation helps the search engine find the information you placed in the site, and efficiently pass it to searchers.

Effective use of search engine optimization can greatly enhance the performance of your sales and marketing process, and provide you a competitive advantage. Better lead generation, in turn, also means an improved sales and marketing pipeline.

For a deeper understanding of process improvement programs for your organization, attend the next Implementing Lean Thinking or How to Align a System of People and Processes for Results class. If you are eager to learn more about creating more order out of the chaos you are feeling at work, then the How to Create Well-Defined Processes class is right for you.

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Originally published in 2008 by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title So You Have A Website…Can Anyone Find It?. All rights reserved. Reproduction permitted with attribution only. www.bizmanualz.com