Optimizing your New Website

If you are in the process of getting your business established on the Internet, you want to maximize the visitors (and potential customers) your site gets. To do this, you use search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO is very important when you’re establishing your presence on the web because it helps determine where your site shows up in the search engine rankings when someone searches on words relevant to your business. If anything, small businesses have to make SEO a higher priority than the big corporations do. After all, they have huge advertising budgets they can use to help drive traffic to their site and you probably don’t.

Good search engine optimization is an advertising campaign in itself almost. The higher your website ranks on search engines, the more traffic you’ll get, so you want a website that is search engine friendly. But before you worry about SEO, make sure you have a well designed site. You want your business to reflect your site and your business philosophy. You want your site to be interesting, unique, and (this is extremely important) easy to navigate. If your visitors risk going deep into the pages of your site with no clear way back out, they’ll be frustrated. Maybe so frustrated that they don’t want to shop there. A well-designed website is a great investment that will probably quickly pay for itself in increased visitor numbers and sales.

The logical placement of your web pages is an important part of search engine optimization. The “deep” pages of your site can hurt or help your search engine standings. If you can get back links to pages other than the home page, that will help tremendously. These are known as deep links and are highly regarded by search engines. The logic is, “If people are linking to his page that’s only about extended wear contact lenses, they must really like the home page.” Make your site easy to shop at and put good content on all the pages. A user-friendly site is a well ranked site.

Have a reliable web hosting company. Not only should they give you plenty of disk space and bandwidth, plus extras like a bunch of email accounts, they should guarantee uptime of better than 99.5%. Nobody can guarantee you 100% uptime, because things break and tornadoes go through, and there’s no way to keep the servers absolutely safe. But they can come really close. Remember, on the Internet, there’s no such thing as opening and closing hours. Even if your site is only down for an hour or two, if you’re getting thousands of hits a day, that means that a bunch of them weren’t able to use your site and consequently, weren’t able to buy any of your products or services. Fortunately, good, affordable web hosting is more available than ever. There are enough hosting companies that they all want to do something to set themselves above the others. Reliability and real 24/7/365 technical help are extremely important qualities for your web hosting company to have.

Your website is as important to your business as your advertising campaign, so you want to have the best site you can afford. Your business’s website should be attractive, easy to navigate, and friendly to the major search engines. Search engine optimization is a function of having a reliable, navigable site that is keyword rich with excellent content.