Search Engine Optimisation: Find my site please Google

Search Engine Optimisation: Find my site please Google

Search: Rising above the competition

The art of promoting your products or services online in a highly competitive marketplace is a skill that can be easily learned and should exist in all website designers worth their salt. Without knowledge of search engine optimisation a site designer faces a tremendous challenge if he is to offer his clients an acceptable service.

It is all very well creating a stunning flash-based website with spinning, fading and interactive objects, but if your client is a corporate entity whose bottom line has a pound sign in its prefix or a new prospect as the target of his new website then your lengthy timelines are wasted. "Search is the bottom line".

If your clients' potential customers are looking for his products or services they are unlikely to crank up their internet browser and just type in his url unless he is carrying out some 'offline' marketing activities. The 'prospect' will more likely head to google, yahoo or msn (or indeed one of the many other smaller search engines). They will enter the terms that they believe will bring them the companies they are looking for. So if your client sells "25.4mm aluminium bolts" then you have to create him a website that will be found when a prospect types that particular term into a search engine.

But is that really what the prospect will type into the search box? And what about the offline marketing actitivity. What can you do to make assist with that?

The 'prospect' may very well type in "25.4mm aluminium bolts" but all angles have to be covered. He may work in inches so take this into account and make sure that the site mentions "1 inch aluminium bolts" too. Does the bolt company want people to buy bolts or does he just want to give advice on bolts? Make sure your page title indicates what the company's relationship with bolts is. eg. "Buy aluminium bolts for best price at XYZ Bolt Co., UK "

To assist with your client's offline marketing make sure his website is at the very least, indexed by the major engines. It is not unusual for a visitor to actually type the url into the search engine box so make sure the site is listed first for this particular search. You can also supply him with specific urls to use in his offline marketing that will allow him to track his campaigns.

Oh, and the competition... just make sure you can help your client to rise above them.

Find my site please Google

It is the dream of every webmaster/site publisher to have their site on the first page of Google's search results for their chosen term(s) and so most will strive to achieve this as their primary goal.
We have a problem here.
Firstly, your primary goal in getting your website noticed should not be to impress google. You should first of all impress the visitor.
Secondly, the website should be able to stand on its own two feet (or how ever many feet it may have) with or without google (or the other search engines out there).
And third, but not necessarily at the bottom of the list, you should look at other methods of driving traffic to your site before you consider what Google can do for you.
I say this not just for the sake of it but as genuine advice in getting your site highly ranked amongst the best in its own category. If you get other sites to link to you and create some 'talk' on the relevant discussion forums then your site will become popular naturally and once you have achieved this then google will have no choice other than to follow the popularity of your site.
Rather than wait for Google to deem your website worthy of indexing, it is good practice to 'pull' Google towards your site and make sure that your site's popularity actually drives Google in the search of the particular term(s) that bring your site the relevant traffic.
Of course, Google do not own 'search' but they damn well drive it and to impress 'Gg' is the ultimate in website optimisation.
I have read many articles on optimising your website offline and creating searches for your url and subsequently pulling Google towards your site through the popularity of the url. The same rule applies when advertising your site 'offline'. The more people searching for your site or entering your company name in Google's search bar then the higher your site will get in Google's perception of what is popular and therefore relevant.