If you had to choose a business, which would it be -
the most stunning store in the middle of nowhere or a hot dog stand in
Central Park, New York? I hope you said the hot dog stand. It has a
much larger chance for success even though it may not have cost a
fortune to build. The same goes for your website. You are far better to
relinquish some of your budget to being found than making your website
just the prettiest one on the internet.
The term commonly used
for this is search engine optimization (SEO), meaning your site needs
to be created in such a way that it is search engine friendly and laden
with the proper key words. Here are a few quick tips to get your
rankings up!
1. Know Your Key Words - First make a list of
every phrase you can think of that people might use to find what your
site is going to offer. Ask your friends and colleagues for input and
try to find people that are within your site's target audience to get
an idea of how they would search.
Once you have a good long list
use search engine databases to refine it and see what people have
actually searched for when looking for similar sites. If you have money
to spend buy Wordtracker. Otherwise use Overture's free keyword
suggestion tool.
Remember the more common the keywords the more
expensive it will be to get to the first page. To help reduce costs,
add a geographic term or extra common phrases. For instance if your
market is in Calgary, then add that word to your phrase.
2. Insert Keywords Within the Title Tag
- The title tag is located right at the top of your document. Have a
look at your website in your browser. Have a look at the bar ABOVE
where you typed the web address. The keywords that are in here hold a
lot of weight with the search engines. Hopefully your Title Tag doesn't
say Welcome!
3. Use Keywords as Anchor Text - In other
words use the same keywords on a page's Title Tags to link to this page
from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your
site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific
page the better.
4. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page.
Adding the exact same text for your main header on the page will
tell the reader who clicks on your page from a search engine result
that they have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page
where they intended to visit. Search Engine Robots like this too
because now there is a relation between the title of your page and the
headline.
5. Sprinkle your keywords throughout your article.
The most important keywords can be bolded or coloured in red. A good
place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of your
article and in the sub-headings.
6. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website.
Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same
if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might
not get indexed.
7. Submit to the search engines yourself or get your web developer to do it. Do not use a submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned.
8. Have links back to your site from high traffic site
- The more INBOUND links there are pointing to your web site from other
relevant, related and complementary web sites, the better. If you are
listed in directories, try to add your website address wherever
possible.
Cidnee Stephen is a high energy and accomplished marketing professional. Born to market, she showed her creative side at a very young ago when she started marketing greeting cards and good ol’ lemonade in elementary school. To anyone that knew her, it was no surprise then that she chose marketing as her focus at University over 20 years ago. Of course most of the marketing principles she learned way back then suited large corporations. So when she was thrown into small business marketing years later, she found she needed to come up with some new approaches. Her techniques served her well and she continuously has been a top producer for the companies she has worked with. Having worked in Canada and Europe, Cidnee has called Calgary her home since the late 1990’s. 
