Youve just spent several weeks working with a your web designer building
your companys websites. You spent a lot of time making revisions, writing and
creating copy, making more revisions, but finally your project is complete and
your website is live on the internet for the whole world to see. A few weeks
later you get a call from a business colleague, they say they went to look for
your company in a search engine but your company was no where to be found, and
they thought you ought to know about it. You open up your web browser , head
over to Google and your company is nowhere to be found. You go to Yahoo and MSN
but the results are the same, its like your invisible to the online world.
Now clearly this isnt the goal you had in mind when you built your website.
You wanted your company to be seen by the whole world, not to be so well hidden,
that people looking for you cant find you. However this is a problem that
affects many small to mid sized businesses who are just getting online or
havent done any online promotions. To help the search engines and ultimately
your customers find you youll to start working on promoting yourself online.
Promoting yourself online is similar to promoting yourself in the real world you
need to find ways to get your website noticed.
To help the search engines find your site you need a basic understanding of
how they work. Search engines have programs that scan web pages, they read the
contents of these pages and try to figure out what they think they are about.
When they visit these pages they also look for links to other pages, note them
down for future programs to visit and read. The early search engine developers
had a bit of a sense of humor when they developed these programs to crawl across
the web they named them “spiders”. The more often these spiders find links
pointing to your pages the more frequently your website will be examined by the
spiders, this process is known as “crawling”.
So to get the search engines to find your website youre going to need links.
There are lots of different ways you can get links, some are easy, some a hard,
and some will even cost you money. Examples of places you can get links are
chambers of commerce, business trade organization, networking groups,
directories, press releases, syndicated articles, blogs, and link exchanges.
There are pluses and minuses associated with each of these types of links. In a
nutshell what you are looking for is a prominently placed link on a reputable
website.
Sometimes judging a websites reputation is a little tricky and is more of an
art form than a science. As a rule of thumb dont ask or pay for a link from a
website you dont want to be associated with. Sometimes youll receive link
requests via email asking you to exchange or trade links, however when you visit
the website, you get the feeling somethings not right. In some cases these
people will have already put up a link to you. Dont worry about it just delete
the email, theres usually no reason to worry about someone else linking to you.
Another thing to note about links is they arent all valued equally. For example
a link from your brothers hobby website isnt as “important” as link from The
Washington Post, CNN, or Business Week Magazine. What you are really want is a
link from another established, trusted, and quality website.
© Copyright www.AtlasWebGroup.com, All Rights Reserved.
Gary Mitchell is part of Atlas Web Group Inc. a complete web services company. They can
help you build and promote your website with a custom search engine
optimization plan that will increase your companies rankings and visibility
across the web. You can contact them for free no obligation consultation at http://www.atlaswebgroup.com
for more information
