By Keegan Michaels BizGuru.com
These days search engines can pull in a huge audience for your web site. Now that half of all North Americans are online with millions in other countries logging on the Internet each week, search engines are becoming the Yellow Pages of Cyberspace. So why not use them for your business? Here's how.
USE YOUR WEB SITE TITLE
Make sure your site gets listed by having a Title that appeals to search engines. Engine computers often place the most emphasis on your title--that line which appears in a box at the top or bottom of your browser screen.
Think of the word or words most people are going to use to search for a site like yours. Include that most important word in your title twice if you can. For example, if your most important keyword is "bacon," your title might be: "Bacon Center Features the World's Best Bacon."
If your most important keyword is "marketing," your title could use two forms of the same word: "Market Your Business with These Marketing Ideas."
A Title that says "Welcome to our Site" or "Joe's Barber Shop" may look okay to visitors, but it offers very little for search engine robots that are thirsting for some way to classify your site.
HAVE YOU GOT A META TAG?
Meta tags are a key ingredients that search engines look for when deciding how to list your web site. You can't see a meta tag while looking at your page. It is a simple code in the HTML behind your page.
Your Meta Tag goes near the top of your page's html between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags. Click the right mouse key (for PC users) on any good web page, then choose "view source" and you will see the HTML code.
The Meta Tag should look something like this:
<META NAME= "description" content= "Keegan Michaels-One of the Net's top business writers provides lots of tips on marketing, media, on-line marketing, and the Internet."><META NAME="keywords" content= "marketing, advertising, ads, Internet marketing, press release, copy writing, web site design, small business assistance, newsletters, web site promotion, selling online, ezines, home-based business opportunities">
This is a simple Meta Tag I use on my bizguru.com site. Copy it and then insert your own description and keywords.
USE KEYWORDS IN WEB COPY
Search engines are a lot smarter than they used to be. These days, when you type in "toothbrushes," you're quite likely to get a site that is all about toothbrushes.
Most of us remember times not so long ago when search engines were less sophisticated. What you typed into the search box had little or nothing to do with the 20,000 sites the engine presented you. Now search-engine computers do a pretty fair job of reading through the copy on your site, figuring out what your site is about, and classifying your site according to the most common keywords in your text.
Sites with lots of tightly-focused information on a specific topic tend to do very well on search engines. You can get a search engine's attention by intensely focusing the first 100 words of your page on a few important keywords.
If your site is about bicycles, make sure your text mentions the words "bicycle," "bicycles," and "bicycling," as often as logical in good writing (search engines are able to detect when you're trying to cheat by using a word too much).
Be sure the same top keywords show up in your title, your Meta Tag and in your copy. Good luck.
Keegan Michaels manages BizGuru.com, a website packed with FREE marketing tips, tools, and strategies for web sites, retail and mail-order businesses. Get his FREE marketing course via email. Send an email to: bizguru@zinfo.net
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