Search All You Want
When trying to promote your site, there are a couple of ways to do so. Not only has search sites changed the face of the internet, Google has changed the way search sites work. Their spiders will seek out the websites, find the information for not only your search terms, but a cached page, and perhaps an offline version. This is then uploaded back to Google's server for the searcher. However, making your way to the top requires a good understanding of Search Engine Optimization(SEO).
What can the average consumer do to promote their site then? I am going to cover two things in this post: advertising and metadata tags.
First off, the easiest and more costly of the two options: pay someone to do it for you! Google AdWords is just one example of a good SEO site that will allow you to type in specific keywords that relate to the searches of your customers. However, finding the right keyword can be tricky. There is a good balance between being too vague (like shirts) and too specific (like extra small blue shirts for band majors under the age of 12). I know the example I just used is a little extreme, but it is to bring up a good point: we need to learn how people search the internet as well as how it works.
I mentioned earlier about the little spiders. These are tiny robots (not physical ones) that go through the web looking at all the information and cataloging it. When someone searches on Google for jam, Google will then show all the sites related to jam that was already found. Thousands of search results, if not hundreds of thousands are available to you now. However, most people rarely look beyond the first page of search results nowadays. And most people do not search for "jam." They search for things like "homemade strawberry jam." Think like a consumer when you create your AdWords keywords. Adwords will allow your search to pop up (if you won the bid) on whatever page the person is viewing as long as it matches their search parameters.
The second option is free, and while easy to do, it takes a lot of skill to do well enough that you will show up on the first page. This is editing the metadata tags embedded into the webpage itself. The concept is the same. If you were selling homemade strawberry jam, that is one of the tags you could add to your site so that the spider would find it in its search of the web. If you have access to the code, simply go the head section of your HTML and add in a metadata tag. If you used a site creator, they often have something similar you can use in their back-end software that will do the same thing for you.
Overall, if we want our sites to be found, we need to give it the right tools to be found. Both the options above will work well in making your site searchable.
What can the average consumer do to promote their site then? I am going to cover two things in this post: advertising and metadata tags.
First off, the easiest and more costly of the two options: pay someone to do it for you! Google AdWords is just one example of a good SEO site that will allow you to type in specific keywords that relate to the searches of your customers. However, finding the right keyword can be tricky. There is a good balance between being too vague (like shirts) and too specific (like extra small blue shirts for band majors under the age of 12). I know the example I just used is a little extreme, but it is to bring up a good point: we need to learn how people search the internet as well as how it works.
I mentioned earlier about the little spiders. These are tiny robots (not physical ones) that go through the web looking at all the information and cataloging it. When someone searches on Google for jam, Google will then show all the sites related to jam that was already found. Thousands of search results, if not hundreds of thousands are available to you now. However, most people rarely look beyond the first page of search results nowadays. And most people do not search for "jam." They search for things like "homemade strawberry jam." Think like a consumer when you create your AdWords keywords. Adwords will allow your search to pop up (if you won the bid) on whatever page the person is viewing as long as it matches their search parameters.
The second option is free, and while easy to do, it takes a lot of skill to do well enough that you will show up on the first page. This is editing the metadata tags embedded into the webpage itself. The concept is the same. If you were selling homemade strawberry jam, that is one of the tags you could add to your site so that the spider would find it in its search of the web. If you have access to the code, simply go the head section of your HTML and add in a metadata tag. If you used a site creator, they often have something similar you can use in their back-end software that will do the same thing for you.
Overall, if we want our sites to be found, we need to give it the right tools to be found. Both the options above will work well in making your site searchable.
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