Building An Online Presence with SEO

If you are a business owner or just looking to start a business, you have probably already realized the power that the internet holds when it comes to expanding your business and growing your market.  Because there are no real geographic restrictions on a website, business owners can tap markets that were previously out of the question.  However, this presents challenges of its own.  How do you prevent yourself from getting lost in a sea of internet queries and sales web sites?

Once you have purchased low cost web hosting services, gotten your site built and uploaded, and established a domain name to point to your site, many new users will just sit back and wait for the sales to come in.  Unfortunately, there is a great deal more work that goes into building an online presence.

You must, first of all, optimize your site for search engines.  Here are some great steps to optimize your site:

1. Make sure to include a descriptive title on your page. The title of the page should be repeated or included in a relevant way within your site or page. The meta title is one of the most important parts of your website’s SEO.
2. Your meta keywords should be relevant to your site and used throughout the site. For example, if one of your keywords is “seo london”, you should have relevant articles or paragraphs using this word in your site.  A good way to utilize this tag would be to have an article all about SEO London.
3. Utilize the spider tags such as <meta name=”robots” content=”all” />. This lets the search engine no that they should crawl your site and the links contained within.
4. Your meta description should be related to your site content. Key words and phrases in your description should be used throughout your site.
5. Images, movies, and Flash cannot be read by the search engine without proper description tags. Be sure to include relevant and descriptive “alt” tags on all of your media, so they relate to your content.
6. Store scripts (such as javascript) externally. These can cause messy searches, so it is better to utilize external script linking.
7. Link to other relevant and highly rated sites. Generic links such as yahoo.com or google.com will not cause much of a boost to your ranking.  Try to find other resources related to your site’s content and link to them.
8. Try to start a link exchange with related sites. If ranked sites link back to you, this helps your ranking.  It is best to contact the admin of these sites and ask if they would like to start a link exchange.  But, make sure to live up to your end of the bargain.  Your low cost web hosting services might even have a referral program or link exchange.  Consider speaking with their affiliate or marketing department about this.
9. Stay under the limits! Some search engines have problems with more than 100 URLs per page and very large sites.  Also, some search engines have limits on the number of characters in each meta tag.  Research these specific numbers and ensure that your site is within the requirements.
10. Use a meta tag analyzer to check the relevancy of all of your meta tags. Even free analyzers can do a pretty thorough job of giving you advice based on your current site makeup.

Once your site is optimized to be read by search engines, seek the advice of your low cost web hosting services, as they might be able to provide you with information or vendors that can assist with getting you in the sponsored results or just submitting you to all search engines.

Link rings, formal link exchanges, and even internet forums are great ways to get your name out there.  Try to find forums related to your product or service and become an active member of the community.  The more people see your domain name and business name floating around, the more likely they are to stop by and take a look.

Your discount web hosting provider may have some helpful tips or tricks regarding spreading your name around the internet.  So, do not be afraid to ask!  After all, the worst answer you can get is, “No.”

Update your site with newsflashes or blogs frequently.  Search engines log the last time a page was changed.  If an old site has not been changed in weeks or months, it is going to lose ranking FAST!  Little updates keep the search engines looking at you and they also keep your customer interested.  Think about your own personal experience in viewing websites.  Do you like to see the same, constant information over and over?

Above all, keep your low cost web hosting services in the loop.  The more they know about what you are doing, the more services they can offer you that might make your job a bit easier.