Get Found, Be Seen

The old saying ‘you have to be in it, to win it’ has never been so appropriate as when referring to wining the search engine game. With typically 80% of the visitors to any website coming from search engine referrals, if your website is not ‘in’ their index, you won’t get those crucial referrals.

Building your website so that it is search engine friendly is a specialist skill and you should talk to your web-developer about it to make sure that they have done the best they can for your website. For reference, the process of making your site as attractive as possible is called Search Engine Optimisation, often abbreviated to SEO.

Once your site has been correctly constructed, you can help a lot by writing interesting and unique content for your website, and then regularly updating it. The more relevant, unique and changing your website is to your project or business, the more interesting it is to search engines to have in their index. Then you are more likely to get referrals from them with people looking for the service or product you are providing.

You can also help yourself by getting other people to link to your site. Links from other sites to yours act as a positive vote in your favour and, the more votes you get, the better your chance of winning.

These activities will help your website appear in natural or organic search engine results listings – the list of results you see when you do a search. The more you can do to keep your site fresh and to get large number of links from other sites, the better your chance of appearing towards the top of these results.

Optimising your site is a process that can take many months to achieve and a lot of effort to retain. In the interim, there is another option that you have; buy your way to the top.

You’ll notice within search engine results that there is a narrow right hand column next to the main left hand column. These are paid for listings and you can place your business in these positions for phrases that are relevant to your business.

It costs nothing do be on the list and you only pay when someone clicks on your advert, hence the term Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. This method can be a cost effective way of buying visitors to your website and you only get visitors for the searches that you want to be found for. You specify the words that you want to appear for (keywords) and the amount you are prepared to pay for a click (click bid value).

Let’s look at an example. Say your business sells pet accessories; you may want to get some visitors looking for a ‘brown leather dog collar’ and you’d be prepared to pay 20p per visitor (much cheaper than the cost of a stamp and brochure). When someone types the phrase ‘brown leather dog collar’ into search engines, your advert will appear and, if they then click on your advert to visit your website, the maximum you’ll pay is 20p. As you can specify which keywords you want to appear for and the budget you want to spend, you have complete control over the type of visitor you attract.

Getting found in search engine listings is crucial to the success of running an online business. An effective online campaign will have a mix of optimised searches and PPC advertising. One thing is sure, the more effort you put in, the more you’ll get back: another old adage that still applies in the digital age.

(Article originally written for Out and Out Magazine)