website search engine visibility

It is highly advantageous that the small business website design is discoverable in organic searches. This means designing and developing the brochure website with this in mind from the outset. This is always useful even if one is intending to use pay per click services and directories to be discovered as well as traditional promotion methods; business cards, stationary, etc. If the site is not optimized to be found in organic searches you will almost certainly have to spend money and use pay per-click or similar services to be found on line.

Small business websites are useful only if people can find them.

Search engine visibility, or search engine optimization (SEO) should be considered from the outset. Although not an exact science, the site can be built in such a way as to maximize the visibility of the important content to the engines.

The benefits: Enhanced online presence, increased traffic to site, cost savings on advertizing.

what search engine visibility means:

Suppose you are looking to buy a pair of florescent pink shoes. You enter 'flouresent pink shoes' into the browser search box. The first thing that happens is that you are offered a correct spelling and you enter that: 'fluorescent pink shoes', (wow! 744,000 results for that search term). Now, In order to show a result, the search engine has to know that you have items described as 'fluorescent pink shoes' on your site.

To get this information the engine analyses your site content (or a cached version of it) for indexable instances that refer to the key phrase 'fluorescent pink shoes' if it cannot find any it cannot know that you are offering this product.

Some search engines will also offer 'related searches' suggestions. In this case Google offered 'hot pink shoes' (90,200,000 results!) and 'neon pink shoes' (15,300,000 results!) which are all ways to describe the same or a closely similar product. So the site ideally needs, in the case of the 'fluorescent pink shoe' vendor to have these terms also visible to the search engine. Its worth noting that it would be easier to compete for the initial search query than for the latter two.

Entering 'pink shoes' will bring up searches related to pink shoes, some of which might be fluorescent the majority probably not. Entering 'shoes' will mean looking through hundreds of websites to find that desirable hot pink shoe you are after. Not very effective. Entering 'fluorescent' will bring up information on everything 'fluorescent' like light bulbs, high viz jackets to the physics of colour and maybe the odd brightly coloured shoe too, probably on page 1000.

So how does the search engine know about the relative importance of the aforementioned very bright shoes that you are trying to sell on your site? It basically makes a call based on a number of important factors visible to the site visitor demonstrating the importance of the particular shoe in question, these factors are present in the page text, links, HTML tags, Alt tags and so forth.

If you are a shoe vendor the process will need to identify your site as selling shoes in general as well as that hot pink pair of shoes languishing (but not for long) at the back of the stock room.

Therefore discovering the search terms that will be used to find your product or service is a key first step in matching buyers to sellers.

So whatever product or service you are providing it makes sense to have the site built with this in mind from the get go.

Coming up high on the search engine results pages (SERPS) for a particular search term is good, but you also need to have the right audience click through to the website, with the desired end result or conversion. This comes down to the informative description displayed by the engines in the browser. Traffic to the small business website needs to be relevant to be of use to anyone at all.

Many freelance website designers and even companies will give a passing nod to SEO and stick a few search terms in the Meta tags because to do it properly is very time consuming and requires some significant analysis.

Search engines work broadly to two criteria; relevance and authority.

on page search engine visibility

These are the factors that are present in the written copy of pages on the website, in the HTML, Meta, and images data and broadly provide the relevance aspect to the engines. This entails using the search terms and phrases that customers will enter into the search engines to find your product or service, and building the brochure website design with these in mind.

The brochure website design should be built to provide distinct landing pages optimized for one or two search terms each. This entails more work but increases the capacity for a variety of search terms to be matched by pages from the site.

Search terms need ideally to be referenced in the deep structure of the site, from folder and file names, through image Alt tags, xmp files (possibly), image captions, associated text, Header tags, links as well as more obviously in the Page Title, Meta keywords and Meta description data, and copy on the page itself.

It is often said that Meta keywords are redundant now, due to abuse. However there is still some demonstrable functionality, the degree of which varies with the particular search engine.

Good content is really the key to good website search engine optimization, and there are few things that will last for any duration that do not arise from or reflect content. Things may work for a while, like spammy links to sites, but then the search engines algorithm will change to mitigate against serving up inadequate or at worst irrelevant material. Such was the case with Google's recent algorithm updates. These updates floored many small business websites that were previously high ranking wholly or in part due to spurious links. The modus operandi of search engines is to serve relevant material and the tendency is increasingly to distinguish and provide both quality and relevance.

Quality content is really the key to long term optimization and website visibility, you have to think blue chip and not bubble.

It is sensible to opt for long tail search phrases where a particular search term is highly competitive. In this way you can rank well for a narrow search string of terms within an otherwise highly competitive arena. A highly specified search yielding a very specific web page is a clear win-win result for both the business and the consumer. For example if you found this site in organic searches it is likely that you used a fairly long tail search. It is relatively easy to get a first page position for a search term that no one else uses e.g. "inaccessible gobbledegook" but far more difficult to rank for a highly competitive term like "search engine visibility". And this reality needs to be considered when choosing and defining key words and phrases.

Avoidance of methodologies and tools which are inherently unreadable by the engines is a given with regard to search engine visibility. Flash is a good example, although there are some work arounds. Additionally H1 tags need to be defined in the HTML and styled with CSS or the engines will not notice them and a good opportunity to describe the site content to the search engines will be lost.

Practices that involve serving the search engine robots data that is not visible to the site visitor are a short term fix and are likely to seriously harm the sites performance long term.

off page search engine visibility

This will include links (in the appropriate format) to the brochure website from as many high ranking and relevant sites as possible and broadly provides the authority aspect, although they carry relevance information too.

Quality links will develop organically when a site is a resource and has content and information worth linking to.

There are many ways to build quality links to your site. Producing worthwhile articles and submitting them to online magazines, posting to blogs, mentioning your site in discussion groups, links from friends, companies you sell product for or who's products you use and well perhaps not obviously, having content that is useful, informative, beautiful or note worthy which is worth linking to in the first place.

Increasingly the use of social media including video is seen as an important factor in search engine visibility and increasing traffic. Although the actuality of social media is no magic bullet for all business models, however in terms of traffic it can certainly be viewed as a relevant tool for some businesses.

Having a blog attached to or pointing to the small business website is useful since search engines like fresh content and links can be built in naturally. However it needs to be apposite, extensive, and you must keep updating it.

post put search engine visibility optimizations

After putting a site up analytic tools can be used so that search engine visibility can be usefully measured and the website design or content modified if necessary. Examples might be to match content to search terms that are in most popular use, to match to previously unconsidered terms which are in fact being used, or to alter the link names or indeed the link structure to relate link credit from pages that are most linked to from other sites, to pages perceived as more desirable to gain uplift from link juice. This is functional SEO.

For costs see search engine optimized brochure website designs