For some organizations, it is important to be found on Google and other search engines. This is not something which can be accomplished by any quick and easy means; rather, it is highly competitive and complicated.
Or – for the right advertising budget – it can be simpler, since Google search results all include paid advertising. You can buy search engine placement. The rest of this article concerns the effort to acheive placement in searches without paying for it.
We can almost certainly be sure that your site can be found via search engines by people looking for it specifically by name, and we can take numerous measures to make it more likely that your site will begin to rise up in the long list of search results for your most important search phrases.
Once your website is live on the Internet and linked from at least one other website, Google will almost always find it (we will link to it from our site to ensure this). Normally, within a couple of weeks or less, typing in your business name will result in your site’s URL being shown prominently in search results.
More important, and much more challenging, is to have your website show prominently in search results for search phrases which your potential customers are likely to use when searching online.
For example, my website design business is called AyersVirtual and our office is physically located in Carrboro, North Carolina. AyersVirtual would benefit from being found in searches on the term “web design” or “web designer” – but that would be nearly impossible, since it would be competing with millions of website developers all over the world. However, AyersVirtual might have a chance of appearing on the first page of search results for “web designer, Carrboro, North Carolina” – so it’s worthwhile to try to achieve that goal through “search engine optimization” of our website.
So, as a standard part of producing your website, we utilize numerous tactics to make it as likely as possible that your website will appear in searches under the most common phrases a visitor would use to find a business like yours – especially if you can include a specific geographical area.
And there are things you can do yourself to improve your search engine positioning. If you are the owner or head of the business, you are probably the best person to do either or both (1) a link exchange or (2) an organization blog. Both link exchanges and blogging can be effective, but they require time and effort on your part. Our Website package comes with standard features which can help you to pursue either or both of these strategies. If interested, please ask us to enable these features and provide some advice on using them.
We cannot guarantee good placement in search engines. This type of success usually comes only after months or years of focused effort in this area. But we will build you a search-engine friendly site which has a fighting chance of some level of success. We have found that over time, if some effort is made, a website’s placement on search engines tends to improve.
