You’ve started a business, you’ve got a website, and now all you need is for the orders to start rolling in. Unfortunately, running a real business, no matter where it might be located, is never as easy. As anyone who has ever tried to start their own business will tell you, the days of being competitive online with the help of just a website are over.
These days, if you want to remain competitive, you have to do more than throw up a website and come up with a catchy but easy to remember domain name. In fact, these days, the name of your domain is nowhere near as important as the information that is actually contained on your website.
A New Era of Marketing
Search engine marketing is, no doubt, the new era of marketing. Gone are the days when TV commercials and magazine pages were considered the best places to put advertisements – these days, every good business person knows the value of marketing for an online audience because, after all, the internet attracts more eyeballs than any TV station, radio station, magazine, or phone book could ever hope to attract.
With sites like Google funneling millions upon millions of internet users everyday to the most relevant websites to address their issues and questions, businesses and professionals who are looking for publicity should look no further than the search engines.
How Search Engines Work
When you type a search query into a search engine, the search engine will return with a list of results which it believes to be the most relevant to the query topic. To determine which results are most relevant, search engines use a complex series of formulas and algorithms that take into account the amount of times that keywords are mentioned on websites, the number of visitors that the sites get each day, the types of tags which are integrated into the site, and the number of backlinks that exist on the web that point back to a site, among a few other factors.
Because the factors which decide where a site will rank can change (the amount of times keywords will appear, the amount of backlinks pointing back to a website, etc.), a website’s position on rankings is fluid, and always capable of changing. This means that even after a top search engine ranking has been earned, some very real effort must be put into maintaining the top spot so that the site does not lose the spot to a competitor’s site.
How Sites Gain Rank
The factors that were mentioned above which help search engines determine where to rank sites can also be used to guide a search engine marketing strategy. Perhaps one of the best things that you can do for a website is to create content on the site that people actually want to read. Articles, blog posts, and interesting tidbits of information will all help websites rank high in search engines and keep visitors on site pages.
For information on launching a search engine marketing plan of your own, contact a dedicated team of SEO and online marketing professionals today.
