You just paid to have a gorgeous web site designed.  But where is the traffic?  ”Just build it and the people will come” does not work when it comes to web sites.  There is much time and effort that goes into building traffic for your web site.  This effort should be shared with your web developer.  Search engine optimization is the process of matching your site content with your web page code.

An optimized site does not guarantee the highest placement, but it does guarantee inclusion into the search engines, which means the search engine can find you.  Google has a list of do’s and don’ts that your webmaster should be aware of if you are going to be successful.

So how do you get to the top?  This is the big question.  The answer to this question requires a lot more time than I have to write this article.  However, you should know that it involves several different methods.  Think of your web site as no different than you opening a business and having to find a way for people to know you exist.  You have to register your business, list it with the yellow pages, maybe take out a few newspaper or magazine ads, mailers and everywhere else including word of mouth. Before the internet, we looked up businesses in the yellow pages.  Those businesses who purchased ads stood out.

Now move all those efforts online and this is how you get to the top.  Some common methods employed are Link building, pay per click, optimizing your pages for an organic search, adding a blog to your site, listing your site in all the top search engines, online advertising campaigns, and a few other techniques.  Because there are people who are serious about their web sites being number one, they are constantly monitoring their rankings and modifying their pages to stay ahead of the competition.

If you have quite a bit of time you can optimize your site yourself, but if your time is limited, your web developer will perform this service for you for an extra fee.  Usually around $200 per page depending on what all is involved and whether or not they have to perform research for you.  A good resource to learn more is the Search Engine Watch web site.  The least every web site owner should do is to optimize their pages for select keywords.  Each page should be optimized separately.  Ask about this when you are having your web site designed by an outside company.

This entry was posted on July 2, 2010 at 4:16 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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