If you own a business, you need the Internet. If you want to reach a wider audience, you need the Internet. If you want to target the right audience, you need the Internet. The Internet has become the first place shoppers go to locate products and services they need. They check prices, availability, and product specifics. They read reviews, visit forums, and look for discount codes and/or coupons.
But how does a small company get its business website search engine ready? You get listed in the search engines, that’s how.
The cheapest way to get listed in the search engines is to write web copy that is search engine friendly. In other words, the content on a specific product page should have words that every day searches would use to find your product. The more specific you are, the easier it will be for your product page to rank within the first ten pages of the search engines. The more general your content is, the harder it will be for the search engines to decipher what that product page is really about.
But even with search engine friendly copy, you still need the search engines to find you. You can do this several ways: search engines, link swaps, paid advertising, and article distribution.
The first way to get search engines to find your company website is to submit it to the main search engines. When you submit your website to the search engines, you do not want to submit every single page of your website. Instead, you want to submit your domain name (otherwise known as homepage or index page) and allow the search engines to crawl (or spider) the rest your website.
You also want to start with the main search engines, like google.com, yahoo.com, and askjeeves.com. Usually, submitting to the main search engines is enough as the smaller, or lesser known, search engines usually pull their content from the main search engines. But when in doubt, submit.
After submitting your website to the major search engines, consider these tips for increasing the visibility of your website:
• write a press release and send it to PR services that provide an online version of your press release, complete with a clickable URL to your company website.
• write an article that both educates and entertains readers and submit it, for free, to article directories. Anyone who uses your article will have to include your contact information, which you provide in the byline.
• write a weekly blog. Share tips and advice about your products and services and don’t be afraid to link outside your company. The more freely you provide “qualified” links that compliment your products and services, the more likely you’ll receive reciprocating links.
Submitting your website to the search engines is as easy as typing in your company’s website address in the appropriate box and hitting submit. And to get you started, I’ve compiled a list of useful links:
Google
http://www.google.com/addurl.html
Yahoo
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
Dmoz Directory (AOL also uses this)
http://dmoz.org/
All the Web
http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php
Alta Vista
http://addurl.altavista.com/
Jayde
http://search.jayde.com/cgi-bin/addurl.cgi
Scrub the Web
http://www.scrubtheweb.com/addurl.html
What You Seek
http://www.whatuseek.com/addurl.shtml
You can also find more places to submit your website to by typing “add url” in the search engine and scrolling the results.