Small Business Web Site Promotion

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I’m amazed at how many businesses I see that have a web site but have not taken even the simplest step in making their web site seen by the outside world.

I understand that not everyone is technical and able to make the changes needed. However, there are some simple things you can do to make your web site come up high on search engine listings.

I will share with you my experience in small business web site promotion. The important point is that there are a few very simple things you can do to greatly impact the success of your web site.

I realize that there are a plethora of consultants offering, small business web site promotion via “Search Engine Optimization.” But, if you are not ready to spend money in that way, some of the following things can done and you will get 80% of the value of a full-fledged search optimization project.

Before going into the details I will mention that this web site was built using an online tool called, SiteSell. This tool simplifies the process of building a website and also optimizes it for small business web site promotion.

With that said, the tool is not for everyone. In particular, if you need a highly custom web site or you already have a web site, you will need to perform the optimization steps that follow.

The list below are the most important things to do to make your web site more findable on the Internet. These small business web site promotion suggestions are listed in order of importance. If you cannot make these changes, pick the top items and have a contractor make the changes for you.

Webpage Titles – This is the absolutely most important thing to do for small business web site promotion. ** If you do nothing else DO THIS! ** This one item will capture as much as 80% of the value of a complete optimization of your website.
The title appears at the top of your page and not inside your actual content. This is the most important item for search engine success. It’s the easiest thing to do. And I cannot believe how many websites are out there where this has not been done. Do it!
Write a unique title for each page of your web site. Make each title relevant to what the page is about. For this title, try your best to use phrases that reflect what people would type into a search engine when searching for what’s on your page. These are called, “keywords” or “key phrases” in search engine lingo. Also, a formal process of keyword brainstorming can be very valuable.
The title is used by every search engine AND appears in the result page. That means that the title phrases you use shows up in the search engine listing when a user does a search. Therefore, you must balance the readability of the title with the need for phrases on which people will search.
A unique title is best because you have a chance to come up in a search for each title of each webpage. So, if every one of your web pages has the same title you are wasting your potential number of search phrases that may get called up by search engines. I see this error all the time on company web sites. Please don’t make this mistake!
All Business Is Local
If your business generates its sales from your local geographical area you will need to include your geographic location in the key words. For example, if you sell insurance locally you should be sure to include the names of your city, zip code, and area code. Even things like the road where your office is located can be a good idea to include. The reason is that a person who searches for your service would specially use these types of geographic words when looking for you.
Technical note: Keep the title phrase length to 125 characters including the blanks. Also, keep your most important key word or phrase at the beginning.
If you cannot edit the titles yourself:
You can get a contractor do put your titles into every page of your web site for as little as $100. There is no reason not to do this. In fact, if you can think of a reason not to do this, please write me and tell me because I cannot figure out why every webpage does not have a unique title.
Web Page Text: This is the next most important thing for small business web site promotion. It is what you have written on your web pages. You must use the words and phrases that are in your web page title in your actual web page. In particular, important words and phrases from you web page title need to be used and best if used prominently in headings and in boldface.
Links to Your Web Site: When another company links to you web site it is viewed as a “vote of confidence” in your website by search engines. So, the more links that are pointed at your web site the better in terms of how important a search engine will “think” of your web site.
In addition, search engines have a way to evaluate the links going to your webs ite. So a link to your web site form someone’s personal web site will not carry as much as weight as one from say, The Wall Street Journal’s website.
Where do you get links? The hope is that other companies find your web site important enough to have a link to it. This can happen when you have partnerships with other companies or provide something interesting or useful in terms of information on your web site.
Also, if you announce important news many websites may link to the news story. This is especially true if you make a news announcement and put out a press release.
If you do a press release be sure to include a link to your web site in the press release so anyone who writes about it will put a link back to your site. This can be an excellent method for small business web site promotion and it includes all around awarenss building for your company. It is expensive though at about $400 a press release.
Links from Directories - For other links, it’s important to be listed in internet based directories. These are like yellow page listings on the internet. Some are free and some cost money to obtain a listing.
One very important directory to get listed in is free. It’s called DMOZ (www.dmoz.com). This is an organization that categorizes web sites according to what they contain. If you get listed here many search engines will “pick up” your web site. Google uses DMOZ and Google is the most important engine because over 60% of web search traffic comes from Google.
Another important directory is Yahoo. Yahoo has a directory which is separate from the general Yahoo search engine. Unfortunately, a listing with Yahoo is very expensive and costs $300. Many search “experts” consider a directory listing with Yahoo as important to setting your web site apart in the marketplace. However this can be a major expenditure so I don’t blame you if you skip it.
Industry Specific Directories - There are other directories that exist. Many have an industry focus such as Market Research Firms, Advertising Agencies, Business Intelligence Companies, etc. These groups are smaller and may earn their own money by changing a small fee for the listing and/or by selling advertising space on their web site. To find many of these types of directories, you should search for “vendor listing” or “vendor directory” along with a keyword that matches your business.
Other Search Engines - Finally, you can submit your web site to other search engines besides DMOZ and Yahoo. Remember though that Google and Yahoo are the most important with Google having about 60% of the search market and Yahoo about 15% (Microsoft has about 10%).
Website Organization – The way that the web pages are linked together makes a difference in your small business web site promotion. Pages directly linked to your home page are considered more important than other pages. Such as those that are linked to a page that is linked to your home page (called third tier pages.)
By the way, many search engines only search the first three levels of your web site. This counts your homepage as level one. Keep this in mind and try not to burry web pages too deep or they will not get noticed.
Next, be sure to name your webpages using the key words and phrases that you use in the title and in the web page text of the pages. This is accomplished by using a hyphen between the words.
Web Page Description: This is valuable to search engine placement but not as much as it once was. Try to provide additional information that is not contained in the title. Keep in mind that the description is displayed when searches are performed so it must be readable AND contain the important key words and phrases. The recommended length for descriptions is no more than 150 characters including spaces.
Keywords Inside Webpage "Code": These keywords do not get displayed on the webpage itself but are actually contained inside the “source code” of the web page. The web developer can place these keywords inside the page for you.
However, these are not heavily used by search engines, mainly because during the early days of the Web they were over used and abused on web sites by stuffing irrelevant, but high-demand keywords into their webpages using this method. The recommended total number of characters to use in all your keywords is 250-1,024 characters.
Warning: If you use key terms that are not found in the text of your website, search engines may penalize the page because it considered “spamming.”

Again, these suggestions are not the end-all, be-all in small business web site promotion. There are hundreds of thousands of web pages written on the subject and a rapidly growing industry that purports to do very complex work to get you the best rankings.

In my experience though, if you do nothing more in your small business web site promotion than the first item listed you will generally capture 80% of the value of a complete website search optimization.