Since you’ve poured a lot of resources into building your attractive and informative website, shouldn’t you put the same effort into promoting it? After all, unless your site is akin to Amazon.com, people will probably use a search engine (SE) to find you. Having a great site and not promoting it is like buying a shiny new car and never taking it out of the garage!

The do-it-yourself person in all of us would love to go into a bookstore and buy a copy of “Search Engines for Dummies”, but the fact of the matter is that if there was such a book it would likely be outdated before it hit the bookshelves. The major players are constantly changing – company mergers, changing search algorithms, data sharing, and revenue-producing techniques all make for a very dynamic arena.

Before your new SE campaign is launched, make a baseline report to use for comparison. Without the prior year’s worth of stats (to allow for seasonal changes and other transient factors), it is difficult to judge how the campaign is progressing. This data should also reveal keywords your visitors used to find your site. Are they different than the terms you thought they were using? If so, perhaps you’ll need to modify your keyword strategy.

Here are some tips to help improve your Search Engine ranking:

1. Is your site graphics-intensive or perhaps even 100% Flash?  Flash creates highly visual and stunning web pages.  Keep in mind that search engines cannot index text that is part of a graphic or embedded inside Flash. Hybrid design using both plain text and Flash on the same page is currently the best compromise. Flash sites will probably be fully indexed in the future, but for now plain text is still king.

2. Links, links, and more links! Use your own networking ability to have vendors, satisfied customers, and associates put your website link on their own sites. Search engines consider the number and quality of incoming links as an indication of the importance of your own site. The more relevant sites that point to your site, the better chance you’ll have of a good SE ranking.

3. Your site must have a good highway system and a comprehensive roadmap. By that, we mean consistent navigation needs to be available throughout the site and a sitemap page that will bind everything together. Regardless of the eye-catching rollover effects used, make certain that there is plain text navigation available (usually at the bottom of the page in a small font). SE “spiders” follow these text links when indexing your site and also make use of the sitemap to find ALL of your pages. Aim for a navigation system where every page is accessible from any other page with just one or two clicks. The more complex the site, the more these features can make a huge difference in SE discovery.

4. Update the information on some prominent pages on a regular basis. Changing content indicates to the SE that the site is dynamic rather than static, and that the pages should be indexed more frequently.

5. Consider your budget for premium advertising. While a few engines still have free site submissions, more often they are using a fee-based approach as a way to make your listing stand out from the rest. Yahoo, for instance, charges a yearly fee to add and maintain a commercial listing. Google has several different programs – notice those sidebar listings on the right and the highlighted ads at the top? Premium listings can measurably boost your site’s performance – and your bottom line.

To learn more about creating a website that works hard for you, contact Maximum Design & Advertising, Inc. We specialize in real estate marketing. For research, budget analysis, design, implementation, site optimization and more, call 800.609.0930 today.

STATISTICS

Search engines affect both online and offline shopping habits. The top 5 shopping keywords in April 2006 were all brick and mortar stores such as Home Depot and Walmart.
Nielsen-NetRatings

In the U.S., online advertising spending will grow from $1.3 billion in 2005 to $9.3 billion in 2010.
Yankee Group

Annual growth rates in search engine queries show a 30% increase in 2006 compared with 2005.
comScore Networks

Google alone answered 4 billion search queries in January 2007.
Nielsen-NetRatings