Thursday, December 15, 2011

Extending Your Reach With SEO

In order to grow in business, we know that it is most important to extend our reach to as many potential consumers as we can. It only makes sense that the further your reach, the greater number of prospective customers you will bring through the door.

Take for instance the maple tree. It is such a massive tree that it wouldn’t make sense to drop its seeds right at its side. The shade it provides covers a large area around the tree, which would inhibit any growth close by. Mother nature found a way to fix this problem by putting wings on the seeds so they would fly away from the tree in the wind.

It wouldn’t make too much sense to start yelling out the back door of your business to let people know you are there, much like it would not make sense for the maple tree to drop it’s seeds at it’s side. Anyone that can hear you yelling out your back door probably already knows you are there.

So how do we extend our reach? One way is through search engine optimization. SEO (search engine optimization) is a great way to open your business up to limitless amounts of potential customers.

How do we do this? Well, there are several ways we can do this. Probably the most important is being keyword rich in all of your content and having a presence on multiple platforms on the web.

How do we word our content to be keyword rich? Start by answering these questions:

· Who are you?

· Where are you located?

· What do you offer?

When people search for something on a search engine, they will typically search by a location and a service or industry. We have now provided search engines with that key information in our business description.

A great example of this is from Go Green Express Home Services. They have addressed who they are (Go Green Express), what they do (green plumbing, heating and HVAC) and where they are located (Hudson Valley).

In today’s market, most businesses are on several platforms on the web from websites to business listings and to social media. Your key words and phrases should be in all of your online content. It is also important to link all of your online content to each other creating your own web of information on the Internet. When you link your different platforms, it keeps readers viewing your content longer.

There are more technical ways to improve your SEO, through meta tags, meta names and meta descriptions which are embedded in the html code of your website, but most people are not familiar with working in html. Being keyword rich in all of our online content is one of the best things that a business owner can do to improve their SEO. Also be sure that your online content varies slightly between platforms to give your potential customers something new to discover about your business as they are conducting their online research.

1 comment:

tiffany jewellery said...

Its like you read my mind! You appear to know so much about this, like you wrote the book in it or something. I think that you could do with some pics to drive the message home a little bit, but other than that, this is great blog. A great read. I will certainly be back.