San Antonio's small business website design and development company - Focused Idea

It is estimated that 85% of people use a search engine to find what they're looking for. Unfortunately, only 1 hit out of 15 brings them to a site that is useful to them. Search engines are to be courted, catered to, and indulged. A top listing on the search engines, particularly Google, is a "Holy Grail" for web marketers, particularly those with a tight budget.

Computers, not people, run most search engines. These computers are trained to look for certain keywords or phrases. Since many pages on your website can be indexed with a search engine, the words you use become an important strategy in attracting visitors. The best plan of attack is to create keywords, simple phrases, and actual content with words that search engines can understand.

But here is where things get sort of tricky. It is imperative to use key phrases that both computers and people can understand and that your target market will search for. We'll use www.genericweb.com as an example. Let's say you need a website developed and you don't know a great deal about the subject. After all, web design and development is not the business you're in. Using Google, you type in web development san antonio in the search box and find there are about 1.8 Million matches (I checked - Focused Idea is currently ranked 4th!). If you're like most people, after seeing the first 30 listings, you're going to get bored and stop looking. Being ranked 31 - neither you, nor Generic Web is happy with the search results.

As a website marketer, it is up to you to develop the actual phrase that the web surfer will look for, the search engine will properly index the key phrase, and will lead to your site.

While we're on the subject of search engines, it is very important to understand what the page titles and metatags do since these play a very important role in how the search engines rank your site. If you're not sure of what metatags and page titles are, contact Focused Idea and we'll help you out.

In these preplanning stages, examine your site and your competitors' sites. Make a list and guess at the key phrases a web surfer might use to search for a site like yours. Before you determine your own key phrases, look at what your competitors are doing. If you are the only one in the world selling a hard-to-find product, it may not be too difficult to know what keywords to use. For example, say you're selling "purple elephant dolls." If this phrase is listed with Yahoo! and someone enters this keyword, your site may be number one. This is becuase you don't have much competition.

But now, let's say, you have a product area that has a great deal of competition. Perhaps you are an orange juice broker. It would take extensive web site promotion, marketing, and advertising to get to the top. Obviously, you're going to have to take drastic measures to get to the top!