How to get your business found on Google, Yahoo, or Bing

Wrong.  The search engines may not have indexed your website. Additionally, unless you are found on the first or the second page of Google search results, you are not going to have any user click-through back to your Website.  According to some studies, 90% of Web searchers never make it to the second page of search results. Let’s say that you have a business selling customizable, monogrammed t-shirts, pillows, blankets, etc and you want people typing phrases such as “monogrammed pillow” or “personalize my blanket” in Google to find you. The phrase “monogrammed pillow” results in about 4.9 million hits and “personalize my blanket” results in 2.6 million hits on Google. 

On the first page, there are about 14 results on the main column and about 8 results on right column titled “sponsored results”. If your are a business in Dallas, then someone typing “personalize blanket Dallas” would narrow the search results, but still there would be an overwhelming number, and  unless you are first or second page of search results, you are not found by most people. 

So the question is this: With thousands of businesses competing for attention online, how do you get your business ranked high with the search engines?

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility (or ranking) of a website in a search engine's "natural" or “organic" (unpaid) search results.  In general, the higher ranked a website is on the search results page and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors the website will receive from the searchers.  Traditionally, search engines have used "spiders" to "crawl" websites to extract content, keywords, and phrases, and return the information found on the web pages to be indexed for future searches.  Thus earlier search engines relied on “Meta Tags” within the websites for indexing purpose. However reliance on factors such as meta-tags and keyword density resulted in abuse and ranking manipulation. Now the search engines use more complex and proprietary algorithms, making  it more difficult and unpredictable for a webmaster to determine ranking of a website in a search. 

There are guidelines available to make a website SEO-friendly, and the first step toward improving the visibility of a website is to make it SEO friendly.  Your webmaster should be able to do this or seek services a company that offers such services. A second, more time consuming step in search engine optimization involves creating “backlinks”.  Getting other websites to link back to your website is an important factor in improving the ranking of your website. Some of the ways to have other websites link-back to your website include writing content or posting (blogging) on other websites, participating in online forums in your industry, and mentioning your website in popular online social communities. 

Sponsored Searches

Almost all search engines offer ways for website owners to pay for advertising their website in order to improve its ranking in search engine results. For instance, the right column on a Google search results page, and also the pink boxes titled “Sponsored Results” at the top and bottom of the page highlight the paid search results. Pay-per-click is one way to pay for search engine ranking.  You can “bid” money for each user click on the search results page.  For instance you can bid 50 cents, $5, or any amount per click for Google’s advertising program; so that if a user clicks on your websites’ link on Google’s search results page, Google gets paid the amount you bid for the click. Higher your bid, the higher will be your website’s ranking because Google has more monetary incentive to rank it higher. Depending on your business type (whether your goods or services are offered by many vendors or you offer something very unique), the optimal bid amount will vary. The more common your business’s offering, the higher your bid will have to be since you will be competing with more similar businesses for a higher ranking.  

Several companies, including Vyasa Web LLC, offer services to help you with using sponsored advertising with Google, Yahoo, or Bing search engines to improve your website’s ranking.  

Bottomline

Just having a website does not give you visibility with search engines. First, check with your webmaster or web designer that your new website is SEO friendly. The second step would include SEO optimization and sponsored advertising. A combination of techniques and your budget would ultimately determine your visibility, but predicting actual ranking is elusive due to search engine’s proprietary and secret algorithms.