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You and/or your web developer spent a great deal of time creating your website or blog. The big day comes and your site is finally live on the web. But wait? Where is it? You can type in the web address and find it, but every time you try to “google” it, it doesn’t appear…Now what? Is that important?

Search engine ranking is very important for almost every website or blog, although the degree of importance may depend on your type of business and/or your site. For example, if you sell your products or services exclusively online, or if you are trying to reach a national or world-wide audience your search engine ranking is, of course, absolutely critical.

However, what if you operate a smaller, more locally-based business or organization, have an actual storefront where people can find you, or generate a lot of traffic on your site through other means? Even in these situations, having your site positioned well for key search terms can still be very important in generating new leads. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that the majority of consumers check out a business or organization online before calling or visiting them. If you aren’t at least listed on the first couple of pages of search results for a key search term some people get the perception, true or not, that perhaps your business isn’t very established or substantiated and your higher ranking competitors may get their business instead.

So how to do you achieve a good search engine ranking?

Unfortunately, this is not a simple one step solution. There are many factors search engines like Google, Yahoo, & MSN use to help evaluate and rank your site. And, to make it even more complex, they all use slightly different factors to rank sites. The good news is that are some well known strategies that can generally help you increase your ranking. In fact, there’s even a term for these strategies: SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

There’s a slew of “SEO experts” ready and willing to have you pay them some hefty fees to help you increase your SEO. Some of these SEO experts are very good and well worth what they charge. However, others are a complete waste of money. Therefore, I always recommend that my web clients try to work through some very baseline, inexpensive SEO analysis and fixes before they look into working with a SEO specialist.

Because there are so many factors to consider with SEO, I’ll be breaking this topic down into a series of posts that will detail various techniques to increase your search engine ranking. These posts will feature relatively simple, inexpensive things you can do either totally on your own or with some limited assistance from your developer. These basic tips will be geared towards those relatively unfamiliar with SEO. So if you are looking for more advanced, technical SEO advice, this will probably not be the SEO blog series for you. (Although I do have a few exciting tips to offer that even those more experienced with SEO might find interesting.)

One final word of caution about SEO is that you will need to be both patient and vigilant about it. Whether you pay someone to help you or you go it alone, most SEO techniques do not instantly increase your site’s ranking. Many take a significant amount of time to make an impact. SEO also isn’t something you just add to your site and forget about. It’s a process that often needs continuous attention, tracking, and development over the lifetime of your site to truly be successful in competitive markets as the web is a dynamic creature that changes daily. So depending on how critical you feel your site’s SEO is, you may either need to commit to spending a certain amount of time monthly to work on it, pay someone else to do it for you, or just accept that you may not get the coveted #1 Google spot without being able to devote more time or money to your site’s SEO plan.

Coming soon… SEO Strategies: Phase 1

Related posts:

1. SEO Article 3: Guide to Using Keywords, Titles, & Page Descriptions
2. Google Analytics 101: Getting Started