How do you make your website "findable"?

What your looking for is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or SEM (search Engine Marketing) and its an entire industry that can cost big $$ if you hire a firm to help you.

Or you could try and do it on your own (it's not hard, just requires a lot of leg work).

The first key is trying to figure out what you want to be found for. This is where you research the best keywords that fit your website and business. If you wanted to be found as a Web Development company in Boston, some good keywords would be "Web Development in Boston", "Web Development in Mass", etc.

Once you know what keywords you want to rank in the search engines for - you can begin using some On-Site SEO techniques for your website to make the search engines pick you up for your keywords.

The key for keywords is to use them in the content of your webpage. If your site is about Web Development, then talk about web development! Use proper coding techniques (avoid stuff like Flash) and try to update your site on a regular basis (search engines like "fresh" content - that's why Blogs do so well).

The three main keys for using On-Site SEO are:
1) Your URL/Filenames. http://webdevelopmentBoston.com/web-development.htm is a much better url for your keyword than "mysite.com/page1.htm" Use your keywords in your file-names and internet address if you can.

2) Make sure every page has a Title - Meta Title tags are very important to Search Engines. Think of titles of your pages as Titles of Chapters in a book. A one line sentence describing what the page (chapter) is about. Try to use your keywords in the title (if applicable).

3) Use your keywords in the content of the page, properly using things like Header Tags, links etc.

The other key is to make the page readable to humans. People sometimes over-do keyword placement and make their site spammy. The key to good on-site SEO is to do just enough keyword placement, but not over-do-it. Search Engines will punish your site if they think your crossed over the line to be Spammy. . .

Striking the balance is where your site's anaylitics come into play. SEO is all about looking at what your did and measuring your results, and then going back and making tweeks to your site and then measuring the results again. Did your changes help or hurt your rankings?

Vaibhav is right about submitting your site and sitemap over to Google Webmaster Tools - that will really get the ball rolling for Google to find you. (You should do the same thing with Bing and Yahoo search engines as well). There are a lot of tools out there that can help you with your on-site optimization efforts such as WebsiteGrader and a number of other sites and plugins for your browser.

Once you get your site mostly optimized in itself, then you can start building back-links. Back-Links are links on other sites that "link back" to your site. For example, Focus.com links back to my site through my focus profile. So that's a back-link for me. The more back-links you have - the more Google and other Search Engines trust you - and that can help boost your rankings as well.

There is a ton more to do with SEO and SEM, but these are the basics that I always start with and can be considered the "low hanging fruit". Hope this helps!

Ryan
http://LDPWebSolutions.com

Hi Mark,

As Ryan said it not only increase in traffic of your website but also helps your SEO Partner firm do activities like:

Website Analysis
Keywords Research
Formulate SEO Plan
On-Page Optimization
Submission of Web Pages
Link Popularity Analysis & Link Building
Rank Analysis
Maintenance
Continued submissions to search engines

You can also check www.blueappleonline.com

Thanks

Sumit