Okay, so you've built or have paid someone to build this beautiful website but you are about the only visitor to the website. Not good. So here’s the deal. Website visitors don’t appear out of nowhere. You have to drive people to your website and not just any people either. You want to drive people to your website who are your prospective customers; the people who want, need and can afford your goods and services. So here are three things you must do:
1. Ensure Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You must make sure that the pages of your website contain key words and key phrases that your target market will most likely use to find your business. There are a lot of free tools that will help you decide what those key words and phrases are. Here are a couple of those tools:
I suggest devoting individual pages to key words and key phrases. For example, if you offer business services such as bookkeeping and virtual assistance to home-based and small business, you should devote pages containing articles and other helpful information for both of these services. Just be sure you don’t overdo it because prominent search engines like Google will accuse your site of stuffing key words and you don’t want that. Here’s a nifty free tool to help you with keyword density: Live Keyword Analysis.
2. Get Inbound Links to Your Website. The goal is to get quality websites to link back to your website. This isn’t easy but it is critically necessary. Here are some ways to do it:
• Make sure you offer good, quality and helpful content to your website. If people like what they see and find your content helpful, they’ll link to your website or refer others.
• Write blog posts on other people’s blogs. You know those Ning sites you joined? You have the ability to create blog posts on those. What about those great articles you find on Forbes Magazine or Black Enterprise Magazine, post a comment that adds useful information and provide a link back to your website. You have the ability to post a note on Facebook on your business page; provide a link back to your website within the Facebook note. Be a guest blogger for someone or just post meaningful content to other people's blogs that your target market reads.
• Submit your website to free directories such as: Localeze.com (search for your business; if it’s listed, click on “Add a listing” link),Superpages.com (look in upper right-hand corner for a powder blue button – “Add Your Free Listing”).
3. Add Meta and Title Tags to Your Website. Search engines look at Meta tags to tell what the page’s content is about. Make sure Meta tags are put on every single page of your website – time consuming but darn well worth it. If someone built your website for you, ask them to insert Meta and title tags on each and every page. This is one of the services which should be included in the price they charged to build your website. If you built your website yourself, you can add the tags yourself; the editor you used will have an area for you to add Meta and title tags.
Please feel free to use this article in your newsletter, on your website or blog. However, the following byline must be included in its entirety and the article must not be edited in any form and must be presented exactly as it appears here.
About the Author:
Carmin Wharton is a home-based business expert and the founder of e-BlackWomenNetwork.com, a membership community designed to take businesses owned by women of color from startup to prosperity. Carmin's mission is to help women earn what they're worth and make it big in their home-based business on their own terms.
