Now that you’re ready to start selling online, it’s time to make your website visible to search engines like Google, Bing and the others.
You can make your website visible through a combination of basic setup steps that announce your presence to the search engines, and search engine optimization (SEO) practices to follow each time you create content on your website, so that prospective customers can find you.
Basic Setup Steps
Your first step to getting found online is to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools, and also submit your site to Bing. Both free services provide basic tools to help make your website visible, including information about how to set up sitemaps to help the search engines find and display your relevant content to people searching for products like yours.
At the time this was written more than two-thirds of internet searches used Google, so prioritize your work accordingly.
What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
The purpose of search engine optimization (SEO) is to improve the visibility of your web pages to people who are searching online. If you search Google for SEO you’ll find a great many articles and ads related to the topic.
There’s a lot of information available online about SEO. Some of the advice is valuable, but a lot of it is definitely not, as you’ll learn with experience. One website I’ve liked that provides free information (along with paid tools) is MOZ.com*, which currently offers a free beginner’s guide to SEO that could be helpful if you’re just starting out.
Avoid Beginner Mistakes
A common SEO beginner mistake is to place too much emphasis on your product or company name in web page titles, headline text, and so on. If few people know your brand, you should focus on figuring out the terms that they’re likely to search to find your solution, and emphasize those key phrases far above your store or product name.
Beware of companies that advertise SEO services, and especially those that claim to boost your search engine rankings through sale of bogus links, fake content, and other artificial tactics. Search engines will almost certainly spot these illegitimate methods and will penalize your website. And as discussed in the article about Steve’s Marketing Rule, you can be almost certain that these advertised services are a waste of money.
Importance of Online Advertising
Paying for search engine marketing through Google AdWords* (and to a lesser extent its competitors) can have important benefits.
- Creating effective paid search ad campaigns will require you to research and prioritize keywords that people use to find products like yours online, and could help keep you focused on using these terms as you create new web content.
- I doubt Google would admit it, but I believe there’s a strong correlation between paying Google for their search engine advertising and the free (also called organic) search results people see when they search for your product category.
Next, we’ll cover a few more of the basics of online adverting.
* This is not a paid endorsement.