How do you show prospective customers the path to your small business website's online door? Primarily through good search engine placement, which means spending time on search engine optimization and search engine submission. Look at your small business website and ask yourself:
6) Have you built search engine optimization into your small business website's pages?
You need to give every page of your small business website the best chance of ranking well in the search engines. Search engine optimization means that every page of your site has title tags and meta tags that are appropriate in terms of the keywords you have chosen for that page (see Effective Search Engine Optimization) - and that you've used each page's keywords or phrases the ‘right’ number of times throughout each page (see Keyword Density Explained).
7) Have you put any effort into search engine placement?
The Web is full of spiders that constantly search for new and updated pages for the search engines. However, as there are millions of pages online, just putting up your small business website and waiting for the spiders to find it is not wise.
While I'm sure you've seen those ads that offer search engine submission to "hundreds" of search engines, this kind of automatic search engine submission is not effective. What works is taking the time (or paying someone else to take the time) to manually submit your small business website pages to a selection of the top search engines and directories.
Some businesses also find that pay-for-search-engine-placement search advertising is an effective way to attract the customers they want.
8) Does your small business website have adequate web hosting?
While there are some free web hosts out there, many visitors will turn up their nose at your site when they see that your business is using one. The assumption is that a quality business will have quality website hosting.
Using a free or 'inexpensive' web hosting service can also cause you problems because of excessive downtime - periods of time when no one can access your small business website at all.
Finding The Best Website Hosting Service, tells how to find the kind of quality web hosting that you need to draw and keep site visitors.
Making Sure You Create a Business Website That Works
The purpose of a small business website is to provide your potential clients or customers who use the Internet access to your business, and make doing business with you, rather than someone else, an attractive proposition. If you can answer "yes" to the eight questions in this article, you have a small business website that will be well on its way to bringing in those leads and sales you want.
