Business Promotion Series #1 Befriending Search Engines

Written by John Raul II at 10:22 am under Money Maker, Search Engine Optimization | 195 views

The Web has expanded immensely – so much that advertisers clash with each other in getting good advertising spaces on high traffic websites to promote and gain exposure of their products and services.

Basically advertising involves costs as it does on television, radio and newspapers. Online advertising however, offers various ways to promote your products and services for free. Social media channels and online communities offer such opportunities in getting your products known beyond geographical borders.

Like other media channels, paid online advertising on high-traffic websites usually is a cost-efficient and timely marketing move. However, there are situations when such activities backfire especially when the advertisements are placed on irrelevant sites or placed in wrong advertising space.

This blog post sparks a series of discussions about online business promotion. Of course, this is aimed to help you bait real customers in the World Wide Web and making more money from them.

To have a head start, we will discuss the first and significant online business promotion channel: search engines.

Do Your SEO

Who else in the world doesn’t know about Google? Nobody except people who are still living inside caves, right?

As you might have known, Google currently owns the largest user base when it comes to web searches. This popular search engine is used by millions of people who are looking for something in the massive Web – people looking for information, entertainment, products, services, and so on. Oops, did I mention “products and services”? I guess I did.

Taking a serious analogy on that, it means that there are millions of potential customers you can have for your business. The problem is – how to catch them – since they browse through millions of websites which could be other businesses searching for their respective customers too. Meaning to say, you are not alone wanting these people – you have rivals like the typical business situation in the real world.

Now to arm yourself, you have to optimize your website to become friendly with search engines. This is first and most necessary business promotion activity you have to do before engaging on other methods.

Here’s what you need to do: try validating your each of your web pages to the following W3C validation services to know if your HTML markups and CSS adhere with the standards: the W3C Markup Validation Service and the W3C CSS Validation Service. If you find irregularities during validation, fix them if you can (else you can contact me for assistance). By doing such, you are making your site friendly to web crawlers and search engine spiders that contribute to your search engine ranking.

If your online business runs a blog that uses WordPress platform, make sure you read my previous post on how to optimize them.

I want to emphasize few things on what you must do for search engine optimization (SEO) since this topic is very broad and if we talk wholly, we would be making a whole separate SEO blog. You have to do some additional researches and make sure to do the following things to your website:

Make sure you properly setup your meta description and keyword tags in each of your web pages.
Name your web pages and image files properly and make them readable to human beings as they do to search engines. Make sure they present relevant keywords related to your site. Use hyphen as separator of more-than-two worded files.
Put relevant ALT descriptions to all your images.
Never use flash as a web page. Flash is known to be SEO suicide.
Make sure your web page file size does not exceed 100 KB (images inclusive).
In your contents, work on mentioning more the keywords related to your online business. However, do not overpopulate them with similar keywords.

In the next business promotion sequel, we will talk about how to generate press release buzzes and where to buzz them to make your business controversial and popular.