Why designing your website for search is important
Website Marketing September 15th, 2008I found two interesting pieces of information about search engines a couple weeks ago. One was a report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project that stated about half (49%) of all internet users use search engines as a routine part of their day. That number had grown from roughly one-third of all internet users since 2002.
The second piece of information is that according to a blog post by ReadWriteWeb, the popular search engine Google is close to getting 70% of the U.S. search market. Right away, this should tell you several things…
1. More and more people are using search (most likely Google) to find what they want on the internet.
2. If you want these people to find you, you’ll need to make sure your website shows up in the search engines.
Certainly people will come to your website by just typing in your website address. But these are people you’ve already come in contact with, say through a craft show, or a open studio, or perhaps through a referral from an existing customer. What about those people on the internet that haven’t even heard of you? How are they going to find you?
Back in July, I had a tele-seminar called “How to Build Traffic to Your Art Website : SEO Secrets” which outlined some important things you can do to make your website more search-engine friendly. I’ve now turned that tele-seminar into a CD and I’m giving away a free copy of that CD to one of my newsletter subscribers.
Along with the CD, the winner will also get:
- a written transcript of the CD with a list of resources and SEO terms
- instructional videos on how to use Free Keywords and Wordtracker for keyword research
- an instructional video on meta tags, alt tags, and title tags for web pages and how to use them
To enter the giveaway, just subscribe to the newsletter by filling out the subscription form on the right or by visiting this page.
I’ll be announcing the winner of the giveaway on September 16th on the blog. That’s tomorrow, so enter today!
September 16th, 2008 at 7:28 am
Being able to customise permalinks in Wordpress helps enormously with this. I was amazed when covering a local event earlier this year my blog entry about the event ranked much better in Google than even the official organiser’s site.
September 18th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Hi John,
You’re right about the permalinks. That’s something I’m going to be fixing on my jewelry blog. I also found this cool plugin for Wordpress blogs called All in One SEO that allows you to customize meta tags and title tags for individual posts. That also really helps with the rankings for individual posts.
Nicolette