Site Unseen? How to market your Web Site and improve your Search Engine Ranking
By Dino Piccinni

Research shows that almost 90% of Web users find sites through search engines. For the small business owner, effective search engine marketing can mean the difference between high-profit visibility and growth-choking obscurity.

Many business owners are surprised to learn that a well-placed listing on major search engines like Google or Yahoo can bring more visitors to their site at less cost than many other marketing options, including e-mail, banner ads, print media, and even television ads.

Search Engine Marketing – a term that the pros use to describe steps you take to improve your site’s ranking on major search engines – is definitely worth the time and money it may take to re-tool your site for maximum visibility. What should you do?

• First, carefully identify and incorporate the words and phrases your best prospects are most likely to use when searching for whatever product or service you provide, including common misspellings and broad descriptions;
• Get specific. Include your city and state to raise the odds of attracting the maximum amount of visitors in your target market;
• Avoid using flash on the home page of your web site since information embedded in a flash web site is often invisible to search engines, making it harder to find your site on the web;
• Ensure that your landing page is user-friendly and contains as many of the key words and phrases that relate to your web site;
• Link your site. Search Engine visibility increases when links to your website appear on other related sites…the more traffic to those sites, the better;
• Maintain and renew. Pay attention to which words or phrases get the most hits and regularly change or add content to your site to capture your target audience.

The long-term benefits of search engine marketing include highly targeted traffic comprised of visitors who need what you have to offer, greater brand awareness for your business and increased value when it comes time to sell.

Worldwide, web surfers perform more than 500 million searches every day. This is an astounding figure and it underscores the value of search engines in guiding the right people to your site. Without search engines, finding your web site would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Don’t miss out on the web’s full potential in building your business. Make sure the search engines are working for you.

Dino Piccinini is the owner of The PRstore in Toledo (www.prstore134.com), the first full-service marketing and advertising retail center created exclusively for the promotional and communication needs of today’s small business owner. Contact him at (419) 842-8580.