Getting Visitors To A New Business Website – Part 1
Once you have an online presence for your offline business, you must let people know your website is out there for them to view.
Contrary to popular opinion, people do not know you have a website simply because you created one, or had one created for you.
That said, one of the easiest ways to get the word out about your website is to get it listed in the search engines, so people who use sites like Google and Yahoo search can more easily find you on the World Wide Web.
How do you do get on the internet search engines?
Initially, you start with the two most basic steps: using meta-tags and creating a site map.
What are Meta-tags?
Meta-tags are small bits of HTML code you add to your web pages that provide the name/title and a description of your pages plus the top keywords a visitor could use to find your page if searching with those words. If you provide these, it makes it a lot easier for potential visitors to find you, even though meta-tags do not show up to your visitors on your web pages.
Your website visitors do not see them, but search engines do, and they use this information to help them properly list your website in their search results. How? The keywords you use in your meta tags help search engines understand the subject and type of information your website offers potential visitors.
This, in turn, allows the search engines to provide searchers with a more accurate, relevant list of web sites, based on the keywords used in the search, to visit and find what they were looking for.
How are meta-tags constructed?
What follows is a sample of a set of meta-tags containing meta-data (descriptions and keywords) that can be added to the HTML code of the pages of your website.
<meta-name=”description” content=”This is where you will add one or two sentences describing the content to be found on this page.>
<meta-name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyphrase”>
<title>This will be the title of your page</title>
Each page in your website will have meta-data that is slightly different from previous pages because each page in your website will contain different content but every page should contain at least this bare minimum of information.
Once you have your meta-tags in place, you can move on to the creation of your site map. We’ll talk about that in Getting Visitors To A New Business Website Part 2.