Four Simple Steps To Getting Your Site On Google And Bing

It’s the best, most valuable online promotion you can get — and oddly it’s free! Of course I’m talking about using major search engines to bring “organic” traffic to your site. Majors like Google and Bing can give you a good listing and — presto! — you’ve got a flood of very interested prospects crawling all over your site. Sounds easy, right? But the fact is SEO can have a very high learning curve.

True SEO experts have been at it full-time for years. They have staffs of experts and sometimes hundreds of test sites to help them keep tabs on the constantly changing methods search engines use.

However most of us don’t need to make SEO so difficult. Yes, if you’re in the business of selling male enhancement drugs or the latest Get Rich Quick opportunity, you won’t get good search engine rankings unless you spend a LOT of money on experts and designers. But most of us are selling something that isn’t that difficult to get listed.

For example, if you’re a plumber in the small town off Springfield (pick your state), you can probably get a decent Google listing just by having a page called “Springfield MA plumber Rick Jones.” That way anyone in Rick’s town of Springfield who searches for a plumber will likely find his site.

Here are some simple things you can do to help your search engine ranking:

1. Have good content. Meaty information and help pages make your site look like an authority on the subject. Search engines love that. Include some posts or articles that are at least 500 words long. This article is about 500 words. That is a length Google respects. Add some videos, a blog, anything you can to create lots of information. This not only helps your site get SEO traffic, the people who visit your site will be impressed and more ready to buy.

2. Get some important sites to link to you. For many businesses this means getting listed on YP.com, Yelp.com, Foursquare, your state and town’s business directory sites and other similar sites. Also have LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook pages that link back to your site. All of this is free and easy to do.

3. Some of the old basics still work. SpringfieldMAPlumber.com could work well for Rick. Have your home page title use the main search term(s) customers will use to find you. Name your inner pages to describe the content ( Rick_Jones_Springfiled_MA_Plumber.HTML)

Right now Google is sending mailers to millions of businesses telling them Google AdWords is the way to get listed on Google. Google ads tend to be rather ineffective unless you’re an expert. However, if you’ve got a narrow niche (Renaissance basket decoration) or serve a limited community like plumber Rick, PPC could work to get you prominently listed in your prospects’ searches.