Sirens blare. Ambulance lights flash. The paramedics jump
out and attend to the things that they need to do to
stabilize the patient. They check pulse and breath,
administer CPR, minimize the bleeding, and brace the neck.
Then they load the victim onto a gurney and rush back down
the road to the hospital, where the doctors can really fix
the problem.
No one wants an emergency—but if you've got one on your
hands, it's good to know the steps to take to "stabilize
the patient." If your small business emergency is that your
website isn't showing up on the search engines, there a
couple of steps you can take right now.
You just have to check 2 things to perform Search Engine
CPR on your site:
1. That the search engines know about you.
This step is simple. Just go to Google or Yahoo and type in
your business name. If that doesn't turn your site up, then
try typing in your URL.
If neither search results in your business showing up, then
it means that the search engines haven't found or indexed
your site yet. In all likelihood, the source of this
problem could be that your site hasn't been up long enough.
The search engine's robots have a long list of sites to
visit, and they just might not have had a chance to get to
yours yet. If you just launched your site, it can take up
to 9 months for them to come visit you.
If this is your emergency, you can "light a fire" under the
search engines by visiting them and submitting your site to
their to-do list. Look for their "Submit Your Site"
options—all the major search engines offer this option.
This will ensure that they have your site on their lists
and that they'll stop by sooner rather than later.
2. That your site is using title tags effectively.
Do you ever wonder why some sites display a bunch of text
at the top of your Internet Explorer or Firefox window
instead of just the company name? The text in that area is
controlled by your title tags, and people put all of that
text in those tags because the search engines really notice
them. The engines give that text a lot of weight when they
decide where to rank your site.
So, if you pull up your website, and your business name or
page name is all that's up at the top of the browser
window, you aren't using your title tags as effectively as
you could.
Go back to these tags and re-write them to include keywords
that relate to your business. For example, if you're a pet
sitter, your title tags might say "Happy Wags Pet Sitting |
Watching dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, turtles and even
goldfish in the San Francisco Bay Area." That gets many
more keywords into this valuable real estate.
Once your tags are rewritten, you can add them to the title
tags in your HTML, or if you don't know how, just ask your
web designer or coder to do it for you. It shouldn't take
long, and it will pay off in a big way!
After you get your website out of emergency status with
these two basic CPR steps, you'll be able to step back and
plan to improve your site's ranking instead. And that plan
will enable you to fix the problem and really get noticed
by the search engines instead of just stabilizing it
temporarily.
----------------------------------------------------
Erin Ferree is a brand identity designer who creates big
visibility for small businesses. As the owner of elf
design, Erin is passionate about helping her clients stand
out in front of their competition and attract more clients.
One of the best ways to do that is with Search Engine
Optimization, which you can learn about in her eLearning
product, Raise Your Ranking, which is available at
http://www.howtoraiseyourranking.com .
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