How To Position Your Business Online During Recession
The easiest and cost effective method of positioning your business for higher profit during this economic recession is getting it online. Like I explained in my book titled: How to Create Unlimited Internet Wealth, every idea has a place on the Internet, and every business should be online for higher profits. Bill Gates opined that, “In some years to come, all businesses shall be on the net; you are either on the Internet or you are out of business”. Do you want to be out of business during this recession?
The web presence of your business should be taken seriously in this age of keen competition in the market place. If you don’t do anything to make your business strategically visible online, nobody will check you out to do business with you very soon.
As I have always said in my previous articles, it is not enough to have a website; you need to let people know about it because customers will not stumble on your website by accident. Your website has to be marketed online. When this is done you will seat back and attract potential customers to your business as a result of your online advertisement.
Positioning your business online involves a continuous process of Internet marketing to promote your website by increasing its visibility in Search engines. Effective positioning of your business is all about getting your website to rank as highly as possible in search engines and online directories. This makes it easier for potential customers using the search engines to find your business during their search. This entire process of positioning your business online is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your business.
Use Search Engines to Position Your Business
Have you ever searched for any information online? I am sure you have. Those websites that help you look for information online are the search engines, the most widely used search engines are Google, Yahoo, Bing.com (formerly MSN), AOL.For a list of search engines go to SearchengineWatch
The search engines are the right place to advertise and promote your business because over 80 percent of Internet users use search engines to find information using keywords or key phrases (what they are searching for). Your business will be seen by millions of people using the search engines.
Learn How the Search Engines Work
If you have used Google for example, to search for information, have you ever thought of how it (Google) works to get relevant search results for you? If you understand how the search engines work, you will then know how to effectively use them to position and structure your business which will improve your brand strength.
One will ordinarily think that when a search query is made into any search engine, that the search engine will interrogate the web to find pages which match the query. This is not how the search engines work; instead the search engine looks at its own version or copy of the web to get your required search result.
Every search engine creates its own version of the Internet called an index. The index of a search engine determines the size of the search engine.Google has the highest index hence it is the largest search engine today. The entire web is bigger than any search engine index.
The search engines build their index using special software known as a crawler or spider. The spider crawls across the web, adding web site pages it visits to the list of pages in its index. It is capable of reading texts on a web page and finding links to other pages too. This is how the crawler travels across the entire web constantly finding new or modified pages of the sites visited to add or update in its index.
What it then means is ones a web user enters a search query into the search engine, the search engine searches its index to find pages matching the search query. The pages are sort into specific ranking order of closeness using algorithm.
Having seen in a nutshell how the search engines work, it is important to note that a search engine may not have a copy of your website or every page of your website, if it does have it, that copy may not be up to date. It can also have in its index a copy of a page that no longer exists, hence the need to regularly position your business.
Search Engine Optimization Strategies that will Boost your Business
Positioning of your business is a continuous process, it starts ones you have a website. You will also not forget that several businesses are also competing seriously with you to dominate the market, so you need every strategy available to beat them.
As an expert in strategically positioning businesses on the web, let me show you simple ways that will increase your business visibility and brand presence.
The first thing you need to do is to inform the top search engines on the web about your website, this can be done manually or automatically by adding your website to the search engines. They have add URL feature which you can use to summit your site.
The next important thing to do is to regularly get links pointing to your websites. Let your site be linked to popular sites like forums, article databases, online directories, social networking sites, e-groups.
The content of your website should have targeted keywords that are highly optimized by the search engines. Highly optimized keywords are those keywords that the search engines can quickly add to their index. You will have to consider the words or phrase people are likely to type into the search engines in other to see your business. This can be done by doing keyword research. Ensure you add fresh contents containing those keywords to your site regularly.
Also use the advertising programs of the search engines to promote your website. Such programs include Google adwords, Yahoo! Search marketing, and Microsoft ad center.
In addition, use article marketing and email marketing to improve your ranking online.
