SEO

You Have a Website … Now What?

Many business owners get that first big website (or sales page, or opt-in page), spending *months* working on writing the copy, getting their logo done, finalizing the website design, and all of the other busy work involved in the launching of a new site.

Then it’s launched, and it’s like, well, now what?

Cause I’m here to tell you, no magical fairies are going to send traffic, leads, or customers to your website just because it exists. Advertising is expensive, and all of those too-good-to-be-true schemes and tricks to drive traffic to your site are just that, too good to be true (trust me, I tried most of them to no avail!). Especially in the beginning, you will need to take action to drive good, targeted traffic to your site, to build your list and make sales.

Here are three strategies you should use to build your list & customer base, now that you’ve launched your website.

1. Publish High Quality Content

You *must* be creating high quality content if you want anyone to come to your website (or for that matter, buy from you). I don’t mean content with a load of keywords, or any particular type of content (could be articles, audios, or videos) … just content that a human being in your target market will get value from and will *love* you for providing.

Not only should this content be on your website, but you will also be using it in teleclasses/webinars, on your social networking sites, as give-aways for joining your list, and in your email promotions. So if you’ve built a site that only contains information about you & your business, now it’s time to add valuable tools, tips, and strategies that your audience will find interesting, useful, and/or enlightening.

2. Develop Relationships With Your Target Market & Others Who Serve Your Target Market

Very few people will stumble upon your site and buy something right away, especially if you are selling high-ticket items or services. You must develop a relationship with them over time if they will trust you enough to start working with you.

My favorite way to develop that relationship is via social networking on Twitter and Facebook. Not only to I provide great content to my networks on these sites, but I engage them in a conversation about themselves and their businesses… and even help them by sending traffic to their sites! If social networking is not your thing yet, the same strategy applies for in person networking, phone calls, and live meetings with potential clients… develop that relationship before you expect them to go to your website (or make the sale).

Same concept applies to other people & businesses who also serve your target market. Once you develop a relationship with them, you may be able to engage in joint ventures where you promote each other, become affiliates for each other, and even create projects together. But this is not going to happen until you develop a relationship with them & they know you are a high quality partner.

3. Ask

There’s nothing wrong with promoting yourself, your website, and your business … as long as you do it in a way that shows “what’s in it for them”. The easiest way to do this is to offer free high quality content. If what you are “selling” is free and valuable to your target market, it will be easy & straightforward to “sell” them to go onto your site. But this only works if you already have valuable content *and* have already developed that relationship.

Attract More Traffic by Optimizing Your Articles

Most business owners have heard that a great way to get traffic to your website is by posting tons of content, specifically articles, on your site. The idea is that google will find your articles, index them for the most important or relevant words used (keywords), and those articles will show up in the google search results when people search for those keywords.

A majority of the traffic to The Wealth Spa comes in via this “organic” Google traffic, but this was not always true. Here are some tips to make full use of your articles so you don’t waste the benefits of all your hard work.

1. Power Your Website Using WordPress (behind the scenes)

Google loves blogs – it indexes them faster and checks them more often for new information. If you host your articles on a site using blogging software, google will find those articles faster and it is much more likely they will appear when people search for your most important/relevant words (keywords).

But your website doesn’t have to LOOK like a blog to be POWERED by blog software. You don’t need that ugly one-column, ordered by date, unprofessional look — your site can look like a magazine, a corporate site, or whatever you want — and still be a “blog” underneath.

2. Use the Right Permalinks

Sorry to get a bit technical on you — permalinks are permanent website html links that are not those weird coded, computer-generated links with tons of symbols or weird numbers. If you have a blog, the html link of each page will be a weird code (domain.com/?=234) unless you change it to something that a human (and google!) can read. For example, a recent post on my site was thewealthspa.com/rock-star instead of thewealthspa.com/?=301.

I recommend that your permalinks should be simply the title of your article, which works especially great if the title of your article has good keywords (see tip 3). Not only will this help google to find your article and increase it’s relevance in google’s eyes, but it will also make it much easier for human beings to link to you.

3. Write for Long Keyword Phrases

It’s going to be difficult for you to get traffic for using words like “money” or “diet” — too many people are trying to get traffic for those keywords. But if you are writing articles for long or specific search phrases, like “christian financial advisor in St. Louis” or “what’s the difference between a trademark and a copyright” it’s much easier to get the traffic.

How to research keywords is too much to cover here, but once you have thought of some good keyword phrases, use those words in your title and similar or related words especially in the first sentence/paragraph of your article. Another great tip is to use a picture that describes those keywords, and name the photo file with those search terms.

4. Link to Good Resources

Depending upon the topic of your article, there may be a few (3 or less) resources that would be helpful to a reader of your article. These resources may include government documents, a news article on cnn.com, a book on amazon.com, a video posted on youtube, or a recent study on the website of a university. Think of valuable resources you would share with a friend or client who is research the subject of your article.

Don’t over-do this tip, but if you give a few links inside your article to these type of “authority” websites, it can help google to release that your website is also an authority. But make sure to link to specific resources on the same topic (“deep link”) or google will think you are just trying to fool them with useless links.

SEO Basics

So, you have a website. It’s got a fabulous design, you’ve written high quality content, and you’ve launched it on the World Wide Web… and now you just have to sit back and wait and people will come, right?

I’m not even going to say “wrong” there, because you already know that. Driving traffic to your site takes a lot of work. You could spend hours looking for advice on SEO, and digging through the good vs. the bad is enough to drive you totally crazy. So let’s start from the beginning, and take a look at the foundation for good SEO – then compare those items listed to your current site. Missing anything? If not, great!! If so… you can spend just a little bit of time updating those tools and over time, you will start to see a boost in page rank.

1. Metadata

The actual definition of Metadata is “data about other data”. In your websites code, it’s a list of information about your site – from the type of site code used, to the title of your website or page, to the author of the content – metadata is used to tell those wonderful robots what they will be finding on your page.

Why you need it: Basically, your metadata helps tell the robots visiting your site where they are and what they are looking at. It’s as simple as that. It’s kind of like the “welcome mat” for your website, as far as robots are concerned.

What to include: The recommended ones are description, keywords, author.
Description: The meta description is what frequently shows up under your page title in search results and convinces people to click-through to your site – try limit your description to 20-25 words or less and tell potential visitors what your site is about in a catchy way.
Keywords: Include between 8-12 keywords that are relevant to your site. It helps to use these keywords in your content, as well.
Author: Stick your name in there, it will help if someone forgets your domain address and just searches for you!

Where to find it: Metadata is listed within the <head> tags of your source code. The easy way to check and see if your site included metadata? In your browser, open up your site and then click “VIEW” > “Page Source” (or just “Source” for IE users) in your browsers menu bar. What you’ll see is a page with a whole bunch of weird code. But at the top of the page, you should see things like <meta name=”____”>. If you don’t, you may not have your metatags set!! If you have FTP access to your site, open up your pages and add this code within the <head> element:

Why you need it: The page title describes the content found on the page. It displays across the top of major browsers and is the text that displays in bookmarks. The title tells search engines what your site is about.

What to include: Write a catchy statement about your business, use your big keywords and your name or your business name. Keep it under 70 characters!!

Where to find it: Open your site in a browser and look at the top of the screen. What does it say up there? You can change you title in your sites code by looking in the <head> section… it’s simply listed as <title>. For blogs, you normally have to change the sites title within the admin site (where you post blog articles from). Keep in mind you can use a different title custom written for each page, too!!

3. Site Maps.

Why you need it: A site map is just that, a map of your site. It tells the visitor what pages you have and how they work together and helps people and robots navigate your site. If you have a simple site (5 pages or less) you can include an html page with a simple map (a bunch of links) of your pages. If you have a complex site (more then 10 pages) it’s recommended to use an XML sitemap so the robots know what pages are there and how they work together.

What to include: This one is easy – all your pages. For HTML site maps, just create a linked list of all your main pages and subpages. Its highly recommended that if you use anchor links ( a link that takes you to another part of the same webpage) you make the link text actual keywords rather then “click here”.

Where to find it: This is tricky if you don’t have access to your server files. Chances are, if you don’t know if you have one, you probably don’t. If you have a small site, contact your webmaster and ask them to create an html sitemap to include in the footer (or navigation menu) of your page. If you have a large site, there are tools you can use to generate your site map. For static sites, you can check out http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ or use Google’s Webmaster Tools. For blogs, you can download a plugin to create your sitemap. I recommend Google Sitemap Generator.

4. Other Quick SEO Tools:

Domain Stability: Register your domain for longer then one year. Search engines like to see domains that have extended registration. This tells them that the domain has “staying power” and is probably not just a spam site.

Use Text: Fancy, flashy, sites sure are pretty. But they get a big fail in SEO because robots can’t read graphics. Make sure you have plenty of actual text on your site, your graphics have “alt” tags describing what they are, and you use relevant headlines in your content (like the H1, H2 & H3 tags).

Take Advantage of Linking: There are many, many ways for using links to boost SEO – I can’t go over all of them here, but here’s a few that can help.
-Don’t fall prey to link dumping and link spamming – these tricks never work on robots and no matter what anyone says, will hurt you rather then help you.
-Use keywords in your anchor links (not “click here”).
- Make your page links easy and clear (like www.yoursite.com/recipes.html – tells us that page will probably include recipes).
-Trade links with relevant websites and put them in relevant sections of content within your site – “links” pages with a big list of links won’t help you.

Want to see how your webpage scores on its SEO? Submit your site to http://website.grader.com/ and get a free report on your site. Once you have that report, you’ll know exactly what steps you can take to boost your site’s SEO quickly.

~Victoria Potts Keale is a newbie blogger, website designer, entrepreneur extraordinaire, mom, wife, daughter, sister… well, you get the gist. She lives in her hometown of St. Louis, MO in an old haunted farmhouse with her 2 kids and drummer hubby. She has 15 tattoos and wants more. She loves 80’s music. She thinks writing bios in the 3rd person is wacky. You should email her and tell her what else to put in her bio – victoria@lynnraedesigns.com – but don’t spam her, cause she’ll get angry.

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