Small Business Advertising Woes

Small businesses have the daunting task of start up. Start up isn’t necessarily the easiest thing to do. There is so much ground to cover and often times it can become very overwhelming. You have a great idea and you feel like, “Ok! I’m going to try it. I’m going to put on my running shoes and shoot for the stars.” So you being to write up your business plan and evaluate your target market and competition. You attend business seminars with hopes of getting insight into the business world and then this BIG issue appears and its name is CAPITAL. If you’re lucky, when you start your business it will just soar but if you’re like many others who really don’t have a clue, then you have an idea on paper with a small clientele wondering how to expand your business.

So your next thought is ADVERTISE. Once you being to look into it you’ll see that it’s a costly venture and that a lot capital for any type of advertising is going to come out of your pocket. So you figure let me get a website so at least if I advertise online I extend my market to the entire world. You accomplish this goal only to find out that your website isn’t generating any feedback or any revenue. So now you think. “What a BIG waste.” You begin to wonder, “How can I make the search engines work for me.” If you don’t succeed at accomplishing this task then you, like most people, will give up on your business idea deeming it a failure and letting your site go.

Before you go that far, let’s make your site work for you as economically as we can. Let’s start with the basics. Make sure you’re submitted to the search engines. You can go to Google and type “add a site” into Google search tab or “suggest a site” into yahoo’s search tab. Next, make sure that your site has a title and metatags for keywords and for content (site description). This is how the search engines will “describe” your site. In the title of your site, target keywords. Don’t make your title generic like “cars”, “websites”, and “tables”. The competition for these generic terms are just too high and lowers your chances of ranking.

Try and come up with phrases that people would type in if they were searching for products, goods and services in the search engines. This process takes thought and research. One company that is good with keyword ranking is RankPay. I love this company. There is no upfront costs they do all the leg work to get you ranked and then you pay once you rank. Really cool company. Anyways, you can type in a keyword and based on the page rank on your site they will let you know how well you can rank for a particular keyword. This tool is really helpful. As well as Google’s Webmaster Tools, they can help you with keywords as well. Google won’t measure your ability to rank but you can always take the keywords they suggest and put them in RankPay’s tool and comes up with some great outcomes. Ok, back to putting the keywords on the site…put the same keyword you used in the title in the keywords tag, the description tag, on the images alt tag, if you’re using tables put the keyword in the table summary, and make sure the keyword is in your copy. This way when the spiders parse your site they can tell what the subject of your site is and the keywords you’re targeting.

Also another good thing to do is list your site in local directories on MSN, Google and Yahoo. Make sure that you put your address in the header and footer of the site so that the search engines can know where you’re located and they will include you in local searches.

Well that’s all for now. Stay tuned. I will have more tips very soon. My next blog will be on link building. This is Nikki Barnard, Owner of Personality Web Designs writing. If you need help with developing your website don’t hesitate to stop by we’re located at https://www.personalityweb.com/ or give us a call at (305)725-5581.