Web Strategy For Growth

Link: http://www.portagemirestaurants.com

A great way to get traffic to your website is making sure your business is listed in various business directories around the internet. One example is Merchant Circle.

Navigate to Merchant Circle, and click on the 'Sign Up' link. Answer a few questions about your business. You will receive an email to activate your account.

This is free, and you can tell web visitors a great deal about your company. You can also sign up for more advanced, paid services, such as sending out a company newsletter.

Repeat this process with other Directories, such as Yelp, Supermedia, and Yahoo Local. Many offer free listings, and reasonably priced upgrades. Start with the free listings to get your feet wet.

To find other directories (and there are thousands), do a search on a competitor. If you find them listed in a directory, see what free and paid services are being offered. Each listing will boost your Search Engine rankings, and ultimately get your site more traffic.

Link: http://www.chickencoopinc.com

In general, the more links to your website, the better your search results.  Check out this free backlink checker.

Sites with a higher Page Rank are given more weight by the Search Engines. Be careful about buying links; Google actively seeks out paid links and gives sites that use them lower results. These may help your results temporarily, but if you are going to be in business more than a few months, it will do more harm than good.

Next topic: how to get more links without buying them!

Link: http://www.surplustechparts.com/index.php

Every marketing guru will tell you the importance of considering your target market when creating new advertising. With a website, I believe it is even more critical. Why? Because the experts say you only have seven seconds to capture the attention of the typical web visitor.

Go back and look at your website. Does it speak to your target audience? Will they appreciate the overall look and feel? What about the verbiage? Pretend you are a potential customer. Click on your site and look around for seven seconds.

Not very long, is it? Sometimes small changes can make a big difference in your bounce rate (The percentage of visitors that leave immediately.)

Link: http://www.chickencoopinc.com

My last post was a search engine experiment. I used "Web Design in Portage, MI" as the title of my post. I wanted to see if the blog would get indexed, and if so where it would show up for the same phrase used as a search term.

Results:

Bing 4th page

Google 7th page

Yahoo 2nd page

Ask 1st page

My subjective interpretation of the results: I was pleasantly surprised that the blogs got indexed fairly quickly. This means that if you set it up correctly, your blogs will be out there for the world to find. On the other hand, they were more-or-less buried on Bing and Google, which makes it unlikely that someone would find them through search alone.

Conclusion: Naming your post with keywords in order to attract search engine traffic is probably not the best strategy. Instead, give your post a name that encourages readers to open it up and take a look.

Link: http://www.sagawebsites.com/

This is an experimental blog titled Web Design in Portage, MI. I am curious to find out if this blog will come up on search engines in the future, when I input the search term "Web Design in Portage, MI", which one of the terms I believe potential customers would type in when looking for a business like mine.

I will likely wait at least a week, and then check on this in the major search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo.) I will report the results here.