How to make spiders love you:
Getting your website noticed

This may give you the creeps…but if you're responsible for marketing your company's website, you need to know how to make yourself more attractive to spiders.

No need to run away screaming. We're not talking about the eight-legged inhabitants of basement corners. These spiders, also called robots, are what search engines like Google and Yahoo, "send out" to "crawl" all over the internet, categorizing and ranking websites.

If the spiders and robots like you, they reward you with high rankings in the search engines.

So, why should the savvy marketing manager or business owner care about influencing robots and spiders?

Your customers who know your name or your website address can find you without a problem. But what about people at their computers, asking themselves…

Where can I buy a new furnace in Oconomowoc?
Who is the best financial planner in the Waukesha area?
What banks are near my new house?
How can I ship my motorcycle to South Dakota?
What was the name of that great builder?

If your name doesn't immediately come to mind, your customer will open up Google or Yahoo and see what comes up. Try it -- put yourself in your potential customer's shoes, and see what happens.

Google and Yahoo want to serve up sites that are fresh, up-to-date and relevant, so you keep coming back. They display the sites that the spiders like the best, first.

If your website hasn't been updated for years, or is all graphics and pictures, it doesn't have any delicious text for the spiders to munch on, which makes you pretty much "invisible." (aka, WAY down on the list for Google.)

The cure for invisibility: SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is all about arranging and adding to your website in order to make it more attractive to these spiders. When spiders see your site, they tell their search engines (Google and Yahoo) "Hey, this site has a lot going on -- look here!" Robots and spiders love fresh, relevant, up-to-date content.

Where you want to be is high in the "organic" or "natural" listings. See an easy-to-understand explanation of organic vs. paid listings.

The good news is that getting started with SEO is affordable for small businesses. Usually, you DON'T need to redesign your entire website! Good SEO can often be LESS expensive than traditional advertising, and can open up broader geographic markets. Please give us a call if you'd like to talk more about it, and watch your email for information on a FREE webinar on SEO that we're planning especially for our clients and newsletter subscribers.

 

Home  |  About Us  |  Services  |  Case Studies  |  Resources  |  Contact  |  For Schools  |  Site Map