A recipe for success with your website
So you are starting a new business, or refreshing the one you have, and you want more people to find you online. The website is the first step, not the last.
A website nobody can find
Getting a website is the right decision. As your presence online grows, so can your client base, and your business becomes easier to reach for customers looking for what you sell.
But creating the website is only the first step. If the search engines do not know where your website is, or what you sell, people searching for it will not find it. Think of it like a house: you can tell people you are having a housewarming party, but they will not come unless you also tell them the address.
Tell the search engines you are open
The first step with a new website is to tell the search engines it is there. That used to mean registering the site with one search engine after another. Today the main ones find new sites by following links, and you can tell them about yours directly: Google through Search Console, Bing through Bing Webmaster Tools, each with a sitemap that lists your pages.
Then you show up when people search for your business name, on page 15 of the results. Not where you want to be, so there are a few more steps to the recipe.
Know who you want to reach
The next step is to work out who your customers are and the words they search with. This matters: optimise your website for the wrong words or the wrong people and it will not show up when your customers search for what you offer.
Take someone starting a lawn bowls club. If they do not think about who they want to reach, they could make the first page of Google and still miss, because the people seeing them are not the people who play lawn bowls. So sit down and spend some time on who your customers are and what they type.
Links from good websites
Links from other websites are another important part of search engine optimisation. Search engines treat a link from a website with a good reputation as a recommendation.
Quality counts far more than quantity. A few links from respected websites that have something to do with yours do more than many links from poor ones, and links bought or swapped only to lift a ranking can harm a site. Earning good links takes time and effort, but it lasts.
Beware of overnight results
Search engines rank pages by methods they keep secret and change all the time: Google makes thousands of changes to its search every year. Nobody outside Google can put your page at the top overnight and keep it there. Cheap services that promise "instant results" or "an overnight better ranking" use methods that do not last.
Work with proven methods and some thought instead, and keep them up with a little maintenance each month. It can take longer to show its full effect, but a ranking built this way holds.
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