Apr 2, 2012

Help Desk: So Can Your Business Be Found on the Internet?

[caption id="attachment_393" align="alignright" width="300" caption="So Can Your Business Be Found on the Internet?"]

[/caption] In each blog post at the SMB Help Desk, we discuss useful tools and services that can help your business increase revenue, reduce expenses, and minimize risk. In past weeks, we’ve discussed the importance of having a quality presence on the Internet. Now, we are going to cover the ways to drive customers to your website in this post. So, let’s say you’ve reached a point where you established your company online presence by designing a website yourself or you perhaps paid a designer to build one. Your website now properly represents your company, explains who you are, and offers your product or service for sale. (And if you haven’t taken this imperative step for your business, you can do-it-yourself through our SiteCenter building tool, or we can help you create an online presence through our team of designers, the Professional Service Team. They can also redesign your website if you’re not happy with it or looking for improvement.) Build a Website, and They Will Come…Right? If it was only that easy! Establishing a website and getting it online doesn’t mean that customers will just be able to find you on the Internet. It’s obviously difficult to determine an exact number, but current estimates state that there are over 350 million sites on the Internet. And according to DailyChanges.com, it is not uncommon for over 150,000 new domains to be registered each day! Three Important Letters: S...E...O What good does your website do for your company if no one can find it in the vastness of the web? Through the utilization of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you can improve the visibility of your website and drive visitors to it. In essence, SEO helps increase your traffic and your website’s visibility by pushing your website higher up on a search engine (like Google, Bing, or Yahoo) results page. Thus, the higher your site appears in a search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. Utilizing SEO is absolutely essential in today’s highly competitive business world. In a time where every sale and customer counts, you can be certain that your competitors are focusing on SEO to increase their website traffic. Next time, we’ll discuss SEO techniques you can utilize yourself to drive traffic to your website. Further Reading: Learn more about our Professional Service Team who can design a website for your company that can help you achieve the online results you want. Learn more about Newtek SiteCenter, our user-friendly, feature-packed, and FREE website builder. See how many new Top-Level-Domain (TLD) names were registered today at DailyChanges.com. Mashable.com: How big is the web and how fast is it growing?