Yesterday we were talking about Internet Marketing in Denver and how you can promote your local Denver business on the Web for far less than using traditional advertising. Not to mention that promoting your Denver business to a global audience might be just what you’re needing in order to pull through this rough economy. Today, we’re going to pick up where we left off.
We were discussing the benefits of Google’s paid ad placement and how it may be beneficial if you’re needing your Denver business promoted right away. However, if you have some time and aren’t in a hurry, the organic or free listings on Google present the best option for long-term success. Frankly, anyone interested in Internet Marketing in Denver, should be interested in Google’s organic listings.
To get your site listed in the free listings, you have to understand, or at least hire someone who understands SEO (search engine optimization.) Simply put, SEO is the process of making your site search engine-friendly so that Google ranks it higher in their results.
The benefits can be amazing if your site is listed at the top of Google for a phrase that gets a lot of traffic. For starters, it’s the equivalent of having having a full-page ad in every phone book or newspaper in every major city around the globe.
So what are the basics of SEO? For starters, you have to have a site that’s easy for Google to read. This may be a little technical, and I apologize for that but frankly, this is technical stuff. If SEO were easy as pie, everyone would be doing it themselves. So, you have to, have to, have to develop a site using CSS rather than tables. If you’re unfamiliar with the difference, then your site is probably built using tables. They’re still being used, unfortunately, by most web developers. However, Google has grown to dispise them. Sites that are programmed with tables are not favored by Google and therefor suffer in their rankings. Look at it this way, if you butter Google up, they’ll like you and will reward you with higher rankings. Do everything they like and they’ll rank your site at the top.
So what else do they like to see? Great content that’s changing or being added all the time. If you make a site and let it sit unchanged for a year, forget about being ranked well. That’s one reason why Google likes blogs. They’re always changing. In fact, while the word blog originally was coined as acontract of the words web and log, today the word has actually become known as an acronym for Better Listings On Google.
Lastly, you have to get other sites to link to your site. Linking is huge. If you can’t get other sites to link to your site, then Google figures that your site isn’t worth anything. Look at it this way, Google can watch the number of sites linking to you and determine how good your site must really be. If lots of people link to it, they’re essentially casting votes for your site and Google will rank you better. If others like your site, Google does too.
Tomorrow in the next part of this series, we’ll keep hitting on techniques for Internet Marketing in Denver so you can take advantage of the low cost of Internet Marketing.
Until then,
Chadd Bryant
Red Rocket