Search Engine Marketing: Are You Accidentally Hiding From Potential Customers?

You may be hiding if the search engines can't 'see' all of your site's relevant content.

You've invested a great deal of time and effort carefully crafting compelling, helpful website content for prospective customers. It's well written and contains the appropriate keyword phrases that prospects will likely use when searching for this type of information on the Internet.

For some reason, though, the search engines seem to be ignoring this great content, and you're missing an opportunity to bring well-targeted traffic to your site. The problem may be that your Website isn't as friendly to the search engines as it might be.

In the audio book, "Sound Advice on Search Engine Optimization," author Jill Whalen says, "You'd be surprised how much content is buried deep within Websites that the search engines simply can't find."

Search engines discover and index Web pages using software called 'spiders'. Spiders crawl from one page to another via the plain text or graphical links that connect them. Organizing your Website properly can improve the chances that the search engines ? and ultimately your customers ? will find all of your site's pages.

"If you've got great content and want to share it with the world, you'll have to make sure that your site is spider-able."

This is where a sitemap page can come in handy. A sitemap is like a table of contents. "Create a sitemap that links to all the major categories of your site," says Whalen. "Make sure you link to the sitemap from your homepage. For larger sites, the sitemap may need to be a directory of sorts, and possibly even be multiple pages."

If you want the search engines and your customers to find your Web pages, Whalen says, "Feed those spiders what they want through your sitemap, and you'll have half the battle won!"

Jill Whalen offers search engine marketing strategy advice each week in the free audio newsletter from What's Working in Biz, http://www.whatsworking.biz/full_story.asp?ArtID=92

About The Author

Richard Cunningham is a principal of What's Working in Biz, http://www.whatsworking.biz, a publisher of business audiobooks and online audio programs on marketing, sales, and small business strategies.