Okay. So you've built your all singing, all dancing website. It tells us what you do and what you are selling. You have found the snazziest design on the market for your home page. The Facebook and Twitter buttons have been embedded, along with one inviting visitors to "Share This" with 100 social networking sites. Hit the link in the top right hand corner and it plays a tune. It's only a matter of time before the visitors come a-calling in their droves and your product starts to sell like half-price pies at a fatties' convention. Am I right?
Well actually no. Fact is you can have the most alluring, informative, interesting website in the world but unless your potential audience knows it's there then the whole exercise is singularly pointless.
This is why most businesses with an online presence understand these days that their sites need to be optimised. They need to announce their presence to potential visitors rather than waiting for those visitors to find them by chance. Then, and only then, when the visitor has been alerted to the fact that your site exists, will your buttons and bells begin to do their work and sell your product or service to the visitor.
It's pretty obvious when you think about it. Try to imagine your website as a shop. Your shop sells the most amazing products at an unbeatable price. But it is located in an unwelcoming backstreet, has no merchandise in the window and no fascia overhead to give the few people who pass by any hint of what is on offer inside.
The obvious, indeed only solution is to advertise your wares, and I have dealt with online advertising in a separate article. But what is required in essence is to make others aware that you are in the market, and to entice them into your shop.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), although its purpose it to maximum the number of visitors to your site, works on a wholly different principle to conventional advertising. To optimise your site you need to publish it in such a way as to attract the attention of the search engines, the result of which will be a higher listing for your site, more casual callers and hence more customers.
The strategy for achieving this revolves around building high quality inbound links, that is other sites linking into yours which themselves are highly rated by the search engines. As the search engines see it, if a site that links to yours has respect on the web then yours in entitled to some respect also.
In another article I discuss ways of creating these valuable inbound links which build up kudos and get your website noticed. After all if your website isn't noticed, your all dancing home page dances alone.
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