Fly-fishing or Quilting? Clue-in the Search Engines

By Paula Mariedaughter and Jeanne Neath

Good referrals can make your business and we all know what bad referrals can do. The biggest danger for your web site is no referrals! Search engine referrals can direct customers to your business twenty-four hours a day. Yahoo and Google can send you customers, but will they send you customers? Yes, but only if you understand how you can match your pages to what the search engines need to know about your site.

Snooping your Site
When a search engine sends its electronic special agent, called a “spider,” to rate your web site, what will it find? This “spider” is a detective, of sorts, because it is trying to figure out what the site is about and what words might be a good match. What is the “spider” looking for? This detective, J.D. Spider, needs all the help you can provide. Is your site about fly-fishing? healthcare? embroidery? quilting?

As a business owner, you have several ways to make our detective’s job easy. If possible, make your business clear in your domain name. For example, www.patsquilts.com is more valuable than www.patsplace.com because the name clearly tells J.D. Spider, detective, that this site is about quilting.

Detective Spider will move to your Home page and then throughout your site looking for clues about the content of the site. Don’t make our sleuth work at this! Choose “key phrases” to supply the clues our detective friend needs to feature your business when someone using Google or Yahoo types in “batiks” or “embroidery thread.” We encourage you to do your own sleuthing about the best key phrases to use on your web pages by using the free service provided by the Overture search engine. Go to http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/. You type in potential key phrases and you can learn how many searches for that phrase happened in the last month at Overture. You can then tailor your key phrases to what people actually use when searching the Internet. After selecting your key phrases, use them over and over on your Web pages. Use some of the key phrases as headlines near the top of the page. J.D. Spider will only be convinced that you are serious about a product or service when you mention it again and again in different ways.

Scouting out the Neighborhood
Detective J.D. Spider, intrepid searcher, then moves on to evaluate your status with your neighbors. Do you have any links to your site from your business peers? Every business pointing a link to your site (you could think of them as your web neighbors) is a valuable asset in the detective’s eyes. The more high quality quilting and sewing sites that post links directing traffic to your site, the more traffic the search engine is likely to send your way. Does this sound like those who have more, get more? We’re afraid that is so in the ways of the search engines. Link exchanges with similar businesses is not a luxury to think of when you have some extra time! Link exchanges are a vital necessity. A simple email with your desired link information and a request to exchange links begins the process.

You don’t have to be a sleuth to notice that some quilting and sewing sites show up again and again on the search engine results. The choice is yours. Join J.D. Spider and become a detective: find appropriate key phrases and find link partners.