The Search Engine Road Map – The Importance of Good Directions
by Michael - June 25th, 2008 9:00 am
Are you telling your customers to get lost? If you aren’t using common sense when putting together your website and website content, you may be.
Think of it from your customer’s point of view for a minute:
John Q. Customer just had a great first date and wants to send this new girl some flowers, but he doesn’t have the yellow pages handy (it is probably holding up the corner of his coffee table if you want to know the truth), so he pulls up his favorite search engine.
What does he type? Well if I were John, I would type in “Florists in New York, NY” (or whatever city John Q. lives in). I’m going out on a limb here, but if you were a florist in New York, I would venture a guess that you would want your website to be at the top of the search engine results.
Now visit the search engines and type in those phrases to see where you rank, if at all. Not seeing what you want?
That’s when it is time to take a look at things from the search engine’s viewpoint. Does the main page (or supporting pages, for that matter) have the phrase “florists in New York” in the text content? If not, then how is the search engine supposed to know that you aren’t a diesel mechanic in Miami?
If you don’t spell it out, even the smartest search engine isn’t going to be able to help John Q. Customer find you. Even if they could, they aren’t going to go through the trouble because it would seem that if you don’t bother taking the time to include those crucial keywords in your website, they must not be important enough to bother with.
Step outside your box for a few minutes and think for a while about the phrases that an average customer might type into a search engine to find ecommerce sites like yours. Are you using those phrases in your website content? If the answer is no, then you have some work to do.
Even if the phrase doesn’t seem to lend itself easily to informative content it can still be made to read easily. Let’s look at an example:
keyphrase: florists in New York City
website content includes: “XYZ Floral Design is one of the premiere florists in New York City, specializing in wedding and special event designs…”
Get the picture now? There’s no shame in asking for directions. If people were still afraid to do so, the search engines wouldn’t be pulling in millions of searches every day.
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