These days, most people with small businesses understand the need for a web site. In this era of global information, customers want their facts fast, clear and at their fingertips without any fuss. A carefully thought out, well-organized web site can place you high in the search engine rankings and put you steps ahead of your competition.

When planning your small business web site, first think about it from the point of view of your customer. Who is that exactly, and what will he or she achieve by visiting your site? What will they be looking for in order to find your site? For instance, your business is a local bakery that creates specialty cakes and cookies for any occasion. Your customer likely has an event coming up and probably lives in the near vicinity of your shop. You will want the written content of your website to both accurately and attractively describe your bakery’s menu and services, include contact information and perhaps even a map with directions on how to find the shop. All this information should turn up when your customer uses a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Live or Alexa to do an online search for local specialty bakeries.

See what your competition is doing. Create a list of your known competitors and see how highly they rank when you perform your own searches. What keywords and Meta tags are they using in their content to achieve their ranking? How effective or ineffective is their web site in conveying their message and winning over customers? Whom have they included inbound and outbound links to? This last detail is very important, because this is how a search engine determines the “popularity” of a site and where it will appear in the rankings.

Now it is time to sit down and do some brainstorming for the right keywords and Meta tags on your site. If you are not sure how to do this, Google Adwords has a free keyword tool and ad text generator to help you get started. Once you have your keywords and Meta tags, run them through a search engine and see where they place in relation to your competition. Make sure your primary goal is achieved on your web site’s home page and that a keyword is in the title and header for all subsequent pages. Create a new email address for the site and be sure that the site can load and be seen properly on the different web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

Once your site is up and running, you must continue to maintain it with updates and the addition of new links. Web sites with outdated or in accurate information receive lower rankings in the search engine results pages. To increase your business’s rankings are add it to the local listings for the search engines, like Google Local or CitySearch, and also add your web site to an industry specific directory.

Labels: seo_guide, website_development