Is Your Website Being Found?
So, you’ve finally done it! You’ve built your first website for your business! Now you can just sit back and all that business will fly in through the door, won’t it?
What? It won’t?
What do you mean that there are 7 million other pages about businesses just like mine? But the Internet is the way of the future – how can there be 7 million people ahead of me?
Now you need to promote your website!! There are several ways to do that, but before we do that, is your website being found?
Don’t know? Then try this simple test:
Open a web browser – any web browser will do. Go to your favourite search engine – I’ll use Google. Type your website address into the search box, starting with www & click the search button.
You should see your website at the top of the list of search results. If not, you might need to submit your website to the search engines for indexing.
Do it now:
- Google: http://www.google.com.au/addurl/
- Yahoo!: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
- Bing!: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
This can take up to 7 weeks, so lets keep going…
While the ‘spiders’ crawl over your website to add it to their database, you can tell other websites about your shiny new website too!
Google Local Business Centre is a good place to start. Click here to add your details now – Google will contact you to confirm your details and then they’ll add you to the directory.
Add as much information about your business and services as you can as this information is scanned when people are searching Google so more is better.
Do you belong to an association like Master Builders? Do you have a listing on their website? Can you add your website? Then do it now?
And do you belong to any networking organisations? Add your website there too!
And why are we doing all of this? Because the search engines like links – the more links to your website the more important they think it is.
