By Jennifer Henderson
In a previous blog post, Carole stated that when it comes to building a small business, “people need to know who you are and where you are.” One way to do this is to build an online presence and make sure that your brand appears high in search engine results. But, how do you get your business to appear at the top (or at least near the top) of the search results list? The first step is to understand how search engines work.
In this video, Google engineer Matt Cutts does an excellent job explaining what happens when you do a search. He points out that when you search for something on Google, you are not searching the entire Internet. Instead, you are searching Google’s index of the Web.
Google then produces a list of results based on a number of factors. Google’s software looks at how many times a site contains the keywords you are searching for. The search engine software also looks at whether or not your search words appear in the page’s title or URL. It also asks if the site includes synonyms to your keywords and if the page is from a quality website.
In addition, Google looks at the site’s PageRank, which is an algorithm Google created that measures the importance of website pages. Google then combines all these factors to create a list of search results.
So, what steps should you take to get your business at the top of Google rankings? As Matt explains in the video, crafting targeted keywords is paramount. In addition, improving your site’s PageRank is important.
In the next blog, I will explain what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is and why it’s so important to your online presence. In following blogs, I will discuss how to craft keywords that get results and how to increase your PageRank. In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you about strategies that help your business appear high in search results. Please comment in the section below.
