If you simply build your website, they will NOT come!
I just received an e-mail from a business owner who feels he has done all the right things in the last six months — he started a WordPress blog, assigned one of his employees to post to it a few times a week, optimized the site for SEO, created an opt-in box to capture e-mail leads, etc., but he’s not seen any traffic to speak of… a few visitors a day, no opt-in’s, no extra business, and nothing but expenses and bills to show for his efforts… and needless to say he’s frustrated, discouraged and at the point of giving up. His results are actually very typical, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Millions of websites are earning revenue for their businesses by following a few key strategies.
A few years ago, you could create an SEO-friendly website and the mere fact that it was optimized would attract traffic to your website, but that’s not enough anymore. You must advertise or market the site.
Before we move forward, I’ll state unequivocally that if your site is not optimized, you will suffer search engine rankings. It’s part of building a professional website, and simply a matter of course that you need to pay attention to proper optimization of each page. It would be like showing up at the opera in a dirty t-shirt and cut-off’s; it simply isn’t done if you want to be taken seriously. Pay attention to the title of your page, as well as the description, keywords and especially the content. Tag your images with relevant keywords. Do all those things — especially if your keyword competes with less than 50,000 – 60,000 other web pages in Google’s index. We commonly see the lack of optimization on home-made websites (made in a free editor), Flash sites (pretty but not very smart) and old websites (technically obsolete). If you have a home-made, Flash or old website, it’s entirely possible to have a well optimized site, but you may have to work harder to get here than the guy with the WordPress blog. WordPress sites are about as good as it gets for good SEO, and should be your model to emulate in your own web property.
More than simply optimizing your site for search engines, you must tell the world about your website. There are simply too many pages on the Internet about your topic — too much noise for a page to simply “exist” and get any attention at all. Time and again, you have heard me talk about “the conversation,” and that’s an image I’ll return to again here. Think about a cocktail party. If you are in the street outside the house, you could be the most relevant contributor in the world to the conversation; but unless you walk into the house and actually join the conversation, you’re not relevant. You’re not even on the radar. People don’t know you exist. You are a mere murmur in a world that is shouting.
The Internet — and by extension, search engines — filter out pages for a number of reasons. Spam content that contributes nothing gets thrown to the side of the road. Good content with no volume is not found, and that is a true shame. There are many ways to join the conversation. If you have something to say — especially if you have something of substance to contribute — you have a responsibility to make yourself heard. So get out there! It’s time to be heard.
