SEO helps Santa Rosa customers find your business!

Most small business owners have a simple website set up. It used to be that a few simple pages containing the business background, location and contact information was the norm for all business websites. Even though they thought that is all their site needed to get their customers through their front doors back then, they could not be more wrong today.

If a new customer cannot find your website to begin with, any page you publish will be rendered irrelevant. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is going to get your small business website seen on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Titles

Your webpage title is the most important aspect of your SEO. The keywords you use to title the pages of your website will bring you to the top, or the bottom, of search engine results.

For example, Bob’s Towing originally used the title “Bob’s Towing” on their homepage. This was great when customers of Bob searched for “Bob’s towing” on Google, but what about all the people out there who don’t know about Bob?

When Bob changed his title to “Bob’s Towing – Santa Rosa, Sonoma County Towing and Automotive Services,” he started to reach customers who were searching for things like “santa rosa towing” and “towing sonoma county.” By adding a few relative and local keywords, Bob reached a whole new customer base.

Tags

Title tags are important to how your business website is presented to customers within search engine results. This would be a good place for Bob to condense his page title, creating a transparent link that no one will be afraid to click. Ex: “Bob’s Towing – Santa Rosa Services”

Descriptions

Meta descriptions are also important to how your website is presented to customers within search engine results. When a meta description is not provided, the search engine will select content from the page and display it for your customers. By providing a crisp, clear and complete meta description for a page, a customer is more likely to trust and click on your site.

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Are you utilizing SEO within your small business website? Adding simple things like page titles, title tags and descriptions will help bring you to the top of search engine results everywhere.

How can you improve your business website?

If your business website has been gathering dust at the bottom of the search engine results, consider a free website evaluation by Ajalon! There are several simple ways to clean up and improve your website, ensuring you attract customers, communicate with clients and get found on search engines.

In your complimentary evaluation we’ll cover the basics, as well as elements of your webpage that will bring your business to the top.

Design
Ajalon will evaluate your business website’s design, including graphics, navigation and content.

SEO
Your search engine optimization is critical for your business website. Ajalon will determine how your keywords, tags, descriptions and content can be improved upon.

Social Media
Ajalon will evaluate the share-ability of your website’s pages, ensuring your goods and services can be shared on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Request your free website evaluation by Aug 31, 2011!

Get Found With Google Places

The internet is where a majority of consumers search for their local businesses. Forget the Yellow Pages, it’s all about Google Places!

Google Places is an excellent resource for business owners. It helps your business stand out within endless pages of search results, and allows you to learn more about your customers with insights and analytics.

Google is the top ranked search engine on the web, why wouldn’t you want to be listed? Let Ajalon help you set up your Google Places account and see how Google can get your business found.

Can your customers find you on the web?

Let’s just agree right now that a website is absolutely necessary for every business owner. The world wide web is where consumers are doing their research, making comparisons, and spending their money. Without a killer website, how will your business get noticed on the internet?

A lot of businesses already have websites, but fall short with minimal design and content. Here are a few strategies to help amp up your business’s webpage.

Relevant Content

If you’re in the field of medicine, your clients probably do not want to read about your summer vacation. Be sure your content is what prospective customers are looking for, and be sure to have enough of it.

Superb Design

Humans are visual creatures. We respond to colors, photos, animation and videos much more than text, so be sure to design an eye-pleasing homepage.

Powerful SEO

You have some great graphics and engaging content on your site, but can search engines keep track of it? Ensure your website is found by consumers by analyzing your SEO (search engine optimization) and improving keywords, titles, tags and more.

Share Buttons

Now that you’re awesome website is being found on the internet by old and new clients alike, be sure they can share it! Social media share buttons will engage your readers in a way that transforms your small business into a growing community.

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Business websites can be improved upon in the simplest ways. How have you improved your business website in the past?

What’s a Bing Local listing?

If you are looking to improve your local search engine optimization Bing Local lets users find businesses near them, or near where they want to go. Because listings are returned in search results, businesses don’t have to search for new customers—the customers have already found them.

Why list your business on Bing Local?

• It’s free

  It’s like free advertising! The more information you provide, the easier it is for customers to find you.

• It’s fast

  Improve or update your listing anytime to suit your needs. There’s no schedule or hassle.

• Reach your customers

  Customers are already searching for what you provide. What better time to reach them?

• List all of your locations

  Expanding your business? Congratulations! Bing  listings can accommodate all of your locations.

• You control your data

  Bing’s verification process helps protect your listing against unauthorized changes.When you finish adding your information, they tell you that they will send you a letter to your address and in that letter they will give you a PIN number so that you confirm your listing.  I like this feature because they are trying to make sure that only legitimate businesses get listed with their service.

• Full business information

  It is possible to list just about anything you would like to about your business. There is a place to add supplemental phone numbers such as 800 numbers, or customer service lines or lines for any other purpose. You can list supplemental web pages or email addresses, add a link to a catalog, menu or other information your customers want most.

  There are provisions for a detailed list of business hours, payment methods, and the ability to add photos, full business descriptions and brands carried.  To add legitimacy you can include professional affiliations.  If you offer services in foreign languages those also can be listed.

• Select categories

  When people are searching for your business, what are they looking for? Search for the categories you want, or select them from the browsable list. After you make your selections, you can prioritize them from top to bottom, placing  your favorite category at the top.  You can select up to 6 categories.

  Bing is very similar to the services offered in Google Places, more than the free listing in Yahoo.  I have to admit that I was annoyed by Bing because it would not support use of Safari, the web browser in Apple computers.  It was a nuisance to have to download Firefox to sign up for their service or even access my account.

  I would still recommend listing your business with Bing.  It is a popular search engine and it will help people who use it to find your business.

Most of us put up a site because we think we ought to and with a vague hope that it will bring us more business.  We may not be sure what we are doing or what to expect.  This may be like getting a new puppy.  You know you want it but you aren’t sure how it is all going to be.

Well much like a puppy, a website doesn’t know what to do just because you have it hosted and live.  We all know that we need to train a puppy in the ways we want him to be.  So it is with a website.

It does not work to bring a puppy home and expect him to know how to behave properly.  You have to put effort into the training. So also with your site.  It should be built properly from the beginning so that it can begin working for you immediately.

It should first be seo’d.  Now what is that you say?  Search Engine Optimization (SEO)  is a big process, which we will be going over step by step.  What it means is doing the things in a website that make it easily searched by the search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

When you put the words for the things you are searching for into a search engine and a few seconds later it comes up with pages and pages of possible matches for what you were looking, it did not go out a search all of the places right then.

When it says, “Results 1 - 10 of about 178,000″  it is giving the first 10 results that it thinks are the closest match to what you were looking for.  It does that by sending robots, sometimes called spiders, out to look at pages and see what is on the pages.

These spiders scan a page and look to see if the content on the page is consistent with what the site and page titles say they are about.  When it feels it understands what a page does, it indexes it, which means it keeps track of what is on that page so that it can quickly recall it if someone seaches for those things.

In our next blog we will continue explaining this process of making your website a more powerful employee  serving your customers and bringing in new prospects.  If you would like to talk about your site and how hard it is working for you call us at 707.528.0288.

Written by David Walrath

Ajalon Printing & Design

Most of us got into business because we loved doing something and thought it would be cool to make a living doing it.  Michael Gerber, who used to live right here in Santa Rosa, called this an entrepreneurial seizure.  It befell us because of a fatal assumption: if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does that technical work.

What does this have to do with making money you say? Well I’m just trying to quickly get to the point that the way to make money in any business is by attracting clients who will pay for what you do.  And to do that you have to market yourself.  Few of us got into business to be marketers.  We wanted to do work we loved.

So now that we are in business we discover that the work is to get customers, not do the thing we love.

The Good News

The good news today is that with the internet and search engines and websites, it is actually easier for your potential clients to find you and for you to meet up with your clients and not try and guess how to reach them.

They are out there searching for your type of work.  You don’t have to hunt them down and try to get their attention.  We all are bombarded with thousands of advertising messages each day.  Traditional marketing tried to get your message out there in a way that interrupted a person’s attention long enough to get them to consider contacting you.

With the internet today there are always people out there searching for what you are  offering.  You just need to connect with them and follow through on helping them get what they want.  This shift is an important one to recognize and take advantage of.

The Bad News

If you put the bulk of your marketing effort into trying to interrupt people’s attention, and neglect the people out there that are looking for your work, somebody else who is out there connecting with those who are looking on the web  is likely to capture their business.

If you are like me, you put up a website sometime ago because it seemed to be the thing to do.  You did it as inexpensively as you could.  Maybe some years later you realized that this web thing was only getting bigger and maybe you went out and spent more money  to put up a better site.

Now you might be hearing more about search engine optimization and social media marketing and  you wonder what way to turn.

The Solution

For certain the internet is not going away.  Maybe it won’t impact your business too much before you retire.  If you aren’t engaged with it though, it will decrease the value of your business.

What we can offer you at Ajalon is to sit down with you and sort out what the best course of action is.  We have been here in Sonoma County for over 50 years.  We have survived and have helped many other businesses with their marketing by staying closely in touch with what works and what is economical.

We have gone through internet marketing.  We personally have got our website to the top of Google rankings.  We did it ourselves.  We didn’t pay somebody to do it for us.  We can help you make the educated choices to take advantage of this great new resource and to avoid the pitfalls.  Call us for help in your marketing today.  707-528-0288.

Written by David Walrath

Ajalon Printing & Design