Search engine positioning is by far the best way to
generate traffic to your web site. A top rank in just one of the major search
engines for one keyword can bring in thousands of new visitors to your site. The
best thing about these visitors is that all of them are potential customers for
you, since they have searched for the products and services that you sell.
However, before you embark on optimizing your site for the search engines, I
would like to put in a word of caution.
If you decide to optimize your
site for the search engines yourself, there is something that you will need to
have on your side - time. Unless you have at least 2-3 hours to spare everyday,
you will simply not be able to get your site to the top of the search engines.
Why?
Well, initially, you will have to conduct research on how each of
the search engines work. Once you do that, you will need to create pages which
are optimized for the search engines.
Once you have created the
optimized pages, you will need to submit each of these optimized pages to the
search engines. Then, you will have to wait for a few weeks to let the search
engines add your site to their databases.
After the search engines have
added your site, you will need to check how your site is doing in each of the
search engines. If you find that your site has not attained the top rankings
that you had hoped for, you will have to repeat the whole process all over
again. However, even if your site does attain top rankings, your work is not
over.
Each search engine frequently changes its algorithms which means
that a site which has a Top 10 ranking today may not have the same ranking
tomorrow. Furthermore, your competitors will also be trying to get their sites
to the top. Hence, you will need to constantly monitor the ranking of your site
in all the search engines, and you will have to re-optimize those pages that are
showing a downward trend in their rankings.
Thus, you'll need to spend a
minimum of 2-3 hours every day in trying to optimize your site for the search
engines. If you do have 2 or 3 hours to spare every day, then you should, by all
means, do it yourself. However, it is quite likely that you find it difficult to
take care of all your normal business activities because of a lack of time.
Hence, you can hardly afford to spend 2-3 hours every day on search engine
positioning. In that case, it may make sense for you to hire a specialist search
engine positioning company, so that you can concentrate on your normal business
activities. If you do decide to hire another company, make sure that it offers
you a guarantee regarding the number of search engine positions that it can
attain for you. I have seen too many companies which offer no guarantees
whatsoever.
