Home business owners online who are interested in reaching a larger audience with their products should consider search engine optimization for their home business website. Reaching a larger audience should be a toppriority for a number of different reasons with the main one being increasing sales and profits.
In order to increase traffic to your home business you have to attract more visitors to your website. Irregardless of your reasons for wanting to increase traffic, one of the best ways to accomplish this is by optimizing your home page for the major search engines. This article will discuss the importance of search engine rankings and offer tips for optimizing your home business website.
The importance of ranking high in search engine results has been well documented with the main reason being, of course, to increase traffic to your home page. Potential visitors to your home business are more likely to make the trip if you’re ranked on the first page of Google or Yahoo rather than on page three or four. People don’t normally scroll through pages of results before selecting the one they believe will suit their needs. Therefore the websites appearing on the first page of the search engine results are more likely to get the most traffic. However, Internet users are not likely to search through more than a page or two of the results when looking for information on a particular subject.
High search engine rankings essentially act as free advertising for a home business website. The reason being many Internet users rely on popular search engines to assist them in finding the information they’re looking for on the web. The search engines apply complex algorithms to evaluate websites and rank them accordingly for specific search terms or key words. As a result Internet users put a great deal of value on the search results and trust these rankings to lead them to the best available websites relevant to the keywords they specified in their search.
One of the most effective ways to optimize a website for search engines is through the use of relevant keywords. The practice of applying specific keyword densities to the content of the site is a common search engine optimization technique. Business owners and other webmasters who utilize these optimization tactics on their websites do not always agree on the optimal percentage for keywords used but many believe approximately 2%-3% is most effective.
Another method of search engine optimization is to place relevant keywords in the code of the website including the title tags and meta tags. Location of the key words is important because search engines often crawl from top to bottom and strategically placed key words in the title and early in the content will get the search engines attention and will help with top ranking. Key words appearing before the body of the blog will be crawled first by the search engines.
Home business owners can also help increase their search engine rankings by generating back links to their website. You can accomplish this in a number of different ways. One tactic is to find other websites willing to place a link to your home business on their website. Some website owners may be willing to do this in return for a link to their website on your home page. This is beneficial for both parties because search engines factor the number of links to a website into their ranking algorithm and this helps contribute to your final ranking.
These are just some of the ways you can improve your ranking with the major search engines while at the same time increase traffic to your home business and increase sales.