Networking Your Website

By Rita Wilhelm, Contributing Writer Rita's Bio Print Article

You may not know this, but if you involved with a networking group, and not actively networking online with that group, you are missing huge opportunities to get your website found on the internet. Let me explain.

70% of people do research online before buying a product or service, according to research done by the Kelsey Group. Nielsen//NetRatings also found that 70% of people use the Internet to search for local service businesses. As internet guru DaveTaylor says, “If you are not findable... you don’t exist”.

That’s a very powerful statement. If people can’t find you online, you won’t have the opportunity to sell your products or services. And, this is the primary function of most websites.

So how do you become findable, and how can your networking group help make you findable?

The truth is, there are several online marketing techniques you can capitalize on with your networking group, which in turn will help everyone in your group become more findable. I’ll be sharing these techniques with you in my monthly column with The National Networker. In today’s column, I’m going to share a bit about the search engines.

It’s the job of a search engine (such as Google, Yahoo and MSN) to bring up relevant search results to what you are looking for. As a business person, you of course would like to see your own website show up high in search engine results. If you don’t come up in the first 3 pages of a Google search for a key phrase that your potential prospect is searching for, you can bet that person will never find out about you, and this person will probably be doing business with a competitor or yours that he could find.

There are over 100 factors that impact ranking. I’m mainly going to talk about Google, since the majority of search results are handled by Google. Google has a secret formula (their algorithm) that they use, to rank websites. Although we don’t know everything about their secret sauce, there are some things we know for sure. A few of the biggies are:

Google can only bring up your results for a given keyword phrase, if it knows what your site is about. Google needs clues. You can give Google these clues by using your key phrases in your website, and then optimizing pages in your website to those key phrases (or very similar key phrases).
Google ranks websites higher if the site is regularly updated.
Google loves content. Content is king.
Google will rank you higher in search engines results if you have quality relevant links coming from other websites, to your website.

So let’s assume that you’ve done your homework, you know what key phrases you are marketing, and you have optimized your site accordingly.

It’s time to get incoming links to your site. This is a great opportunity to capitalize on those membership organizations that you are currently involved with.

If you are a business in Denver, and you are a member of the Denver Chamber of Commerce, it would be highly relevant if you have a link coming to your website from the Denver Chamber of Commerce. That gives Google a nice clue that you might be doing business in Denver.
If you are a realtor, and you are a member of a real estate association, it would be highly relevant if you have an incoming link from that trade association.
If your leads group has a web page, and that webpage has been optimized to businesses serving your local community, it would be highly relevant to have an incoming link from that leads group.
If you belong to an organization, and that organization has an online directory by category, and you list your business in the appropriate category, it would be highly relevant to have an incoming link from that category in that directory.
If you belong to an online community of entrepreneurs, it would be relevant to have a link coming to your website, which would show up in your signature every time you participated in that blog or forum.

Marketing online is like having a store front. You’ve got to drive people to your website through marketing. And… if you know that 70% people are looking online, it starts to make a lot of sense as to why it is so important for you to become findable online to your target audience. You are probably already connected with a lot of different membership organizations. If so, take advantage of that on another level. Make it part of your online findability strategy.

Next month, I will give you an online networking strategy for your leads group.

Contact Rita Wilhelm at RitaW@TheNationalNetWorker.com or Post a Comment on TNNW Blog.