More on Websites
Posted on September 20, 2007 - Filed Under Marketing Tools |
Alternative Health Practice Blog is having a great series of articles on websites. They talk about building a website and now have some good information on getting the website recognized so that when people search for you, they find you.
In building a website, they talk about wordpress. I love using wordpress, as I’ve said before. Primarily they talked about using wordpress as a blog and why you might want to have a blog on your site. I noted in the comments and discussed the fact in a prior post that you can use wordpress for your entire site.
The next phase Alternative Health Practice talks about is optimizing your site for search engines. Once you have a site, you need to get it where people can find it. This is called Search Engine Optimization. They have some of the best simple tips out there.
I wanted to add two newer things you can do that could be really important in the future. I know that my personal site is indexed by Yahoo Search Engine (not yahoo directory, which costs money to be indexed in). I discovered that I am NOT listed under Yahoo Local, so I submitted by site for inclusion under local. This was important to me for my acupuncture site because people searching for my services will want local results. I highly recommend submitting your site to yahoo local.
To add your site to yahoo local, go to yahoo.com and choose to do a local search. This can be for anything, although I searched acupuncture to see if I’m in the results. At the bottom of the page, you will see a resources footer. One choice is to add a business. I added mine about two months ago and it’s still not showing up. I always give search engines about three months AT LEAST for results to show up. Consider that they have millions of sites to search through. If local is doing this manually that can take a lot of time.
Another local search engine that I found is google maps. To add your business to google maps, you will need a google account. If you’ve taken the advice of Alternative Health Practice, you’ve signed up for Google Analytics, which means you have an account. You should be able to use this account. I have one account for my free blogger blog, analytics, adsense (both advertiser and publisher) and answers.
If you go to google.com, you will see up in the left hand corner a selection you can choose from. Click on “maps”. Then click on your area. I actually had to choose a local business and say I wanted to log in and edit it before I could add my own business. At that point they will give you a choice of editing the business you have clicked on because it was your business or add a new business. You will want to choose to add a new business.
I input my information. At the end of this, they asked if I preferred to have my business confirm the information via post card or via phone. Not being sure how the confirmation process worked and not wanting to miss a phone call, I choose to have a post card sent to us. This was about a week ago. I have yet to get the card, but we’ll see. After confirmation, if people use google maps to find local businesses, my business should show up.
Both of these are new things in search engines. By nature both google maps and yahoo local are designed to help brick and mortar offline business find customers via their search engines. Not everyone will use these services now, but ten years ago, not everyone used the internet. The numbers are creeping up. Typically once you are in a search engine, so long as your site is live at the address, you will stay in the search engines. If you change your website address or if you don’t have anything on the site for a long period, you could get dropped. I suspect the local directories may periodically check in to be sure you are still at that address but we’ll see as time goes on.
Good luck and check out the posts over at Alternative Health Practice. Setting up a site may not be as hard as you think it is!
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2 Responses to “More on Websites”
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The first postcard Google sent me never showed up, so I had to request a second one. That time I got it after about 2 weeks. Guess they’re not quite as adept in the offline world.
Keep up the great posts!
Illyan Seem
Director of Marketing
Tri-State College of Acupuncture
Thanks for the note. It’s always good to hear how these things ACTUALLY work (or not).