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postheadericon Google is not a Trade Directory


Are you a Shopkeeper or Businessman?Are you a Shopkeeper or Businessman?
Why you should never be quiet It reminded me of some research I was doing into running my first computer store... was it for me? how would it work? and what was going to make me successful. I was working as a sales consultant and was meeting 20-30 shopowners a day so quickly got to tell a good shop from a bad one but, I didn't know enough to understand why. Why you...
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Lets get something straight okay?

- Search Engines are not your friend.
- Search Engines are not there to promote your business.
- Search Engines are not there to advertise your company
- Search Engines are not there to help people find your website 

Okay, now we have these facts on the table, what are search engines for?

A Search engine is designed to find products, services or items of personal, academic or commercial interest, they are not there to find www.widget.com because if they were they would be called Directory Engines.

When you go searching for something on Google do you go searching for widget.com, or do you go searching for an item or service? Obviously its the latter.

If search Engines were just directories they would be useless. (Its true).

if you want a motorhome engine part you type in the part number and it pulls up 14,289 references to that part number on the global net, and whats more it does it 1.2 seconds. Cool Beans!

You want to know if there are driving schools in Bristol? type in driving school bristol and you get about 564,000 results in 0.25 seconds

Thats a lot of entries to search isn't it... so lets make it work harder we want to know how many offer "free lessons" so add free lessons in front. You now have "free lessons" driving school bristol and you get 2,140 results in 0.17 seconds but, this is still too much information to sift through.

So lets make it sweat a bit... what can we add to narrow down the search? well, we want local knowledge of roads so lets add "free lessons" driving school bristol "local instructor" and this now gives us about 324 results in 0.21 seconds

Identifying the route to success is not where you think it is

What is happening here is we are deliberately targetting our results based on a complex mix of information to narrow down our specific requirements. This is what search engines do. They are designed to do EXACTLY this and this is what you need to consider when setting up your website.

Having a website is not about telling people about you or about what you do, it is all about helping people to find what they are looking for.

Your website is a storage area of information in the form of single words and phrases that the search engines need to register and record to drive people to your website when looking for specific solution that you provide. The solution is the engines target, not your website.

The Basis of your understanding needs to focus on your customer

If you understand this, then you understand the basis of Search Engine Optimisation. Its all about the little things. When you put in your tags look at what I did above and see how people might use the search engine to drill down through the trillions of meta words and phrases to get to your website then ensure that those phrases are hooked into your site specifically to catch those users when they input their search.

Its the breadcrumb trail that you lay down that is the key to your ultimate success. Google follows breadcrumbs and if you use it right you can turn 564,000 listings into just 324 (or less) by targeting your site to the words people actually use to search.

We find solutions so you don't have to

If you find all this a bit too much to take in and manage there is good news - you don't have to.

We have designed our new website to host our web products, our bespoke solutions for speedy delivery of your web project. so you can deal directly with us and join many others in sharing our successful implementation of working solutions for businesses that need business web sites - that work.

Les Kinch - Author

Les brings a wealth of commercial experience into the development of web designs for all kinds of business is fundamental to the business concept.

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