Okay, how are people going to find your website?

One way to think of it is that your website is like the internet version of having a home or business location. For people to come to your home or business, they need to know your street address. So, how do you let people know that?

There are two primary ways. One - you tell them. It might be when you are talking to people, or it could be on all your marketing and promotional material, your ads or whatever.

The other way is to have your website "found" on the internet.

Unless you are a bigtime internet business and can afford to do all the fancy search engine stuff, you need to realize that people finding your website will be a lot like them finding a business location. It used to be that people would look in the phone book or yellow pages to find you, or to find the category of business you are in.

In our internet world today we do have a somewhat easier way to find things - by using search engines.

Without trying to get too complicated about this, when you design a website, part of what you put into the coding for the website is something called "keywords". These are the words or names that people would be most likely to type into one of the internet search engines like Google or Yahoo or whatever if they were trying to find you.

So for example, if you are a business you will want to include in the keywords your business name, any words that would describe your business category, ie, accounting, plumbing, etc. If you have some unique products, you may want to include those names. You may want to include your name, if you are a well-known part of the business. You should also include your address, phone number, city and province/state.

Another thing you should give your webdesigner is something called a description. This is a short sentence or two that describes what your website is about. If you have used an internet search engine, when the website lists come up you will see their name, a description and the internet address for that website. So you want a good description that will grab people's attention in just a few words and tell them what you have to offer that is unique and special. (We'll go into that in more detail in the Marketing Module.)

You can spend a lot of money on search engine rankings and the such like, but for my clients, the simplest thing to do is make sure you've included the keywords and description in your coding. Once that website goes live, the search engines will eventually "spider" through your website, and then people can type in your name or whatever, and your website should show up. It doesn't usually take too long for the search engines to find you. I uploaded a new website earlier this week - just did a search now, and the website was already there in the listings - right at the top of the list.

But - something to be aware of - let's say that you are a plumber. Now if someone goes to the internet to search for "plumber", will your name show up? Yes, but it may be so far back in the list as to be useless. I just did a search for that and guess what? It tells me there are over 14 million webpages that have something to do with "Plumber". So the chance of you being in the first page or even the first several pages is extremely slim.

Now if they go searching for Pete's Plumbing Calgary, which is far more specific, then you will probably show up on the first page.

So whether or not you will be found online very much depends on what search words and names people use. Your best bet is to have good keywords, and also to have your web address on all your other marketing materials.