Attn Small Business Owners – Is your Website Search Engine Friendly?

As a website designer, it is my experience that alot of small business websites are missing some basic elements, and this causes their search engines rankings to disappear off the radar. If your small business website features on page 363 of Google,. Or not at all, there is a good chance that it is missing a couple of very basic elements that would change this dramatically. These elements are metatags and a sitemap, and if your site does not have them it will suffer!!

When consumers search the internet they are usually looking for one of two things. They are either looking for information to solve their problem, or they are looking for a product to solve their problem. So, as a small business owner I have both information and products that help to solve peoples’ problems, and I need my website to tell them about how I can help them. So, in order to do this, you must first tell the search engines what information and products you have, and what problems you can solve, so that they can convey it to your consumers.

The first way to do this is by the use of metatags. Don’t worry too much about the jargon. Ask your website designer that designed your website what metatags they included for your site. If the answer is none, or they give you a blank look, then there is a good chance that your site does not have any metatags. Metatags tell the search engines the title of your site, the description of your site, and the keywords that you want your site to focus on.

If your site does not have metatags then you are just leaving it to chance as to how the search engine will treat your site. And this will not be good for your search engine ranking.

Have you ever tried to sell a product to a customer without telling them anything about it? Sometimes the customer will figure it out for themselves, sometimes they walk away without buying, and sometimes they buy it and bring it back later for a refund because it did not do what they thought it would do. That is what happens when your website does not have metatags.

The second thing that your website must have is a sitemap. Metatags tell the search engine robots what they will find on your site, and the sitemap tells them where to go to find it. Ever tried to go somewhere that you had never been before without a map. If your website does not have a sitemap, that is what you are doing to the search engine robots. And, they will go somewhere else at the first available opportunity. So, you run the risk that they only find some of your website, and some pages will not feature in the search engines at all.

Sitemaps are relatively easy to create, and once created you can submit them to the search engines. That way they know where to go and how to get there, and when they get there your metatags will tell them what they will find.

Do you have a website that is not performing as well as you would like? Can you not even find it in the Google search rankings? Or maybe you are on page 363. Even if your site is the most beautiful website on the internet, it will not work if no-one can find it. In terms of search engine optimisation, there are alot of other factors that influence your rankings, but if you are missing out on the basics you will be hurting your website and yourself. The basics are metatags and a sitemap. Talk to your website designer and make sure you are using them both effectively.

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