Are You Getting the Traffic You Should From Search Engines?
A couple of weeks ago, I constructed a page on my personal blog decicated to information on Springfield’s upcoming city council election. I did this because I wanted to make it easy for the residents of Springfield to find information about the candidates and make an informed decision on February 3.
This post isn’t about elections though; it is about making sure people find your information online!
Earlier this week I decided to do a Google search for “springfield city council election” just to see if and where my new page would show up. I was very happy to see that my resource returned the number one result for this search in Google! It currently sits ahead of the city council page, information from the local newspaper, and all the local television stations. If the general manager of the leading local TV news station knew I managed to do this in one week, he’d probably be sick! The same goes for the publisher of the leading newspaper.
How can these leading news sources in the area get bumped by a mere individual doing a few interviews in his spare time?? It’s because I set up my page to be friendly to the search engines. Web geeks call this SEO (search engine optimization), but essentially it’s just making sure that it’s easy for search engines to tell what your page is about. As hard as the leading local media outlets may be trying to do this, they’re obviously failing. I can only wonder how much ad revenue they’re missing out on by not getting those search engine referrals, not to mention the fact that they’ll also be losing some of their reputation as the leading media outlets because their information just isn’t as easy to find.
Are you losing traffic, reputation, and business because your information just isn’t easy enough to find? Sure makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
