That is for those of you out there that run a retail business. It will put you in the right mindset.

If you have a store, you want the most walk by and drive by traffic you can get. In the brick and mortar world, you can do this by building a your store on a busy road in a good neighborhood with other stores.

On the internet, your road is search engines. Google is a huge 8 lane highway that is constantly packed with cars. Yahoo and possibly now Bing are the 2 lane type and the rest, they’re just sidestreets, if not rural routes. You now the type. The roads don’t have names, just letters and numbers.

Ranking For Keywords?

Maybe I have that wrong. I play with SEO analogies all the time when I am trying to explain what I do to people who want their business to succeed online. It works in one way. But I am beginning to think that search engines are more like countries and keywords, they are the roads.

In the brick and mortar world, to expand you build a new branch in another good location.

Online, Branches are as Easy as Good Keywords.

You stake your claims on keywords. Ranking for one keyword in Google or other search engines can be worth thousands of dollars to you a month. Do your search engine optimization right and you could rank for hundreds and even thousands of profitable keywords depending upon the breadth of your site.

Links, links to your site are more roads. They send traffic to your site. But certain types of links do something else that is special. They help you rank higher in the search engines.

An Example

Lets say that when someone searches for your site in Google for “blue widgets”, because that is what you are selling, you come in at number 15. That is the second page. Your odds are not good at getting a lot of hits. Your in that street behind the strip just hoping someone will get lost enough to find your store.

Getting a link from the right site with the right keywords can bump you up to the front page, main street. Editing your page can help with that to.

But there is another thing a good SEO does. A good search engine expert will not stop with the keywords you want to rank for. There are hidden gems in competitive research and there are tools to suggest higher traffic, more profitable keywords related to the one you have.

Hopefully that makes some sense. The internet and search engines are really relatively new right now. But they can be compared to things we already know.

You can’t deny it any more. You must have a web site. I don’t care if you run a local service or have branches all over the world. If you don’t have an internet presence, your business will not go as far as can.

And it takes much more than just building a web site and telling your friends about it. Your web site is yet another salesman on the internet working for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And this employee really does work for cheap.

Software can do amazing things. It can process online orders for you, capture sales leads and give customers information they need without the necessity of using the phone and your time. But until people start coming to your site, it is pretty worthless. A site’s value comes with traffic.

And in order to get traffic, you need to found. And in order to be found, you have to rank high in the search engines. And that is what SEO does. It is search engine optimization.

In other words, SEO puts you where the customers are. SEO is “location, location, location” on the internet. And SEO is relatively cheap compared to any other type of online promotion because it lasts unlike pay per click advertising which stops working once you cut off the flow of money.

But SEO is also a continuous process. As you work to make your site rank in search engines like Google, so will your competitors. But without it, your site is nowhere.