How your website shows up on search engines

When it comes to building a small business website and publishing it live, we often expect something big to happen. We’re here shouting on a rooftop after clicking the publish button and expect a flood of visitors. Type in your website or keywords on Google, and you hit a wall.

Why is it important to show up for search engines?
When you peruse the Internet, you type in a keyword into a search engine, and less than half a second later, you’ll have 35 million search results readily available to you.

The majority of Internet users will only click the first link of a search result. Each subsequent link decreases significantly in probability, and it’s only a matter of time before they are on to the next keyword search.

Why isn’t my website on the top of the page after I publish?
This is because Google takes time to index your website, ranking it for keywords. You’ll also need to submit your website to Google. We do this for you at Yola, however, you can always do it yourself by following the steps in this article.

Even after your website is indexed, there is also steep competition for common keywords. This is why we encourage our small business customers to use long tail keywords.

What is a long tail keyword?
Search engines use keywords and phrases to categorize all of the website and web pages on the Internet. When a user searches for these terms, it’s a search engine’s responsibility to display the websites that best match these terms. Long tail keywords are more like phrases than anything else.

For example, if you have a website for your bakery, a good keyword would simply be “bakery.” Being ranked for this keyword would be pretty tough. However, if you were to optimize your website for “San Francisco bakery,” you might have a better chance. Alternatively, you could optimize a page for the long tail keyword “birthday cake bakery San Francisco” and rank even higher.

How do I optimize my website for keywords?
First, add long tail keywords in the content of your pages. This means adding them to your text, images, alternative text, video, meta description and page titles for every single page on your website. We’ve got a lot of tutorials and blog post that highlight exactly how and where to add long tail keywords.

It’s easy to do on your own, or you could subscribe to Yola Gold to get help on where you need to add keywords as well as how you are ranking for them. You can also contact services@yola.com to get a quote for professional help with keyword research and content.