Website Promotion and Search Engine Optimization, 101:
Search Engine Optimization is all about making your website and your business appear "important" to Google, Yahoo, Bing and the others. There are 4
main components to "importance":
- Content - the information on your website is interesting and unique.
- Links - other websites think your website is important so they link to yours.
- Visitors - other people think your website is important so they visit it.
- Cleanliness - your website is syntactically correct. You think that your website is important and have made the investment in time and skills to
hire a competent website designer.
Catch-22
When you start a new website, you have little content, no links and no visitors. Until you get all 3, Google will not think your website is
important so they will put your website onto page 10 or later in their searches, and you will get few visitors. This is the Catch-22: until the
website is important you will get few visitors but you will not get strangers as visitors until it is important enough to get onto the first 2 or 3 pages
of a Google Search.
Getting your website beyond the initial Catch-22 is a major part of what CIT Services does.
Been There - Done That
Unique content, and lots of it is important to Google. Unfortunately too many businesses copy from other websites, use a template and then don't
modify the template. Google knows is you copied from another source, even if you changed a word here or there. Writing unique content is
critical to a website. A website should have a content theme and be consistent. If your business has 2 or more product or service lines, it is
best to have several different websites. Overlap is OK, as long as you are not copying and pasting between them.
Helping you with content is a major part of what CIT Services does.
References
When people apply for a job they typically include references with their resume. In the website world, references are links to your website. In the
world of a fist-time job applicant, some references are better than others, a reference from your professor is better than the reference from another
student. If you have a reference from someone who just hit the papers for being arrested for a major felony, you might want to take them off your
resume; similarly a link from a website that Google regards as "bad" hurts your website rather than helps it.
Getting quality links to your website is a major part of what CIT Services does.
Visitors
It is amazing how few people visit their own website every day, but that is critical. How they visit the website is also important. Finally
Google knows if you are the only one visiting your website, so we help you by visiting yours even after we have completed the design and development.
We also visit from 5 different computers in different locations, getting you past the Catch 22 situation.
Promoting your website is a major part of what CIT Services does.
Cleanliness
If you were a Real Estate broker, would you invest your time in showing a messy house that smelled bad? Of course not, so don't expect Google to
put you on Page 1 if your website is riddled with syntax errors or obsolete code. How do you know if there are syntax errors in your HTML?
Unless you are a professional website designer (not a self-appointed SEO expert) you don't know, but we can show you.
At CIT we take care to deliver clean code. We are programmers first, not promoters or artists.
Knowledge is Important
There are many things you can and should do to promote your own website. Unless you want us to do all of them, we will show you what
you can do. 10 minutes as day will make a huge difference in getting importance for your website.
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