How to Get Found Online: Putting It All Together

How to Get Found Online: Putting It All Together

It’s time for the final segment in my three part blog mini-series “How to Get Found Online”.  Now that you’ve established your target market and created an online presence on social media, it’s time to wait.  Once your online presence is established, it may take upwards of 6 months to start seeing results.  I know, it sounds like a lot of time to wait for something that you’ve invested time, effort and money in, but there is not much in the way of short cuts around this issue and I will explain why below.  During this time, many people can get discouraged that their efforts were wasted, however I URGE YOU to be patient.  If it were quick and easy to obtain these results instantly, everyone would have done it, and than we’d be back at square one with the problem of an overload of companies and posts on Google fighting for the front page.

Are we there yet?  Are we there yet? 

We live in an age where everything can be done at the touch of a button.  Information is retrieved instantly from search engines, we can drive and fly across the world faster than ever before.  But some things take time, and building your online presence is one of them.  Remember in my first article when I talked about the “seeming simplicity” of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo?  Well, this goes to show that there’s nothing simple about them.  Let’s focus on Google for example.  Just think of how many businesses there are in your city/town, now think of how many are in your province, now your country, now your continent, now the world.  THAT’S A LOT OF BUSINESSES!  And as more and more are coming online every day, Google is receiving this data every second of every day and trying to index it based on many advanced algorithms and guidelines.

Understanding “Keywords” and “Meta-Tags”

The reason we utilize online strategies is to work within the system search engines like Google use to index results.  Blogging is one of the best strategies to achieve this.  I’m going to use some “tech-talk” here and then translate it for you.  It used to be that website “Keywords” and “Meta-Tags” held great value when it came to indexing, but within the last few years Google has changed their system so they only “comb-through” about 60 characters of keywords per website.  That is not a lot of room to get your business message across.

Here’s a description of my business, and what 60 characters looks like: Rosewood VA is a Virtual Administrative service provider that works primarily with health, wellness, fitness, eco-friendly and green small businesses in York Region wanting to increase their online presence.

The way to overcome this limiting obstacle is through page keywords; that’s where consistent and proper blogging comes in.  Google technically treats each new blog post as a new page; the benefit being that a new page has keywords and contains new indexable content.  Firstly, new content always helps increase your SEO.  Google wants to make sure that your website is still active and relevant.  Secondly, each new page allows for Google to comb for more keywords relevant to that post.  That is why following proper blogging guidelines is so important.

What are the strategies to increase SEO with blogging?

That’s the million dollar question right there.  There are many tried and true strategies to increasing SEO and overall traffic to your website and that’s where someone like me comes in.  I have spent and continue to spend countless hours reviewing the old and new SEO strategies and keeping up with all the new guidelines.  I know all the tips and tricks that help my clients increase their online presence.  What makes my approach different is that blogging, while a good start, is not enough on its own.  I focus on what I call a “Holistic Approach to Online Strategies” with my clients, where I utilize as many online platforms as are relevant and useful to my clients’ business and their target market.  The purpose is to drive traffic back to their website and ultimately bring them more business.  My Holistic Approach looks at the big picture, and proper blogging is a great place to start.

If you would like a few more free tips on how to start blogging effectively to increase your SEO, you can contact me directly, or comment on this blog post.  You can find me everywhere online on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Stay warm, until next time!

Deanna